Excerpt from The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

LET'S PLAY DEAD

There was a man, let's call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let's call her Anne B. Let's give them a castle and make it nice. Let's give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let's give him a fussy way of being. Let's make her smart and sneaky, because it's such a mean thing to do.

Let's make it so she can't escape. Just for fun.

Let's seal the bottle, and shake it, and shake until our hands fall off.

* * *

IT TAKES TWO swings to cut off her head. Everyone does their best to pretend that the first one didn't happen. In the awkward silence afterward, the swordsman says something about mercy or justice, a strangely fervent soliloquy in French that might have made Anne herself emotional, but it's a touch long-winded, and no one's paying him any attention. And she's dead, so it's especially beside the point.

The ministers dither in the courtyard, venturing their last looks, murmuring, Exquisite, just exquisite. She is so beautiful, they agree, even beheaded.

Henry will return to the body later, when everyone's gone and what's left of her has been moved to the chapel. He'll stand on the threshold, halfway between one momentous decision and the next. He'll find it in himself at last to enter, to kneel on the dais beside her severed head and lay one rubied hand along her frigid cheekbone.

Maybe he stays five minutes, or thirty-five. Maybe he'll cry softly, but it doesn't matter, because no one ever commissions an oil painting of this moment for the textbooks. And it doesn't matter because she's dead. She's still very, very dead.

He will leave as furtively as he came, wiping his hand on his smock. Anne's headless body and bodiless head will be left to their own devices, her blood blackening, thickening on the ground, the gristle of her neck tougher with every minute. The clock ticks. Night falls.

It is her head that moves first. It says, "Is he gone?"

Her body spasms, maybe a shrug, or maybe just a reflex.

Her head opens its eyes and looks this way, that way. It says, "It's over? It really worked?"

* * *

WE DON'T NEED to linger while her body crawls its way to her head and fits itself back together. Every excruciating inch of the stone floor is a personal coup, and every inch lasts the whole span of human history. It is slow. It is clumsy. The head falls off a couple of times. The body is floppy with atrophy. There is a lot of blood. She probably, definitely cries. It does not befit a queen.

* * *

HE'S READING THE Saturday paper, still in his shirtsleeves, when she breezes in the next morning. The horizon of the paper lowers to the bridge of his nose. He is a man who wears his tension in the way of a beautifully tuned piano, and in this moment he vibrates at a bewildered middle octave.

"Anne," he says, at an absolute loss.

"Henry," she says, the picture of politeness.

She sits at the table. Not a hair out of place, not a leaky vein in sight. She butters her toast in two deft strokes. A servant steps out from the shadows to fill her teacup to the brim. It's all very serene, domestic. If it takes her a few tries to put her toast back on the plate, or if he dabs his napkin with a little extra violence, well, who can say.

She slurps her tea, which they both know he hates. He hoists his newspaper back up. Like this, they go on.

* * *

OF COURSE SHE knows what comes next. Let's not fib.

She is seized from her bed some weeks later, in a state of drowsy dishabille, the wardens bristling with royal braid. This night will have the consistency of a dream. The palace swims in sound and darkness. The youngest warden, the boy or man who grips her arm with one rubbery fist and studiously avoids her gaze, reminds her of the sons she has lost in the womb. She wants to tell him, Don't worry, the thing you're afraid of, the girl, the job, the rising cost of real estate in London, it will all work out someday—you'll see, it all comes to pass, but he's leading her to her death, so it seems a bit impolite.

Excerpted from The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad. Copyright © 2026 by Senaa Ahmad. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.