On my knees now, I look back at May, small compared to the looming ceiling and far walls. Her brown hair, highlighted with strands of white, runs over her shoulder in a careless braid, loose wisps curling upward here and there. Her crinkled face is aglow with a full smile, dark brown eyes like a fawn curiously watching me.

She holds my blanket in a bundle close to her chest, bony hands engulfed by the thick fabrics. Her short, thin body is practically completely hidden behind the blanket, only a black maid’s collar, cotton with a button, shows around her frail neck, skin practically white, paler than the moon, as my father once put it before he died.

“Today calls for something special,” she says, pressing the bundle down on the mattress. “Eighteen isn’t just any age. Today, you are a woman, Princess Alea.”

I nearly choke as I swallow the laugh. Eighteen means nothing other than a fancy meal, perhaps my favorite of roast beef and potatoes, peas, a cherry pie, and vanilla ice cream if I’m lucky. I’ll receive several bouquets, each one an attempt at being exotic, with rare colors and rippling petals, tendrils looping and curling, the fronds always a tad too big. The notes on faded paper, torn edges with a ribbon connecting them to the bouquet, always say the same words.

A part of me wonders if the Queen orders them all herself so, once a year, I can feel the slightest bit of acceptance.

I’m not a woman in her eyes, but a disgrace. Wild and untamed animal, she has called me before. An un-groomed mane of fiery red hair, freckle-spotted skin, and frightening eyes of sharp blue. I’m a feline, though I lack the elegance, so giraffe may be a better

comparison. “She requested to see you first thing,” May says, tapping the mahogany wardrobe, over six feet in height, each door an arm’s length for her. She spreads the doors open, a thrust just so they reach their full swing.

The sun soaks into the hanging dresses, gems, and glittering threads alive and laughing. The vibrant skirts—pinks, purples, blues, and greens a mix of shining silks.

I have to look away before I’m blinded.

“Which dress would you like to wear today?”

“I honestly don’t care, May,” I say, crawling to the edge of the bed and placing my feet on the floor. It feels gravely today, dirty and grainy, like sand between my toes, though I barely remember the true feeling of sand, but I can imagine it based on what I do remember still.

“Are you ever going to stop calling me May?” May asks, her thin fingers sliding down a sky-blue skirt.

“I will only if you tell me your real name.”

May sighs, pursing her lips. “I’m not supposed to say my name, and you're not supposed to call me by it, or any name for that matter. I am supposed to be referred to as maid, though you already know that.”

“I won't call you maid,” I firmly say. It’s unthinkable, inhuman to me. A name is n identity, a claim to yourself. Without it, what are you? What am I? What is a maid if I simply call maid? She becomes an object, a possession, a tool, something someone can move around at will. She’s overlooked, overrun and trodden like a flower everyone considers a weed. They ignore its beauty, its fragrance, its name and stomp it flat, to a pulp, driving the life from it all because they categorized it.

I won't be like them.

May sighs again, though I hear the humor lacing it. “How about your green dress? It will go nicely with the spring weather, don’t you think?”

She pulls it from the wardrobe and holds it up in the morning light to show me.

A green bodice and skirt, sleeveless, and silk as many of my dresses are. A golden chain, embedded with rhinestones, currently hangs limply from the waist. The back forms into a flowing cape, extending from the shoulders to the floor, a few feet of train pooling behind it.

“Will it compliment my hair?” I ask, rising to my feet.

I cross the room, venturing onto the large circular rug that covers most of the stone floor —a light lavender, bruised with darker tendrils of vines and small flowers, an occasional silhouette of a bird appearing here and there within the pattern. The carpet is warmed by the sun, a more preferred texture than the bare floor. I stop in the center, straightening to perfect posture, a mannequin for May to dress.

“I think it will go lovely with your hair,” she says as she walks, the dress trailing behind her, the green a young fern uncurled and shining in the sun. “Off with the nightgown.”

A gentle tug on the white ribbon unfastens the front of my nightgown and it melts to the floor, the sun kissing my bare back. A moment of darkness and the green is falling into place around me, folds flapping at my legs and arms. May slips behind me, her hands beneath the cape, and starts tugging, tugging on the lacing crisscrossed up my whole back. The wires and firm in the bodice of the dress press into my ribs and stomach, forcing everything to take a certain shape, forming me into something people want to see. My spine straightens against its will, my knees lock and lower legs already start aching, my chest compresses, refined.

May runs her fingers over the cape before reaching for my scattered braid, ginger strands clinging to the silk of the dress. She peels it away, undoing it, curls circling my face and tickling my bare shoulders as it comes loose. She works her way through it, meticulously untangling the bird’s nest one strand at a time, like prickly grass, kinked and dry.

“Would you like your hair up or down today?” She asks.