The rewrite is up! Just a one-shot, for the month of October ahead of us.
Three critics (for want of a better word) review Lilly's neutral ending.
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Scottish Play
“No respect,” I mumble to myself, gaptoothed, one-eyed, half-blind, half-deaf. I am Atropos, inevitable, formidable. I cut the thread. I am the answer to all questions. I am cold, and if my shadows were darker, there’d be no light at all. I take my task seriously, and I cannot be avoided forever.
“No respect?” she says, as always. If I am the answer, Lachesis is the question. Sunny and brown and fecund as summer, fertile and flirty, a shade over thirty. She is always in a mothering mood, always ready to support the imaginations of the feckless and reckless. And sometimes, ready also to egg on their desires.
“No respect!” the other one says. Clotho, this is, pale complexion aged eighteen, lithe of limb and hair of green. Always like a new shoot after the winter of my discontent. Damn girl, most powerful of us and most innocent—a combination that always leads to trouble. “I find it refreshing! Look how he describes us!”
This time, it’s Shakespeare. Next time, it’ll be that young Kurosawa. Again and again, these cycles of men. They craft and control, design us a role… I stop before I cast a spell by accidental pique and burn a hole in our tapestry again.
“Never any respect,” I say firmly. “There’ll be trouble, you know.”
“Never?” says Lachesis, primping and pimping. “Any respect there will be trouble? You, know?” Idiot woman.
“Never any respect there will be! Trouble you? No! Come on! Mortals must, till times be done, have a little bit of fun.”
I am old, and even if my power is sharp and narrow, I know when a spell is being made against our wishes. Damn it all. The rule of three is forcing our hands. All we can do is make it difficult.
Carefully, I say, “There’ll only be trouble if a lady of the two traditions makes friends with a lady of two faces and becomes a rival of a lady of two voices."
Clotho interrupts: "And all must fall in love with a man of two lives!"
Lachesis grins: "And even then, the first must bed him but leave him, and the second must love him but not bed him, and the third must speak to him without opening her mouth or her loins."
"As above, and on the heath, so below and unto death. There.”
It’s about as tight a conjuration we can make, to bind Shakespeare’s play against Kurosawa’s film. Thank the gods that their islands and traditions are all the world apart. I cannot imagine how this binding could ever fail; in the old days, we’d have used more rhymes, and sealed it with a baboon’s blood. Now, we are less messy.
*****
“Damn!” I say. I knew no good would come of this.
“Damn?” says Lachesis, from where she sits on Mount Aoba with her friend Meiko Ibarazaki.
“Damn,” agrees young Clotho a tad unhappily, from her tea with Yuuko Shirakawa. True to her nature, she perks up quickly. “But the whole thing turned out wonderfully! Look how many lives that Raita and his four-leaf-clover-whatever friends have changed for the better!”
I gnash my gums and grumble. Damn artists, writers, playwrights, musicians all. Time to bring out my scissors and prune some leaves. I look at Hisao Nakai and he looks unhappily back.
“You first,” I say.
But in my dark old heart, I know there’s no escaping from good art.
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