The party of the century did not come to pass. To be certain, it had almost arrived. For a while it seemed to be approaching eagerly. Tents had risen all over the island. The finest and most expensive foods and wines arrived daily. Garlands were put up along the streets by workmen much less surly than usual. It seemed even they, who would obviously be excluded from the affair, were somehow swept up in the golden enthusiasm for the event. Huge clots of hyacinths were installed in the squares. Thrushes in the trees sang more beautifully than usual. It seemed the kingdom (for people had begun to use that word again) had found a sanctuary from its usual troubles, and the need to celebrate drowned earthly habits in favor of more celestial pursuits. In fact, the certainty and increasingly furious speed with which the day approached led even the wisest and most lucid of the community to speculate that the day would actually arrive ahead of schedule, sending preparations into an even more frantic pace.

Disrupting the grandeur of the nearing occasion, the death of the queen came as something of a shock.

The talisman of a platinum jubilee aside, the queen's long figurative coma had changed, almost unnoticed, into a real one. Apparently, a small tumor had been missed at what turned out to be the monarch's last royal physical, just above the base of the brain stem, growing quietly by feeding on oxygenated blood and painkillers prescribed for the royal arthritis. Just as a century of her reign had finally chased away the blight of apathy on the land, the lethal invader had chased off some vital life force. It was quietly that the once nymph-like crone slipped into her afterlife, leaving the body anointed with sterile fluids behind, the movement obscured by the sounds of ventilators and squeaking of nurses' shoes.

The news fell like a hail on the land. The mood of happiness suffocated quickly, replaced by the dull emptiness that follows the death of someone a person almost loves. Not long after, an outbreak of cholera arose from the unsuitable septic system, which had been forgotten about in the fury of ready making. Fever gave the population such a chill that winter came three months early, freezing the late hatched infant birds whose blindness prevented them from following their parents' escape in feathered flight. Hepatitis came next, spreading an amber jaundice over the teeming crowds that attended the royal wake. Even the sky turned traitor, spiting freezing rain on what would otherwise have been a funeral procession of titanic splendor.

Flags and bunting were soaked with the wetness, deteriorating into a gray paste that adhered to the blacktop lick cement, dried on as hard as goose shit and twice as odorous. The party napkins, immune to the rain, were caught by the wind and flew like gadflies just above the ground, sticking to ankles and shins, staining red the feet of those whose poverty made them go barefoot. A brazier, originally intended to cast a luminous glow on the evening time ball that was to have been held, set fire to a tablecloth and injured two men, a woman, and a young child. The child was struck blind by the burns, but later in life the scars provided a clairvoyance that caused charlatans and politicians to seek out his services. In his shop, he set up a small shrine containing not only fragments of the tunic he wore that fateful day, but also the remains of the offending tablecloth; a lovely peach where the flames had not charred it black.