of ladies most deject and wretched

[chariestmaid]

The first feeling is fury. When Ophelia wakes from a warbling, uncertain dream like the reedy call of a recorder, there are tears in her eyes, but she can tell they're tears of anger. Ophelia would always cry, whenever she tried to argue on her own behalf, always broke down and bit her tongue before she got another word in. But if something saddened her, she could never summon tears. Her father didn't believe her because of it — she doubted her own feelings, doubted they counted if she couldn't express them appropriately. Hamlet could, he could swear his love with all the holy vows of heaven, before he ripped up his own words and threw them back at her.

And now her father’s left her, to weep herself to sleep. All propriety, all decorum left with him, not that it was been enough to cover her. He put his jacket on her shoulders instead of his arm, and turned his back to her, to go with the king.

Fury fades, and what remains is a drowsy numbness, a sense of wrongness as she sees herself as if from the outside: a missing cog in a breaking-down machine. What should she be feeling now? Ophelia doesn't know.

Hamlet was right, she thinks. She wasn't made to live in a court. She should have been a convent girl. She should have worn a veil, so no man could ever see her face, nor smear the paintings from it.  The chariest maid, her brother once said, is prodigal enough if she unmask her beauty to the moon. She keeps her eyes down, lest the moon catch her crying, or her angry tears unmask her.

When she looks up again, she's still clutching her father's jacket, thinking of the shame she'll bring when she's found out of doors. How did she come to be in these woods? It’s a quiet relief, after the stone walls of Elsinore, to see so much green.

Comments

[chariestmaid]

"Ay," she says, reflecting calmly. This is easier to consider to whether or not her brother knows her. When she prays, she prays more often to the spirit of her mother than to God or the saints. Sometimes she prays to the heavens themselves. (She did when Hamlet was railing at her. O heavenly powers, restore him. Bring back the boy she knew.) "Then there are other gods other than Jehovah. Do you require worshipers, or are you merely being kind?"

[papadopoulos]

"I don't go out and kidnap young women to worship me, if that's what you're implying," he says lightly. "I just know woods can be...uh, disorienting at the best of times. So I figured I would help out."

[chariestmaid]

She nods, absently. The warnings she’d grown up with against following pagan gods (who were surely demons in disguise), the warnings her father gave her about walking alone with strange men — they all seem equally meaningless now. “Then I should thank you.”

[papadopoulos]

"I believe your brother is here," he offers, without further explanation. Maybe she'll take it as an omnipotent god sort of thing. Hopefully. Explanations could get a little sticky. "Would you like to go to the main house, or where he stays?"

[chariestmaid]

"Is he well?" asks Ophelia. It seems a weak, trivial question compared to the enormity of the idea. Laertes feels more than a world away, the North Sea greater than all the oceans of stars.