The Emperor Is Dead

We heard the news this morning when we woke up. The message button was beeping on the plasma screen, and when we turned it on, the video played. Emperor Welsh of the United States of America had been shot repeatedly in the chest by a man with an old fashioned pistol. The emperor was rushed to the finest hospital in the world, but he died before he arrived. The assassin was vaporized by twenty three bursts from stun guns seconds after the emperor hit the ground. No one knows who he was or where he came from. No one knows why he did it either, and we probably never will.

The whole nation mourned that day. No one smiled, no one laughed and to the best of my knowledge not a single person wanted to. No one went to work, no children went to school. We just sat and watched the plasma, watching in vain for a change in the reports. Of course none came. Who can raise the dead? With all the progressions we’ve made, science can not bring back a life that has left its earthly shell, even if that life was quite possibly the only one that could save our fair nation.

I moved to the window when the message was over. I looked into the square courtyard that sat at the center of our apartment complex. Its grey concrete was barren except for the occasional piece of trash that blew lazily across. The jubilant children who normally filled its shadows with ringing laughter and the sounds of running feet were not present today. The sky, though it was still its brilliant shade of blue that can only be seen on a clear morning, was somehow dull, and sad. Perhaps it too mourned the death of our great ruler.

The life was gone from the apartment too. My fiancé and I sat sipping our bitter black coffee in grave silence only disturbed by the sound of him turning on the plasma to the newscast. The pretty blonde reporter was dressed in an unbecoming black suit and her hair was pulled viciously into a bun at the back of her head, as though some beast of great strength had tugged it roughly into position there. Her pale lips never quivered to a smile, even a polite one, as she recapped over and over the way our great leader had died. I wondered for a moment why they didn’t just record her saying it and then play it again and again, but that would be too impersonal, unfitting for the day when we all needed someone to comfort us.

After what seemed like hours of monotonous coverage, which we soaked up with near passion, video footage of the revolution was aired and patriotic music was played beneath it, our national anthem’s archaic melody stirring our nationalist fervor. Tears danced quietly on my cheeks and I’m nearly sure I saw one escape Bradley’s sad green eyes.

That footage of the revolution, the tapes we’d all seen over and over in the past ten years, held new meaning now that the man who had engineered, led and seen it through had perished. I was only ten when we finally won, the people I mean. We defeated that terrible government that had managed to suppress our freedoms, our liberties, and our rights we had established from the first days of our history. Our late emperor had risen up, with all the youthful vigor of his thirty years of age, and violently ousted the offending politicians; and the people, in thanks, had made him emperor for life.

He was our symbol of peace, our leader, our hope for a future not plagued by depression and heartache. A future that didn’t continue our sad history. One man had taken that hope from us and was vaporized by our superior security, leaving us with no one to blame. Who was I to be angry at? The officers who hadn’t protected him sufficiently? The country that had spawned such an awful person to douse a nation’s hope in a shower of bullets? The God who had allowed such an important leader to be slain when billions of people needed him the most? Or maybe, the man who sat beside me and did not comfort me in all my anger, my sorrow and my loneliness. Maybe myself, for I did not reach out to him either. We each reveled in our own silent pain. I finally released the pain, in a torrent of tears and a soft cry of agony. I fell limply from the soft chair I was seated in, and felt the cool tile against my cheek. Brad was at my side seconds later, resting my head in his lap, drying my tears with his sleeve, pulling my hair gently through his fingers. He whispered sweet comforts, and I heard them echoing emptily through my throbbing head.

I remembered the day I met him. It was a bright, sunny spring day and I was watching the military parade through the 5th avenue park. I was seventeen that day, and I saw Bradley marching with the other soldiers, leading them on with his vocal commands. He was handsome in his uniform, strong and proud. Every girl was watching him. The young commander was as professional as he was dashing, and he didn’t even spare a glance to the young women admiring him from the sides. Even after the parade he seemed too engrossed with the other soldiers to take notice in the women. By some twist of fate, I thought at the time, my father knew him. I wasn’t sure how, he’d never been a soldier, but he introduced us, and the attraction was mutual. We talked for hours after. He told me stories about his job, him men, and his life. What I didn’t know, until two years later, was that his father was the emperor himself.

So here I sat, with my soon to be husband, letting him comfort me over the death of his father. His soldier’s brain wouldn’t let his heart grieve the way mine could, so I cried the tears that yearned to free themselves from his eyes. My tears were selfish, and I cried partly for my dead ruler, partly in place of my lover, but mostly because the fear of what lay ahead, and the duties I would have to perform to support my soon to be husband, flooded my mind and scared me half to death.

In two weeks, I married the new Emperor of the United States and I found myself part of a new symbol of hope for our country, a role I never thought I’d play.