Hero is a Four Letter Word Read Online Free

queens.
    Merlin snorted indelicately.
    “Well,” Arthur conceded, waving his chubby toes in her direction, then put them in his mouth because, well, he could. Around his toes he added: “I guess I don’t feel so cheated after all.”
    Merlin looked at her wristwatch, snapped her gum again, and said, “The football final is on. Mind if we watch?”
    “Football?” Arthur asked. “I don’t know football. Is it a sport?”
    Merlin snorted again, that mannish sound that was so wrong coming from lips slick with gloss. “It’s a religion. This is a nation obsessed, your majesty. Even you won’t resist for long.”
    Merlin propped Arthur up on her lap and Arthur leaned back into the warmth of her stomach and the reassuring patter of her heart. He watched with interest as Merlin explained the rules, and the work and passion the various nations of the world invested in the FIFA tournament.
    It wasn’t until partway through the second half that Arthur realized that while he had never watched football before, he recognized the pitch and the stadium. And when the game was over and the blokes in orange were declared the tourney winners, Arthur immediately recognized the golden cup being hoisted aloft.
    “The saviour of Albion, indeed,” he murmured.
    Merlin just snapped her gum.

Another Four Letter Word
    by J.M. Frey
    Funerals, Jennet decides, both literally and metaphorically suck .
    Metaphorically in all the ways they talk about in entitled poems, and empty hymns, and useless novels about vast open spaces and disillusioned young men with something to prove. Literally, because when they lower her father’s coffin into the cold, damp earth, it feels like she’s about to be pulled down on top of it.
    It had only ever been the two of them. Jen and David against the world. Happiest pair that ever was. Strong. Defying all the stereotypes of men who can’t care, can’t nurture, can’t mother . Father and daughter, powerful together.
    And now separated forever.
    Jennet clutches a slim ash tree, leans close to it and does her best to breathe wet, chill, cemetery air; to remain upright; to not pitch nose-first into her Da’s grave. She has no mother, no uncle, no brothers or sisters to hold her upright, help her stand firm. Only Mrs. MacDonald, the cook and housekeeper, hovers beside her elbow but does not touch. They don’t have a close enough relationship for that, but if Jen was pressed, she’d have said that the woman was the closest thing to a female role model she’d grown up with. Her father hadn’t believed in governesses. Too Victorian, he’d thought.
    When she’s invited to speak about the deceased, Jen just shakes her head, fingers digging into the bark. Mr. Coldwell, the only other servant and the man who was chauffer, mechanic, valet and friend to her father, steps up instead. He pulls a folded card from his breast pocket, clearly anticipating that Jen’s grief would make her mute and the task would fall to him. That is the nice thing about Mr. Coldwell: he is so good at anticipating when he would be needed.
    Jennet listens with half an ear, the rain on the leaf mold and the canopy above them too much of a hindrance to her sorrow-soaked brain to catch all Mr. Coldwell’s words. When he’s done, he presses the card between Jen’s fingers. Mrs. MacDonald takes it, tucks it into her small black purse, and Jen is absurdly grateful that it will be kept safe. She wants to read it, but she can’t worry about keeping track of it just now.
    Then the priest is calling her forward, and she goes on shaking legs, the heels of her pumps sinking into the wet grass. He presses a clump of soil into her hands and she steps to the edge of the wound in the world and opens her fingers. It lands with a wet plop right about where her father’s face would be.
    She stumbles back, horrified with the visual, and covers her own face with her soil-streaked hands. The rain is freezing, sharp fingers against the back of her neck.