The Queen's waltz

‘The Queen’s waltz’ is a literary short story adapted from a speculative ‘long short story’. In stripping the ‘long short’ of all its cast but two, in cropping sub-plots and concentrating on an event at a juncture, this work experiments with re-theming to an intense timeframe, with condensation, with the discarding and narrowing of characters, events, timeline and point of view to engender a ‘stand-alone’ with its own integrity around an emotional center point, a new child mindless of its parent.