The room suddenly seemed twenty degrees hotter than it was when she’d first began her rant. With one misplaced sentence in her explanatory account that had been crafted to absolve her of even any seeming infraction she’d overturned her own apple cart.
She felt the eyes on her that she’d requested, in fact had paid for by the hour by footing the bill or in one way or another do something they’d never done before in the cyclical dance they’d perfected across years of transactional friendship. There was no convincing herself otherwise prior to proceeding.
She reset herself, tossing her chin casually and duly noted that the sharp, sudden twinge of anxiety had not been the ringing of an alarm, amiss. Katherine sat across from Brianna, eyes narrowed, mouth indeed slack in indignation.
“Say that again-” Katherine hissed.
Brianna chuckled, waving the misstep away. “It was nothing-”
“Then say it again.” her friend of fifty five years snapped so sharply that all the bravado that had basically carried the relationship onward buckled and bloomed around her shoulders before it made her ears ring as it deflated in front of her face.
“I don’t think you really-”
“I defended you, Bri-” Katherine hissed.
“KitKat, come on! You know how she-” Brianna tittered nervously, then leaned in surreptitiously. “ You said it- said you saw streaks of it yourself- that you saw it too- you were her Godmother, for cripes sake-”
“Because I was being led by you, Brianna!” Kat yelped. “I-I- you said you saw them- and I-”
Brianna suddenly went cold with the woman she knew there was no coming back with.
She stretched each talon-tipped finger towards her across the linen-dressed table sharply, like the envy at the closeness that had once been standard operations between Katherine and Brianna’s daughter, her godchild had distilled into a select vintage of vindictiveness her so-called friend who had made excuses for the entire duration of their relationship like the wide-eyed, obedient lapdog she’d always been could in no way, shape or form, possibly be ready for.
“No one is going to believe you, Kitkat. It’s too late… and I’ll just~” Brianna smiled at an appalled Katherine with the hatchet faced smile she’d once chastised her god-daughter for drawing her friend with as a kindergartener, “say that you and I had a…falling out, at a girls lunch in,” she tapped a talon on the table to punctuate each syllable, “This. Exact. Restaurant… because you couldn’t just be happy for my success-”
Katherine looked around the room, bewildered by the grandiose audacity of this tummy tucked, propped up and pulled woman she’d suffered 50 years longer than she’d ever wanted to solely due to the birth of the very child Brianna had gotten her to betray. Her eyes narrowed again, throwing Brianna off a second time in a row over the untouched bruschetta between them as she slowly raised her celebratory glass of prosecco to her lips and drained it before setting it back down next the the cabernet.
“Success? This is how you define success, Brianna?” Katherine mewed as she tilted her head and peered at the sorry excuse for a mother trussed up across the table from her, still thinking she was living on the prayer Katherine had sent up to save her from what she now understood was the woman’s blood-bought right. Katherine leaned across the table and popped open her eyes to full mast for the first time since her sadistic BFF had let it slip from her lips that she indeed had done all that Ebony had washed her hands of Momma Kitkat for not believing when she’d told her years after the fact.
“Have you forgot who the demonized seed your entire claim to fame has been that you survived the carriage of IS?” KitKat spat. “You think THIS shit you’ve done…is success?” Katherine laughed and leaned away from Brianna in disgust.
By the time her back the banquette she was in a whole new world that the repugnant woman in front of her was a non motherfucking factor within.
“Who she is?” Brianna softly brayed with bifurcated tongue as she grabbed the cab by its stem. The twinge of sadness for the cloying act of friendship forever being over paled in comparison with the weight of the gig being up finally have been tossed off.
“Yes, I know exactly who she “IS…” Brianna hissed as the residue of the bloody toned cabernet made her suck her teeth like something was stuck in her sharpened canines, “SHE…is who thought…she’d get away with making a vicious spectacle of me, after all I’d done For that measley bloated beast of a-”
Katherine sat there, unmoved. Quietly amazed by how the unveiling of Brianna’s reptilian form had not stunned her at all. It had instead made sense of the smattering of incidents that’d led up to this meeting of the minds that had always nipped at the woman, diminutively expressed as KitKat or in full bloom as Katherine, the Great. An aspect that she’d always witnessed Brianna struggle against her showing up as, but the one boundary she’d held throughout the arc of the unequally yoked relationship.
Brianna went on and on about how she was the victim, how she had been wronged by the child she’d reared with such a despicable disdain that Katherine had been compelled to stay close until said child tossed both of them away with no ceremony whatsoever. A child who’d grown into the woman who’d quietly disowned her entire toxic community for coalescing around the performative cunt Kitkat had always defended, and gotten on with her weird, wild life.
Katherine rolled her eyes and the Great ascended to the throne housed behind them, one that she’d never step down from again to make things more comfortable for the peasantry.
“Enough-” she snapped, motioning Brianna to stop with her simply manicured hand that shot out above the talons that had been tapping on the table like the hypnotic morse code for the duration of the venomous, vitriolic soliloquy the dissonance was passively meant to be.
This time Brianna narrowed her eyes at the insolent interruption until it registered who had entered the chat. She sucked her teeth again, rolling her skull on her neck to look away as “Oh come on, Katherine~” slithered out of the corner of her mouth before every thing else she could possibly dare to arrogantly say dried up like her milk had at the child’s birth, saving the daughter in question from being suckled on the poison the rest of her siblings had been formed by.
“How did they… this-” Katherine the Great chuckled heartily, the darkness of her own inner Monarchy at the helm as she spoke, “Success… find you, Brianna?”
“Hmm? Did you… ever… once, in all your boombastic, brazen bandyhooing about …pause and… contemplate how they sought you out, or…more importantly…Why?”
“Because They- They!-” Brianna snapped and clawed at the dregs-stained ghastly goblet beside her and drained it as the two and two that she’d refused to do the math of the entire time slammed into one another against her will. “Theeeey’d had the same kind of problems with that cunt-that-”
“That somehow survived you and crawled out of your…cunt-” Katherine archly corrected, stunning the woman, then waved it away. “Continue, BricaBrac-” she shrugged, “as if you had not an ounce of self awareness or comprehension left in you when it came to the…cunt that…I now know wisely…kicked you out of her life …and refused to push the matters at hand that you feel so egregiously victimized by while an ounce of life-force animated your Sorry, performative, always tooth-achingly simple ugly soul.” she hissed. “Please! Please…continue! Friend- ”
“What in the-” Brianna’s voice hitched.
“Waiter! Wine! What in the-where is he??” she yelped abrasively in an attempt to hide the fear suddenly flooding her chest.
“I want to see how long you’re going to take trying to avoid getting her…them… or IT… In my face-” Katherine the Great murmured.
The weary of the women who frequented this watering hole waiter nervously arrived to refill the wine glass of one of the most loathed regulars on rotation at the town’s toniest ladies who lunch address without catching her eye.
“Thank you,” Katherine the Great said curtly. She locked eyes with him, smiled coldly at the young man, tapped the untouched flute of celebratory champagne she’d found waiting for her when she’d arrived and wagged her finger at it.
Understanding in every sinew and tendon stretched across his taut body he removed that glass of Veuve Fourny that stood as an abomination before the one quietly regarded as queen of queens in this particular clatch of swans by all the Service staff who’d received the rigorous pleasure of serving her tand quickly made himself scarce.
In a flash he’d returned with the quiet Queen’s signature Charles Heidsieck, Blancs de Blancs that had been readied front of house as soon as she sailed through the door in a seasonal cloud of ornately nosed perfume, bowed as she graciously took the flute from him and all but disappeared.
Brianna peered at Katherine the Great, the dull mollified look on her face slightly balanced by the red tips of the top of her ears as she watched KG raise the replaced crystal to her lips.
“Please~ by all means, continue, dearest Bricabrac, to explain to me how these… as you say luridly,” KG chuckled gently, “Monied new associates of yours somehow attained a similar state of-” Katherine murmured softly as she sipped, “Nauseatingly pitiful wounding that you have carried for half a century over your unapologetically beautiful, violent daughter having stolen the man you know that I know you’d never loved from you… by the audacity of being born? It’s such a strange …commonality …to have with someone, isn’t it? I am sure it’s fascinating-”
“They found me because-” Brianna’s voice crackled with indignation as her mind raced to escape the corner that stupid misstep had backed her into.
“She sic’d them on you~” Katherine the Great muttered and raised a brow as Brianna flummoxed before her.
She chuckled and, tsking her long, noble finger at the despicable excuse for a mother as Brianna passively did her best to slowly dissolve into the warm tucked velvet of her surroundings.
KG drained the champagne glass with a smile, one that was greeted with an immediately on offer secondary glass of Blanc de blancs as the Waiter demurely floated past, leaving the two women in a dainty cloud of effervescent stone fruit, lemon curd and an almond-rich whiff of cyanide as Katherine the Great exhaled enthusiastically.
“She sic’d them on you, and-” KG leaned forward conspiratorially, “in all likelihood, due to who your demonized child has been egregiously written off to be, with them being none the wiser to all of the machinations motivating them stemming from her.”
She sat back and took in the woman crumbling before her. “That being said… let’s indeed…raise a glass… to your Success-” Katherine the Great murmured warmly.
His elegant stride softened to a seductive saunter as he rounded the silk shantung room space divider beyond the bar.
“Indeed, there is blood running wild on the savannah today, my friend,” he muttered and bumped a bit of nosegay to clarify his intentions for those remaining in the section he’d been assigned to helm that afternoon.
“ I knew it- I fackin’ called it!- It’s always something foul afoot when that vagina dentata rolls in hissing pregaming instructions at everyone present-” the bartender whistled proudly, then carried on with the accounting that undergirded his shift. “I’m just glad the day’s audience was with KG-” he grinned and bowed.
“The Queen of Queens, indeed~” the server curtsied. “Sometimes, I really do love this place, man!” he whispered. “It’s like… wild~ a veritable jungle,” Casey the server chuckled and sniffed again. He roughly inhaled, got in state, received the thumbs up from Donovan behind the bar and slid back out into lunch service.
“The killing fields, indeed,” Donovan softly murmured as Casey sauntered away. He pulled out another bottle ofCharles Heidsieck, Blancs de Blancs for the establishment’s beloved, quiet Queen of Queens and iced it, just in case.
©Angel Brynner, 2025.
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