The third story in Freckled Whelp, based on King Lear.

I. Night

Things that love night love not such nights as these.

Cordelia was born an old man. She was hard and fast in her opinions, boiling and weary of the world. She sucked on hard candy and sat in rocking chairs. She was tired, and nostalgic for a past that hadn’t ever happened.

Edgar was born an old woman. He loved people well, as if he had known them for lifetimes, and he trusted that almost everyone meant to do good. He liked to give without getting in return, and he said things so wise, sometimes, that the air would fall out of the room.

Cordelia’s father threw her clothes onto the lawn when she was fifteen. She’d been seeing a boy, he heard, and Cordelia’s sisters had shown him a condom which they had found in her room. Maybe she was pregnant too, they said. Someone had told another someone at school that she was.

Cordelia’s things fell onto the front lawn like snow. Her shirts and socks and underwear dappled the driveway and mown grass like stars.

Edgar was seventeen when his father asked to speak to him. His brother had told their father that Edgar had gotten a girl named Cordelia pregnant, a rumor he had concocted, and spread around school. Edmund did it because he was jealous of Edgar for every reason there was, and this jealousy planted a serpent in his stomach, poisoning him from the inside out.

Edgar’s father sat him down, on the worn-out polyester couch, and asked in a shaking voice if what Edmund said was true. “No,” said Edgar, after a stunned silence. “It’s not true.” And he stood and slammed the front door behind him. He scared himself with the sharp sound.

Cordelia walked away from her father’s yells, from the repeated stab of “slut”, from her sisters watching at the window, biting their nails. Cordelia held her head high as she passed through the yellow glare of streetlamps, the cool glow of the full moon. When she was a child, Cordelia would beg her father to take her outside every night. “Moon, moon,” she would say, and she would hold out her chubby-fingered hand and pretend to grasp it, to hold it like a pearl.

Edgar passed honking cars and artificial light, people with only the clothes on their backs and a blanket wrapped around them. He gave five dollars to a man with a dog, which looked like a cross between a pit bull and a border collie. The man looked like he was dying. Rain began to fall, as Edgar turned around, and walked back homeward.

Cordelia climbed the hill on the edge of the subdivision. Thick globs of water pelted her. Hot tears ran down her face, but she couldn’t hear herself cry through the downpour. She wondered if her clothes were getting wet, lying on the front lawn.

That way madness lies, let me shun that.

Edgar found his brother on the street corner outside their apartment complex. He clenched his fist, until his knuckles turned white. “Why did you tell him that?” Edgar asked. “It isn’t true, you know it isn’t true.” Edmund shrugged. Edgar punched him in the face. He watched as blood streamed down from his brother’s nose. He watched until his brother blinked, shook his head, and hit him in retaliation. Edmund gave him a black eye.

People paused to watch them, anxiously, but no one stepped in. Their father heard the shouting, came running down the stairs, and spread his arms wide to separate them. “Who started it, I don’t care, I’ll call the cops on you both,” he said. But he didn’t call the police. Instead, he dragged them inside and gave Edmund tissues for his nose. He threw a bag of frozen peas at Edgar.

Both brothers were seething with injustice. Edgar got up and slammed the door behind him, the second time that day. Edmund sat perched on the edge of the couch, staring at the door. He followed his brother out, ignoring his father begging him not to.

The wind howled in Cordelia’s ears, pricked her eyes as she sat on the hill. She didn’t care that the grass would stain her jeans. She tried yelling louder than the wind, but found she could not. There was a special madness, in opening her mouth and hearing nothing.

Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!

Cordelia had seen madness before, in her father’s drunken rants, in her sisters’ screaming matches. Her own madness was quieter. It killed no one but herself. Cordelia considered the possibility that she had wanted to be caught, and she decided that it was probably true. Guilt had a strange way of worming in past logic or sensibility. She wondered if Edgar knew how she had used him, hadn’t loved him, had just needed someone to love her. The night engulfed her as she thought. The storm hugged and kissed her as no one else could.

Edgar decided that he would walk to Cordelia, because there was nothing else he could think to do. He wanted to know if she had been the one who told his brother. More than that, he wanted to know if the rumor was true. Edgar wasn’t sure why Cordelia would say something like that, but no one else knew they were having sex.

Besides, she would need him, if the rumor had stretched all the way to Cordelia and her home.

Edgar had one eye open, the other behind a bag of frozen peas. Half-blind, his other eye saw all the better, all the taxi cabs and closed storefronts.

Edmund trailed behind him, quiet as a memory. He followed like a second self. Edgar didn’t tell him where they were going, or ask him why he followed. He did not tell him to go away.

Cordelia decided she would wait for someone to find her. Who, she didn’t know, she didn’t care. She closed her eyes, tightly, so that darkness was all she could see. She thought of knights and nights, of rescues and resuscitations. She did not want to be rescued, or for someone to put their lips on hers, to breathe her back to life. She wanted someone to sit with her. The night was so cold.

Edgar ignored the stares and whispers directed at him and his brother. Each boy looked like he had come from a fight; Edgar supposed they had.

They passed a building with half its lights still on. Tall and half-darkened, it was a symposium of whirling city-brightness, like the cypress tree in Starry Night. 

“Imagine,” whispered Edmund, suddenly beside him, “if you jumped from the highest floor.”

Edgar imagined standing on a precipice, the wind nudging the thoughts in the back of his mind to the front. He imagined walking in the opposite direction despite them.

Thy life’s a miracle.

The sky blushed pink against its still-dark shades of blue. Cordelia’s face was sticky and her fingertips were numb. She wiped her eyes and nose. She hadn’t slept, but there was still gunk in her eyes. Perhaps the sandman had gotten confused; Cordelia had sat so awfully still, she was like a statue, now blinking into life. She pulled absentmindedly on her necklace, ran her finger along the cross’ edges and lines. She left a red mark on the back of her neck.

And my poor fool is hanged.

Edgar and Edmund slowly crossed the strange, amorphous divide between city and suburbs. Highways and late-night drivers blurred with early commuters and morning larks, towers that all looked the same, houses that all looked the same. Edgar was too tired to be angry with Edmund. He had walked with his brother long enough to grow opposed to the very idea. Instead, what he wanted was to show Edmund the sunrise. It was Edgar’s mother who had always taken him outside to see the first glimmer of sun. Edmund had had a different mother; she had never taken him to see sunrises, and, like Edgar’s mother, she was dead.  

Both brothers stood squinting at the rising light. “It’s nice,” Edmund said, using both hands to shield his eyes. “It’s nice.”

Edgar smiled, as his brother frowned, studying the orange-pink horizon, bright and endless. Edgar noticed, as he glanced at his brother, that Edmund’s eyes were a different color than his own, but were shaped the same.

Edmund pointed, up, then, and asked if that was a person, there on the green, sun-splattered hill. They climbed, as morning dappled the earth, until they reached her.

Cordelia nodded at Edgar, and asked what had happened to his eye. I fell, he lied. She asked what happened to his brother’s nose. I hit him, Edgar said. He didn’t ask what she thought he would, at least not yet. Cordelia assumed that if her sisters had heard the rumor, Edgar had too.

But for now, they sat in a row, the three of them, quiet and cross-legged. In the morning, Cordelia supposed she would tell Edgar the truth, and say that she wasn’t pregnant, when he asked.

Cordelia wondered if her clothes were still covering the lawn, or if her father had picked them up before the sprinklers turned on. Or if that wouldn’t matter, since they were already wet from the rain. Cordelia didn’t expect to find out. She didn’t expect anything, beyond the impasse of night lifting, beyond the future occurring. She loved the cold, terrible night, that time before the morning which resumed the course of living. Cordelia only wished she had had someone to sit through the night with. But typically, when someone had arrived, they were too late and they had nothing to offer her. The presence of the two brothers augmented her loneliness, as she bit her nail, as she stared at the sky.

The hill was streaked with yellow, real, buttery yellow, and the day began again with watery eyes. It breathed, in and out. The sun offered no warmth; the wind was too strong. But there was light enough to see by, the storm-battered earth, the ruined hill, the three silent specks upon it.

II. An Interlude, Before Morning

Goneril didn’t sleep. It was easy not to—behind her closed eyes, her mind would not stop swimming. Rain poured outside, ceaselessly.

“Do you feel bad?” she whispered into the darkness.

“No,” her sister answered.

They sat at the window, cracked open, each smoking a cigarette—a contraband item, stolen from their father’s bedside table. He wouldn’t notice they were missing. He wouldn’t have noticed many things, Goneril thought, if we hadn’t pointed them out. Maybe he turned a blind eye. Maybe he just didn’t care, until he had to.

He always loved our sister most.

Regan coughed out a puff of smoke. “It was for her own good,” she said.

Goneril nodded, hesitant, then sure. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Cordelia was always so perfect.”

“No one’s perfect. Not even her,” said Regan. “I knew that she wasn’t. Perfect. Even if she thought she was. Even though Dad thought she was.” She breathed in, and blew out, more neatly this time. The smoke floated out the window, blurring with the night until it disappeared.

Goneril held the cigarette between her lips. She hated the taste, but she loved the feeling of breathing it away. It made her feel, absurdly, like a dragon: scaled, powerful, cold-blooded. Impenetrable.

“He’s crazy,” she said, between clenched teeth.

Regan snorted. “Yeah.”

“But I didn’t think he would do that.”

“Neither did I.”

Goneril drummed her fingers on the windowsill, squinting at the sky. She wasn’t looking forward to walking to the bus stop tomorrow morning, with every one of the neighbors waiting to gawk from their windows, to figure out what had happened last night, why the girls’ father had screamed at his favorite daughter on the front lawn.

“I don’t know what she’s going to do now,” said Goneril.

“Do you care?” Regan asked. She stared out the window, still nonchalant, but Goneril could tell from her tone that she desperately needed this question answered.

Goneril breathed in through her nose. She stared at the moon until it bore a white hole in her vision.

“No,” she said. “I don’t care.”

Downstairs, their father sat in the recliner, his knees at his chest. He did not fight his bawling, but he made sure to cry quietly, and to punctuate each sob with a drink. He didn’t want his two remaining daughters to hear him, wallowing and weak. But he needed to cry. And he couldn’t cry sober, so he drank. He pressed his forehead to the bottle’s rim, and he closed his eyes, like a child, waiting to wake from a dream. 

Far away, another father sat waiting. He sat on a carpeted floor, looking out the window at the city skyline, too bright for stars. He hoped Edgar and Edmund were all right, and that they would be coming home soon. He hoped they hadn’t thought him cruel for yelling.

Rain poured, heavy and sharp, and Regan and Goneril extinguished their cigarettes on the windowsill, leaving little black marks behind. They closed the window, and rain trickled down the panes as they laid in their beds, their eyes open, wide awake.

III. Morning

Cordelia led the way down the hill. The earth was soggy and clumped, storm-soaked. She hadn’t thought to grab a pair of shoes, as if she could have thought at all when she was leaving home. When Cordelia reached the bottom of the hill, she peeled off her socks and left them there. She wiggled her toes, failing to dispel their numbness.

This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.

“I’m going home,” she said.

The two brothers stared at her. “You think he’ll let you in the house?” Edgar asked.

“He doesn’t have to,” Cordelia said, continuing forward. “There’s a key under the doormat.”

“That’s the last place I’d hide a key,” said Edmund. He scratched his broken nose delicately. “Isn’t that the first place you’d look, if you were an intruder, or a thief?”

Cordelia shrugged. Edmund hadn’t said a word to her before this. “It’s easy to remember,” she said. “If you were black-out drunk, wouldn’t you want the key to be in the first place that you looked?”

A firefly buzzed near a streetlamp, until the light blinked off, and the firefly flew away.

“Common problem for you?” Edmund asked. “Being black-out drunk?”

“Shut up,” said Edgar.

“I don’t drink,” said Cordelia. She walked around a broken bottle, avoiding the shattered glass. “You should both go home.”

Edgar looked down. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

Cordelia sucked on her cheek. “I’ll be fine. He won’t still be angry.” She wasn’t sure if she believed this, but she did know that her father would be much less angry if she didn’t return dragging two strange boys behind her.

“We’ll protect you anyway,” Edgar said, with finality.

They didn’t listen to her—no one ever listened to her—and eventually Cordelia gave up trying to convince them to leave. They walked in silence then, through the foggy morning mist, the pale sunlight just beginning to darken into something gold.

When they reached the front porch, Cordelia walked through the sprinklers without acknowledging that her clothes were still spread across the lawn and driveway.

These weeds are memories of those worser hours.

She unlocked the door, opened it, and closed it before either Edmund or Edgar could enter. They shouted, and banged on the door as she held it shut, as she locked it behind her. Cordelia winced, as she heard stirring, the sound of feet clambering down the stairs, the creak of someone rising from the recliner in the living room.

“You’re back.” Cordelia turned around at her father’s voice. She pressed her back against the locked door, and felt the vibrations of Edmund’s and Edgar’s fists. Goneril stood on the last step of the stairs with her arms crossed. Regan was just behind her. Their father swayed as he stood. Cordelia saw light flicker off of several bottles at his feet.

“I told you to go,” he said. “Not to come back.”

“I’m sorry,” said Cordelia, before she could stop herself. It was ridiculous, her being the one to apologize. But it was necessary, for no one else was going to say it.

“I didn’t lie,” Cordelia added.

Her father laughed, shook his head. “Then are you saying that your sisters lied? You think they would lie to me about something like that? They would say you were fucking some boy without being sure of it?”

Goneril and Regan stared at her. They seemed to plead with their dual, steady gaze, and Cordelia swallowed. “Do you think I would lie?” she asked in a small voice.

“I don’t know what to think,” her father snarled.

Goneril opened her mouth, but Cordelia spoke before she could say a word. “I didn’t say my sisters lied,” she said. “They only told you what they heard. If you’d let me explain—”

“Are you raising your voice at me?” Her father rubbed above his left eyebrow, where his hangovers always began. “Are you raising your voice at me?” He strode into the kitchen, and knocked over a chair at the table. It fell onto the wooden floor with a clatter. All three girls flinched, and flinched again as the banging at the door grew louder, faster.

“Cordelia, let me in!” Edgar yelled. “Open the door, or I’ll break the window.” Edmund stared at him worriedly, afraid that he’d actually do it. Edgar, at least, believed that he would.

The girls’ father barked out a hollow laugh. “Is that your boyfriend? Is he threatening property damage? Sure sounds like it.” He stumbled deeper into the kitchen. “Sure sounds like it,” he repeated, mumbling. Cordelia heard him rummage through drawers, mutter a string of curses comprehensible only to himself. When her father emerged, he held a sharp, silver, black-handled knife.

Regan screamed, and Goneril wrapped her arms around her sister, pulling her up the stairs. “Be quiet, don’t make any noise,” she whispered. “Shut up, you stupid—”

Regan pulled free and clutched herself, rocking back and forth. “Daddy, put it down, please put it down.”

He pointed the knife at Regan and she froze, gulping like a fish. Everyone stopped, Goneril halfway up the stairs, reaching for her sister. Cordelia’s shaking hand ceased its search for the doorknob just behind her.

“I have a right to protect my property,” said their father in a low voice. “I’m a man; I have a right to protect my property.”

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

The room was almost silent, but for the continuous knocking at the door, Edgar’s shouts. “What’s going on? What’s happening? Cordelia!”

I’ll not endure it.

Cordelia’s hand found the doorknob. She twisted it, flinging the door open. “Run!” she screamed. “Run!”

Edgar and Edmund stumbled backwards, falling down the front porch steps. Cordelia’s father plunged the kitchen knife down in a desperate swipe towards the boys. And the knife stopped, suddenly, caught in Cordelia’s chest. She gasped, and brushed, barely, the knife’s plastic handle with her fingertips.

Goneril unhinged her mouth as if to scream, but nothing came out. Regan shrieked, and the noise made everything more sharply real. Cordelia yanked the knife from out of her chest, as her father gaped, and pulled at his thinning hair.

Edgar scrambled up, and caught Cordelia as she fell. “No,” her father sobbed. “Don’t touch her, don’t touch her, you’ll hurt her.” He lurched forward, seized her crumpled form from Edgar.

You hurt her, Edgar thought numbly. You hurt her.

Edmund pulled his brother away. “Don’t look, don’t look,” he said. He believed that was the right thing to say, as he dragged his brother away from the blood, the wet clothes on the lawn and pavement. Edmund made himself care for Edgar, his brother who he was jealous of in every way there was. He did not pay attention to the scrapes the granite had left on his palms when he fell, the matching ones on his brother’s hands. He didn’t care about the burning guilt, the web his little rumor had spun. He just wanted to go home, back again to where they had been.

Edgar allowed himself to be guided, like an old woman with milky eyes. He was cold, and his feet told him the only way forward was forward. But so many terrible things ran through his mind. The small, shocked noise that had escaped from her throat—it played over and over, like a chime. The red stain—her blood—on his t-shirt seemed to expand as they walked, for hours and hours, until they reached home, until their father wrapped his arms around them, and told them never to do that again, never to do any of it ever again.

No words, no words. Hush.

Cordelia felt her father pull her away from Edgar, pull her away like an old man is pulled through time. Over the archway, into the house, heard his sobbing, his jumble of words—perhaps apologies. Front doors clicked open—neighbors came out in bathrobes, alarmed by the noise. Cordelia could hear them but couldn’t see them. All she could see was her own hand, before her face, covered in blood. She dimly knew it was her own.

Briefly thyself remember.

Cordelia wished it was night again, full of noise beyond the earthly plain, utterly unaware of the world beneath the stars. And she gasped, once more, as her wish came true. Impossible, deliciously impossible, but darkness fell over the world, and her sisters’ screams became thunder, and her father’s tears rain, and the air settled over Cordelia, and kissed her good night, as she lifted up her hand, and grasped for the moon.