Vicki Husband

The princess and the teeny tiny man

Once (and probably more than once but no-one made the connection), a princess complained of a pain in her back, at night in her bed. The princess attended a private doctor because the NHS waiting lists were too long, and because she had a little money saved, and because she was desperate. But the doctor dismissed the princess because he knew it wasn’t a lucrative case. And so she tried to solve the problem by ordering different types of mattresses. The first mattress was made of springs and she felt it beneath her like a loaded gun. Next she tried a mattress made of horse hair but it shifted restlessly in the night and she sweated like a beast. Then she tried a mattress made of memory foam but she couldn’t sleep for remembering every wrong done to her, then she tried adding more mattresses to muffle the memories but they just piled up. Eventually she hired a handyman to solve the problem. The first one mansplained the problem but didn’t actually solve it and charged her a call out fee on top of his fee. The next one removed all the mattress and piled them back together just as they had been and said the problem was solved, but the princess’s pain persisted. The third handyman was old and kyphotic but had kind eyes. He showed a certificate proving he was registered with the Handyperson Guild – it was dated a hundred years before which would have made him 121 years old – but he had kind eyes. And this man removed all the mattresses and found a teeny tiny man lying on the bed base with a small sword stabbing upwards towards the princess’s back. The handyman didn’t seem surprised, he just smiled and left and only charged a modest fee. No-one believed the princess (who wasn’t actually a princess but was just called that because people thought she was too precious, and because she was a black woman). Even the small man with the small sword didn’t believe he had been living all those months under all those mattresses because it was a preposterous idea and the case didn’t go to court. It turned out later that the small man had been exploiting a loophole in the law which permitted tax evasion for those living between a bed base and a mattress. Meanwhile the princess, who had been told her condition was stress related, died of metastatic cancer.

Vicki Husband’s first collection of poetry, This Far Back Everything Shimmers, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2016. Sykkel Saga, a pamphlet-long poem, was published by Marsicat Press in 2019. Vicki’s poetry has been widely published, anthologised, broadcast on radio, and translated as part of collaborative projects with poets from Pakistan and Ukraine. Vicki lives in Glasgow and works for the NHS in community rehabilitation.