That Way Madness Lies

by Dahlia Adler

  We dance, ready for his rage. We have expected it. And for our defiance, he may turn us into doe and stag, or wolf and wife.

  But he will never tear away this sight we have put before him. It will be woven into his mind as a tapestry, stitched in dyed thread and bitter detail. The girl he decided was his daughter, in the arms of the boy who defied him.

  We prepare for the king’s wrath.

  But the music plays still, and Oberon does not part his fabled lips to command or condemn us.

  Neither do Titania or Puck, on either side of him.

  They all gaze into the sky. The chin of each fairy lifts to mimic them, masks of petal and feather inclining toward the heavens.

  The moonlight revel halts. The musicians cease their playing.

  But silence does not come.

  A new song becomes heir to the one before.

  It sounds as I would imagine the call of mermaids, high and clear as the rarest bird.

  The first glint in the sky seems a falling star. Then another, and another after.

  Narciso and I are still, hands paused on each other’s waists.

  With their descent, each falling star comes closer, each a moonbeam forged into a rod of silver. The bright head of each grows glinting edges.

  Not falling stars.

  Arrows.

  It is a rain of Cupid’s arrows. We recognize them by their gleam, as much light as metal, and for this, I do not fear them. The most harm they will do is give my heart to this boy and his brown hands.

  I find Narciso’s eyes, set within the half mask of amber leaves.

  He is steady as the glass of a pond. He gives only a slight nod of his head, as though a falling sky sows no fear in him.

  And so we keep still, the fairies hushed in awe. Peaseblossom and Moth and Cobweb and Mustardseed. Even Puck. Even Titania. Even Oberon.

  The arrows, streaming down, set a rushing noise beneath the mermaid’s song.

  That far song rises, heralding the touch of arrow to earth.

  But they do not strike us. They do not sway the motions of our hearts.

  Instead, with each finding its ground, comes a bloom of color.

  I expect purple, as with the flower Puck fetched Oberon, turned white from Cupid’s mark.

  But the shade that opens before us is not purple or any of her sisters.

  It is brown, the soft heat and beauty of brown.

  Every pale flower touched with an arrow’s gentle weight becomes a rich and perfect brown.

  Every pitcher of milk and cream dons an amber glow.

  Every white gown is dyed to match the acorns and hickory.

  The fairies startle back. Even Oberon, his wide eyes green as leeks.

  For a moment, my heart is a weight pinning me to this patch of grass. Then I feel it shifting inside me, and I understand that is not my heart keeping me in the fairy court. My own fear has been the shell of stone around it, and my heart will forever be sealed inside if I do not take the bright star of this night between my fingers.

  “Show me,” I tell Narciso, soft enough that it’s a breath between us.

  “Show you what?” he asks, not as though he’s confused but as if I have only to tell him and he’ll do it.

  “That there is a world in which we belong to ourselves,” I say.

  He looks at me harder, the fall of the arrows lighting the edges of his hair. “Are you sure?” he asks, and I know he understands that I mean tonight to be the last Oberon and Titania ever see of me.

  “Yes,” I say. “The world I know has grown as small as this court, so much that I’ve nearly forgotten my own blood comes from outside it.”

  Narciso takes my hand.

  He draws me away from the fairy court, and I run with him through the woods, beneath the rain of arrows.

  Still, they fall. Still, the palest things grow a warm color.

  The magnolias crowning the trees and the water lilies adorning the ponds are cast in copper.

  White cats and rabbits turn to brown, bewildered but not displeased with their new coats.

  Swans find their wings burnished in bronze. The moon-milk on the ponds turns to fireweed honey. Even the moon herself grows a copper sheen.

  I run with him until the trees open into a vale I have never seen.

  Narciso stops, I alongside him.

  He draws a deep breath, nearly a sigh, as though we stand before something he thought we might miss.

  A meadow, the ground gently waving as a sea, wears a coat of rippling grass. Trees with leaves as deep as Narciso’s shirt define the edges, hiding it from view of the woods.

  Even through the rain of silver arrows, I know the place for what it is. I know it by the scent. The lilting perfume eases my heart open, even as I catch my breath. It is the damp green and early blossom of that which Narciso would not give up.

  A wide, glimmering meadow of love flowers.

  “And what shall I call you?” Narciso asks, his voice still soft with getting his breath back.

  I look to him. The wind lifts the edges of his hair as carefully as the leaves.

  Not What is your name?

  Not even What should I call you?

  But What shall I call you?

  It happens as a quick, bright thing, how I cast off the name Titania and Oberon have given me. And in its place I take up the earth from which the queen of the fairies stole me. It is a world away, that earth, but it is still mine. It lives in my skin and my blood.

  “Tierra,” I say. “Call me Tierra.”

  Beneath the rain of arrows, the shy, white blooms put on their coats of violet and brown and turn to face the glinting night.

  The king doth keep his revels here to-night:

  Take heed the queen come not within his sight;

  For Oberon is passing fell and wrath

  Because that she, as her attendant hath

  A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;

  She never had so sweet a changeling;

  And jealous Oberon would have the child

  Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;

  But she perforce withholds the loved boy,

  Crowns him with flowers and makes him all her joy:

  And now they never meet in grove or green,

  By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen.

  —PUCK, ACT 2, SCENE 1

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  As tends to be the case with stories I reimagine, I both love and hate A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Love, because how could I, with my queer, magic-laced heart, not adore a tale about both fairies and desires ruling a charmed forest?

  Hate, because I rarely found anyone talking about the “changeling” Oberon and Titania quarrel over. Had anyone else, I wondered, heard what I just heard? That this child, coded as brown and now in the arms of white fairies, had been stolen from his father? What else do the king and queen of the fairies feel entitled to?

  It unnerved me as a Latinx reader who secretly wanted to be a fairy but didn’t want white hands deciding my fate.

  It’s in this spirit that I code my narrator as Latina, a kind of brown these fairies likely would have called the same word as the original child in Midsummer. In some contexts, it’s still the default term used to describe part of my family and my community’s racial identity. These fairies, much in the spirit of English colonialism carried across continents and oceans, likely would have thought of her as the same, a chilling reminder of how interchangeable brown bodies—and brown identities—are so often considered to be.

  While I was in these woods, you didn’t think a queer nonbinary author would leave without casting rainbows everywhere, did you? Alongside trans fairy prince Narciso, a character of my own making, I wanted as many pairings from the original text as I could manage. What if Helena and Hermia wanted each other far more than they wanted Demetrius and Lysander and the whole pining affair was just for show? What if Bottom enjoyed Quince bossing him around? What if Puck’s devotion stemm
ed more from being Oberon’s lover than his subject? And what if Titania’s and Oberon’s marriage is far more political than personal?

  A note on the figurative language: Much is my own. Much is adapted from the Bard. It’s the least he can do considering how many nightmares he gave me about being stolen by gringo fairies.

  If bringing colonialism into the discussion of one of Shakespeare’s most whimsical plays disturbs you, I invite you to consider why. And in the meantime, I send you off with the slightly altered closing words of fairy Puck:

  If these pages have offended,

  Think but this, and all is mended,

  That you have but slumbered here

  While this retelling did appear.

  And this brown and queerest theme,

  No more yielding but a dream.

  WE HAVE SEEN BETTER DAYS

  Inspired by As You Like It

  Lily Anderson

  Oliver: Can you tell if Rosalind, the duke’s daughter, be banished with her father?

  Charles: O no; for the duke’s daughter, her cousin, so loves her, being ever from their cradles bred together, that she would have followed her exile, or have died to stay behind her. She is at the court, and no less beloved of her uncle than his own daughter, and never two ladies loved as they do.

  Oliver: Where will the old duke live?

  Charles: They say he is already in the Forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.

  —ACT 1, SCENE 1

  “It’s worse than I imagined,” I spat.

  “But in a good way,” my cousin said.

  At a safe distance, behind the redwoods and only halfway up the driveway, we could tell this wasn’t the camp we remembered.

  It was horribly, painfully beautiful.

  Each of the main buildings had a mural wall painted to reflect its purpose in an explosion of color and bubble letters. The front lawn had grown back—lush green. Along the perimeter, sunflowers stretched toward the sky. The whole place looked brand new.

  The sight of it made my blood boil.

  “Do you remember when I wanted to buy a plot in the community garden and my dad said it was too expensive?” I pointed beyond the hammocks and horseshoe pit. “That’s an outdoor kitchen! There’s no way I have a college fund left!”

  “Stay positive,” Celia chided, shaking my arm the way she did when we were little and she used to try to “wake up my sillies.” “We’re back at camp! We didn’t think we would ever see this place again.”

  “I was sort of hoping we’d never have to.” I looked up at the WELCOME TO CAMP ARDEN sign. Repainted and sealed at a sun-reflecting high gloss, it was hard to look at.

  “Rosie,” my cousin chided.

  “Cece,” I stressed back, crossing my eyes at her. We were at camp, so I was no longer Rosalinda and she was no longer Celia. Camp was for nicknames.

  “We wouldn’t be friends if we’d never come here!” she said. She opened her arms and spun in a circle, distance-hugging every tree. “We would be cousins, but we wouldn’t be sisters.”

  “And I’d never know how sharp your toenails are,” I said, fake swooning back at her. “Sleeping bag serial killer.”

  “Two sleeping bags!” Cece protested as though that was a normal amount of sleeping bags to tear open with one’s toes.

  The sound of a car pulling up the gravel drive made both of us turn around.

  A silver sedan with multiple ride-share stickers in the window pulled to a stop. The back door opened and out leapt a tall light-skinned Black boy in owlish glasses.

  “Thanks, man,” he called back at the driver. “And remember, you swore you’d give Solo another shot. Don’t do it for me. Do it for Bradford Young!”

  As the door closed behind him, he swung a backpack on and turned to see us. His face broke into a dimpled smile. “Sorry, I’m late. There’s no clock in the forest.”

  The name on his luggage tags was Orlando Cohen-Kersey, but for the first few years we knew him, he’d been the smaller half of Ollie-and-Orly, the bickering brothers whose inane arguments kept their cabin up all night. When Ollie got promoted out of the communal bunks and into a counselor’s twin bed, Orly had emerged as:

  “Lando,” I said, too quiet to be heard beneath the sound of the Uber-Lyft crunching its way back toward civilization.

  Space buns bobbing, Cece ran to hug our old friend. “Look at you! You got taller again! I told you that you had to warn us when you did that!”

  Lando laughed, and it was a rumble, not a wheeze. “You’re just remembering me shorter because we missed a summer.”

  I gripped the straps of my overalls. “Aren’t we lucky that summer is extra-long this year?”

  Lots of people attempt the camp upgrade. Away from everyone who defines you, it’s easy to show up in the woods with a new name and a statement wardrobe. Camp was the only place where Cece wasn’t under constant parental surveillance and I tried to be a person who wore hats. But Lando had not only upgraded but stayed plused up.

  Getting taller had a lot to do with it. Now, there was no mistaking him for a little kid. Instead of curls weighed down with grease, his hair was picked out. It stood up in a halo around his head as round as his tortoiseshell frames. His jeans were tight, and his socks were loud.

  After camp ended, Lando had become decisively himself. It was such an unforgivably hot thing to do, I could barely stand it.

  Cece beckoned him down to her level. “Come down here and let me admire your mane. I’m obsessed with the volume you’re getting.”

  “I just do what you told me,” he said, but he generously bent in half anyway so she could see every angle of his ’fro. Before she was the queen of the quickie hair tutorial, @CeliaCurlz, Cece had been known as the girl at camp with the hair product suitcase. A godsend to the other natural hair campers. Whether you needed shea butter, silicone-free conditioner, or someone with quick hands for a braid down, Cece was the person to know. Following that reputation had brought Lando to the door of Cabin 12, hoping to exchange cookies for cornrows.

  We were camp besties ever since.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said. To save myself the awkwardness of trying to initiate a hello hug, I patted him on the shoulder. “I didn’t know if you would.”

  Before this week, I’d never had to ask him for anything more than a movie recommendation or the finishing knot on a friendship bracelet. We were camp friends. Inseparable in summer, social media mutuals during the school year. We were untested in the off-season.

  “My friends needed help,” Lando said. “So I’m here to help.”

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s go find my dad.”

  I led the way, taking the first step into the wild, drunk yonder.

  * * *

  Dad swore Camp Arden used to be paradise, but every year that I was there, it got a little bit worse. The waterfront cabins were condemned. Canoes were left to rot. An ongoing lawsuit ended the annual capture the flag tournament. And the lake had a dead-thing smell that lingered in everyone’s hair.

  “Percy Jackson lied to us,” I told Cece the year the ceramics hut burned down.

  “Maybe camp is only good if your parents are gods,” she said.

  By our last summer there, camp was barely two weekends. Cece spilled an entire container of homemade flaxseed gel in the woods and cried for three days. Lando recapped the plots of Jordan Peele movies. I never even unpacked my swimsuit.

  Not long after that, Dad sat me down, solemn-faced, to tell me that Camp Arden had officially closed. His autopayment bounced back to him. I was sad to know that I might never see Lando in person again. But we started a text thread and promised to keep in touch.

  Dad, on the other hand … Dad rallied. He called other Arden alums, tracked down old camp directors, hired aquatic ecology experts and arborists, emptied his savings, cra
cked into his retirement twenty years early.

  Because, to my dad, camp wasn’t some old slice of the woods on the other side of a stomach-churning, two-hour bus ride. Camp wasn’t its stinky mess hall or empty owl sanctuary or weird frozen food concoctions. To him, camp was home. Being a counselor was the first job he ever had, and he came back every summer, even through college. Until he and my mom had me and needed to move closer to family.

  Camp Arden reopened, a little over a year after it closed. Except now it was a summer camp for adults.

  And summer had been extended indefinitely.

  * * *

  The main office was the only building close to the parking lot. In the nearest space was the junky, old truck my dad had downgraded to when he had been raising the money for the camp renovation. I couldn’t believe he’d traded in our Prius for something with no GPS, no Bluetooth for the stereo, and no backup camera. I was never going to be able to parallel park that behemoth.

  Seeing the weeks of dirt accumulated on the windshield only fueled me forward, ready to pound my fist on whatever desk or door got between me and Dad.

  But no one was in the office.

  “At least they left the air conditioner on,” Lando said, his eyes closed against the cold breeze coming out of the wall.

  According to the dry-erase calendar on the wall, the bus had dropped us off in the free hour between lunch and afternoon activities.

  I couldn’t resist testing the handle of the camp director’s office. Locked, of course. Through the smoked glass, I could only see the vague outline of a messy desk. I wanted to know what my dad looked like sitting behind it, what photos he kept in the frames on the wall. Had he changed the furniture in there? Everything on this side of the door was so eerily the same. The operations desk even had a bulky, old desktop computer that was way too clean to be disused.

  Cece pulled down a printed map from a wall display of brochures and legal release forms. Tracing her index finger in a serpentine trail away from the camp entrance, she said, “If we walk fast, we should be able to do the whole walking trail in less than an hour. I want to run the wishing steps and ride the tree swings…” She gave me a weak smile. “And find Uncle Duke, of course.”