by Dahlia Adler
Katherine snorted and rubbed at her eyes. “What are you planning to major in when you graduate?” she asked, trying for another topic.
Petrucio sighed in irritation. “Of course that’s what would be important to you. I’m majoring in business with a minor in theatre.”
“That’s a weird combination.”
“Fuck you,” Petrucio volleyed back mildly. “It’s expensive to go to college. I’m going to do what I want, no matter what anyone says. Also, it’s good to have a hobby, even if I’m trying to get a good job.” He sniffled.
“Are you crying?”
“I’m not crying,” he said firmly. “My eyes just hurt. No one told me that your eyes hurt when you first see color.”
“My nose kind of hurts, too,” Katherine admitted. “Kind of like when you drink something fizzy and inhale it the wrong way.”
“Yeah,” Petrucio agreed. “I was reading somewhere that you can smell your soul mate from really far away after a while. Which is kind of gross.”
“The entire concept of soul mates is gross, so I’m unsurprised.” Katherine snorted.
Petrucio was quiet after that, and Katherine could feel a frisson of pain coming from him. She couldn’t tell yet whether it was from his multiple hanger wounds, or if their new connection was forcing her to perceive his feelings. It hadn’t occurred to her that he would have felt differently about this. Boys didn’t seem to care about romantic stuff, so she had assumed he would be on her side about feeling disdain for the whole thing. But now that they were sitting in silence, her words felt like more of a misstep than she’d intended them to be.
“You … have some good qualities, too,” Katherine started, tentatively. “You seem to be smart, and you can think on your feet. You’re considerate of others’ feelings. You’re a good friend, and you’re protective of the people you care about. You … uh…”
Petrucio sniffed again.
“You don’t care what people think of your hobbies. I like that.”
Petrucio sighed, and Katherine could hear him wiping at his face.
But when he began to speak again, his voice didn’t have any tears in it. “You know, we can do this however we want. We can pretend we’re not soul mates until we can announce this at a better time. We’re basically strangers, Katherine. The only thing we owe each other, really, is consideration. I know you’ve got a lot of stuff going on and that this wasn’t a part of your plan, and I respect that.”
“You would let me go? Just … let me do what I want?” Katherine asked, leaning closer. It was an unusual offer. Not unheard of, but certainly not traditional.
“Yes!” Petrucio cried. “I don’t want someone who doesn’t want me. We don’t have to … you know. Be a couple. We can just be partners or companions. Or not even that, if you don’t want. But whatever we pick, it’s ours to choose. Just because we … just because…”
Petrucio scrunched his legs up so he was farther away from her. “It doesn’t have to be anything we don’t want it to be,” he continued, quieter. “You can finish school and go start your career. I’ll stay here and finish up my degree. Maybe we can live in the same city and get coffee every so often, see each other once a week so that neither of us gets heartsick and fades away like soul mates do when one of them dies. Maybe spend a couple days together every year. You don’t have to meet my family or anything.”
“Maybe you can get a sweet girlfriend who will actually be nice to you, instead of ‘the biggest bitch in the entire school.’”
Petrucio chuckled. “I’m not taking that back. But to be honest, even though that’s how I feel now, I don’t know if that will matter much when I’m older and there’s no school for you to be the biggest bitch of.”
“How do you think you’ll feel then?” Katherine asked.
To her surprise, Petrucio answered immediately, “Lonely. But I would never make that your problem.”
Someone slammed against the door loudly, and both of them flinched. Laughter leaked in from the hallway, and the body pressed against the door moved away.
“What do you want?” Petrucio asked, when both of their hearts had stopped wildly pounding.
Katherine thought for a while. “I want … to be respected. To be loved by someone who won’t tie me down and force me to do things I don’t want to do. I want to be independent but know that I have someone to come home to. I want to be myself and to not be mocked.”
“You say that like those are incredible things to ask, but they’re not. That’s basic. Everyone wants to feel like that, it’s not special. And if someone cares about you, they’ll give you that stuff without you having to ask for it,” Petrucio said.
“And what about you?” Katherine asked. “What do you want?”
“I want to turn on the light and look at you,” he replied thickly. “I just want to look. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that.”
The knot in Katherine’s throat grew bigger, and her chest began to ache. “What would you do if I never let you?” she whispered.
She could hear Petrucio move, scrabbling on the floor for something, then he lightly felt up her side until he found her arm. He took her hand and gently placed something round and heavy in her palm and closed her hand over it. She turned the object over in her hand until she understood what he had given her: the doorknob.
Her heart thundered behind her ribs. Katherine slowly got to her feet and placed the doorknob into the door. Petrucio made a small wounded sound, a noise so quiet that if they’d been in the hallway instead of the closet, she would have missed it.
Instead of opening the door, she reached her arm up and pulled the chain to turn on the light.
The colors were still there, still bright and achy as he looked up at her from the floor with his weak-tea eyes and warm-bread curls and the heat of his cheeks like the sun on her skin. This boy, who was hers. Who she didn’t know, who she knew better than anyone, who didn’t know her but was willing to learn her anyway. Who ran from her when she first walked into the room but wasn’t running now.
Her stranger, companion, not yet a friend, who thought she was a bitch, who gave her a doorknob like he was giving her his heart. Who was still growing up, who was so far behind. Who offered her freedom after keeping her inside a closet until she was able to see the freedom he offered her.
Who was just a boy looking up at a girl by the flickering light of a dying lightbulb. On the first floor of his best friend’s house, at an elopement party loud enough to get shut down by the cops.
With his pupils blown wide, in full colorbirth, in honeymoon, alone.
Katherine let go of the doorknob and slowly, to not startle him, kneeled until they were the same height. Petrucio looked at the door and at the feet casting shadows from the outside into this little room, then he turned back to her. She reached out to touch his cheek, but he flinched, ready for her to hurt him again.
Katherine hushed softly until he unwound, face less pinched, eyes less frantic, then she placed her hand on his cheek. Petrucio closed his eyes and let out a breath. She hadn’t noticed that he’d been shaking until he stopped.
“Are you ready to leave the closet?” she asked. “I’m ready now, if you are, too.”
Petrucio covered her hand with his and leaned his face into her palm.
“Not yet, Katherine. Not yet.”
Well, come, my Kate. We will unto your father’s
Even in these honest mean habiliments.
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor
For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich;
And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,
So honor peereth in the meanest habit.
What, is the jay more precious than the lark
Because his feathers are more beautiful?
Or is the adder better than the eel
Because his painted skin contents the eye?
O no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse
For this poor furniture
and mean array.
If thou account’st it shame, lay it on me.
—PETRUCHIO, ACT 4, SCENE 3
KING OF THE FAIRIES
Inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Anna-Marie McLemore
That very time I saw (but thou couldst not)
Flying between the cold moon and the Earth,
Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal thronèd by the west,
And loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passèd on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound.
And maidens call it “love-in-idleness.”
Fetch me that flower. The herb I showed thee once.
The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
—OBERON, ACT 2, SCENE 1
They are white, all of them. Endlessly and unrelentingly white.
The fairies have long been hailed as fairer than high Taurus snow. It is part of their name and nature. Each morning, the pale wind crowns them as princes and princesses of pure white.
And each evening, I stand among them, a brown-armed girl, lonely as a jasper set in alabaster.
Here, in these bewitched woods, they dance.
They dance between ponds so clear, they make crystal seem clouded.
They dance beneath the moon, beholding her silver form in the water.
They dance beneath arches of perfect primroses and on grass the moon has decked with liquid pearl.
They dance, and I remain still.
While they flit over petal-strewn ground, the gold of my skirt remains still.
I have lived and grown in this place, among these pale bodies.
The fairy court, which declared itself my home without ever asking if I cared to belong to it.
* * *
Peaseblossom and Cobweb turn their filmy skirts to the lutes’ song. Titania laughs from her cowslip-adorned throne.
Oberon rises from his, gesturing to the musicians.
“King of the Fairies,” he orders, and the court raises its cheer, hailing the king and his choice of song.
Titania gives him a fond smile.
But I remember when they glared at each other so keenly, I thought their eyes would leave wounds.
“Floria,” Titania calls to me, a laugh tinkling through her voice.
The relative youth of the king and queen still unnerves me. Titania and Oberon have lived a thousand seasons yet hardly look old enough to have a child my age, nearly grown. They call me their changeling daughter and boast of how the fairy court has enchanted me with the same steadfast youth. But the court whispers that I will age no more quickly or slowly than a being who is half fairy and half mortal, that I will likely die before the king and queen’s hair has even turned more gray than gold.
Titania extends a hand toward the fairies, and the moon finds her crown, as pale as her hair. “Dance,” she says.
I bristle, as I have for years. She wants to show off this changeling daughter, pretty and brown and ever willing to do as she says.
I suppose anyone reasonable would blame me for my inaction all these years, as I’ve grown from child to young woman. Anyone might ask why I did not protest, did not demand I be taken back to my family.
But to any such question, I would say that I was small when Titania plucked me from my father’s arms. I was small enough that now I remember my family only by their warmth and their specific shades of brown. I had thought the fairy queen was merely taking me on some living dream, to then return me to my bed by day’s gentle approach.
By the time I realized this was not some fairy dream, that Titania and Oberon would never return me to my father, I did not know how to leave.
I did not know how to be anything but that changeling who exists to delight them.
What I did know, what I know still, is that fairies are long used to having what they like.
I did not want to learn what would become of me if I denied them.
Puck leaps across the bower, amusing the king. Puck, ever the happy uncle to me, has been Oberon’s faithful attendant longer than I have lived.
Moth and Mustardseed spin, skirts fine as if they were woven from water.
With the parting of their bodies, a sliver of color startles me.
Brown.
Brown, among all the white arms and blossom-pale gowns.
At first, I wonder if a pond has left its bed, if it holds itself up to me as a mirror.
But the brown does not belong to me.
This brown belongs to a boy.
He does not wear the jewel purples and greens of the fairy men.
He wears a green as soft and dull as olive leaves, white softened into cream-beige, brown as deep as the earth.
And he dances more precisely than any of the mead-drunk courtiers. Light-heeled, each step is as crisp as the horned edge of a crescent moon. He skips forward as easily as water over stones, and the air smells a little more sweetly of woodbine and honeysuckle.
The set to his mouth shows both his concentration and his disregard for the way the fairies pause to watch him.
“Stop.” Oberon signals the musicians.
But the musicians, too, are watching the boy and continue their playing as though entranced.
The fairy court grows so still that the trees seem to shift, breathing, stretching out their arms to intertwine branches.
“Stop, I say!”
Oberon’s bellow silences the musicians.
Even the boy stops dancing.
“You.” Oberon rises, regarding the boy who seems now to be the still center of the rustling woods. “Approach.”
The boy does.
And he stays upright.
The court seems to hold its breath, all of them together, waiting for the boy to realize his mistake.
He remains standing at his full height.
An angry flush rises from Oberon’s neck up to his fine hair and silver crown.
“You dare show your king no reverence?” Oberon asks. “Bow, you intruder.”
The boy lowers himself to his knees, the usual first deference for a court visitor. So he knows enough of fairies to know their way. But he lowers himself slowly, so slowly, I can hear Oberon’s sigh of impatience.
This, together with the curve of the boy’s mouth, the bow of his lips, makes the gesture seem mocking.
“What is your name?” Oberon asks.
Even in raising his glance to Oberon, even in the small flick of the boy’s eyes, there is defiance.
“You know my name,” he says.
The court gasps.
I pray for the woods to tie up this boy’s tongue before Oberon orders him drowned in a pond.
But Oberon chuckles.
It is a sound so unexpected, I startle.
“Ah.” Oberon finishes his laugh as though savoring a fig. “The bastard changeling. What was the name you called yourself?”
The boy glares up at the king.
The king seems more pleased at this than offended. “Yes.” He pretends to have a sudden recollection. “Narciso. I do hope you’re pleased with it, for unlike those of us named by our fathers, the only quarrel left to you is with yourself.”
“I did not name myself,” the boy says, “the first or second time, and you know it.”
Titania sees my confusion and offers an obliging smile. “As the ivy enrings the barky fingers of the elm,” she says, inclining a delicate hand, the way she always does when explaining something to me, “so the boy before you must enring
his own form in cloth beneath his clothing.”
The court murmurs its incomprehension.
But understanding flashes through me, fast as lightning in the coiled night. That Titania would declare this before the entire court sickens me, even if half does not understand.
As the ivy enrings the elm.
She is talking of Narciso binding his chest.
She is talking of how, to be taken properly as the boy he is, he must wrap cloth around himself beneath his shirt.
I have learned that, for as flighty and lovely as fairies are, the fairy court has little patience for anyone who wishes to step out of the dresses or trousers they were handed at their birth. I’ve heard that fairies raised in the depths of the wood live as they wish, but the queen has always said that what may be fine custom for the far meadows is unseemly at court. Once, I asked to clothe myself in the deep colors reserved for fairy men, the night blue and dewed-grass green, and Oberon asked why I should want to mar my girlhood. I once asked Titania if I might wear pants to a midnight dance, and she gave no reply but the bell song of her laugh.
My soul and my stomach fell each time.
I cannot imagine the grief of this boy who was likely given a girl’s name at his birth.
But I find in his face no shame or fear. Only that defiance. He holds Oberon’s gaze.
And still, with that pitying laugh, Oberon speaks. “Rise,” he says.
Narciso obeys.
“I banished you as a child,” Oberon says. “Do you imagine greater forbearance now that you’re grown?” He flicks a hand. “Skip hence.”
Narciso gives a small bow, a gracious nod.
Not to Oberon.
To me.
I did not realize he had noticed me.
But as he exits, it is only me he acknowledges, a brown-armed girl among these pale sylphs, as though it is I who commands him, not the king of the fairies.
* * *
Once the gleams of the moon have faded and the fairies have taken to sleep in their bowers, there is little time before the king and queen argue.
From behind the heavy elm where I hide, where I have hidden during their quarrels for years, their words are crisp as new grass.
