John Colburn | 17
It was quite simple. The other princes had killed him in the night, eaten the unfortunate prince and buried his bones.
From twelve princes, the number dwindled. We allowed it. In a month, there were five.
Some of us, shamefully, began to watch. Some of us played favorites.
The toddlers’ instincts for violence astonished us. Royalty is exceptional, we thought. Perhap even divine, the hand of an angry god.
Eventually we covered the cage at night, and instead of monitoring them we guarded against their escape. Soon enough there were only three princes left in the cage. We listened to the cage in the night from our beds and heard their rustling and growling and wailing.
The lives of the princes oppressed us. Through a circuit of lies and missteps, we tended their violence like a crop. We couldn’t look each other in the eyes. We began to use coded talk and euphemisms. We spent less time together and took meals alone in our houses.
Of course that final morning we found only one surviving prince. The watchers called out, and I rang the bell, and we gathered around him in the cage. He stared at us, blank-eyed. He appeared as an innocent. I told the crowd, “It’s important not to be afraid of him. He’s only a child.” By afternoon, we wondered if the other princes had ever been real. If perhaps we had been in the grips of mass delusion, well-known to occur at harvest. And convenient.