That Way Madness Lies: XV of Shakespeare's Most Notable Works Reimagined

by Dahlia Adler

That summer found a happy conclusion for the king and queen, but not for me. For ever since then, I have lived here, in this flowering court where pale fairies eat swans not for the taste but because they are beautiful, and because they want to remind themselves that beautiful things are theirs to consume. This flowering court, where a fairy king and queen each wanted a brown-skinned child only because the other wanted her. Even now, almost grown, I am more pet than child. And they remain, to me, more king and queen than the mother and father they proclaimed themselves when I was too small to realize I was not just being brought to see the fairy court. I was being folded away into it. The warning Narciso’s stepmother gave him, the one laced into his name, finds me now. How much have I left unexamined? How many times have I heard Titania’s wistful claim that my mother would have wanted her to have me? How often have I heard assurances that nothing good waits for me outside the fairy court, that I should want nothing to do with anyone beyond it, not even the fairies who live deeper in the woods? How long have I thought this place of fear and bitter loyalty is the only one that would have me? I could carry on chanting hymns to the cold, fruitless moon. Or I could follow the dream that burns in me, bright as Venus in her sky. I could pull against the draw of this court on my very being, heavy as a stone in my chest.