Queen Marie Antoinette tried not to snivel as she dug into her jacket for the 500-Franc note she'd hidden there while listening to the Girl Scouts hovering in the corridors. If they can reach me before the party begins, I'll buy twenty boxes of their caramel chocolate chip cookies, stuff them in my mouth and chew them like there's no tomorrow.

In the morning, as her jailers led her from her cell, she addressed the abhorrent screaming masses with nothing more than these words: "Play a little traveling music for me, my cake eating friends, and enjoy the show!" Then she smiled as the executioner paraded her in a rambling donkey cart through the streets of Paris down to the river Seine, and thrice around the great Cathedral of Notre Dame as vegetable-tossing, howling, laughing, screaming masses of peasants jeered at her and made disgusting sounds with the noses and lips until the donkey cart finally stopped in front of those bloody thirteen steps ascending the platform where the guillotine sat waiting hungrily for Marie Antoinette's head.

Marie, daughter of the Austrian Empress Maria Teresa, and formerly Queen of France, knelt, crossed herself and then shouted one more time: "Play a little traveling music, maestro-it's going to be a hot trip tonight!" then she chewed all those caramel cookies, cramming her mouth and throat as full as she could and smiled as the crowd could almost smell hell's fire and brimstone flickering their flames for their defunct queen and the mob laughed even louder as Marie placed her head in the guillotine and raised her right hand high above her head before swooshing it down in so rapid a movement that the crowd felt the earth itself was shaking.

And how they howled as the blade came thundering down, crashing, crunching, splitting, chopping, splintering with the fiercest sounds the crowd had ever heard, but it was Marie's neck, crammed full of caramel, that split the blade into tittering tottering bits sending pieces far out into the crowd, cutting a few of the wagons in two, severing the head of a hungry awaiting rat and soared over the donkey cart-missing the sad donkey by a hair. And then the people cheered as Marie Antoinette stood triumphantly, regally, royally again as their Queen. "Let us all eat caramel!" she screamed, little knowing how history would erroneously record those joyous words and miss-record her caramel salvation, but 'est la vie.

The End

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