Othello Quickwrite

The Poet lay a-shivering, heated by cruel fever, wrapped tight in blankets in a vain attempt to chase away the chill that had seeped into his bones. Faithful wife and dutiful daughters crowded 'round, and went unrecognized. The doctor had been, and the priest. Both now were gone, grim-faced and morose. There was naught to do now, save to wait.

All through, Will took little notice. Days, this had been. His mind floated easily in and away again, back into dreams.

It was the twenty-third day of April, in the Lord's year, sixteen-sixteen. He'd not live to see the morn.

"This should never have been!" Angry, enraged, viciously so, the Moor of his imagination snarled, easily as dangerous as William had written him. Big hands, dark as burning wood, curled into his shirtfront, lifting and shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat. Their surroundings whirled, black and shadowy as Will's head flopped, forth and back. Fires flickered around them, and beyond them the demons of Hell itself watched, eyes alight with mirthless laughter, faces twisted terribly, forms scaly and deformed.

"Myself, I begged nothing, but my wife piteously I wept for. And cared you not!" roared fierce Othello, every inch the vengeful devil. Playwrights' eyes, honed for detail even in conditions adverse, noted ragged clothing, wounds gone to fester. The tortures of the damned lay upon this figment's illusory hide, yet earthly strength shook him, rattled him 'til his body might break apart and be scattered by the force.

"For naught, for jest, you had devilish Iago play me a coxcomb! For naught but pence and gold coin, my beloved's light cruelly extinguished by these hands!" He shook the Poet again, in anguished emphasis. "Believed I, at your behest, mine love be faithless! O, worm, vile, cowardly villain!

"Sweet, was she, and loyal true. Stood against her father for me. Her duty, said she, for the Moor, her lord, and went willing when I named her 'whore' and turned against my marriage vows that under protection mine lay she."

Now despair lay in lines carved by pain and torment, and black eyes went faraway.

"A handkerchief, and the betrayal of one whom I called friend. Why had she to die, thou quilled Atropos? Would Iago's twisted hate not served the better to fall squarely on shoulders with the breadth and strength to bear? T'was too much, that she must be ended that I would follow suit. Why, Will Shakespeare? Why so cruel?"

He roared again, a great black lion, and his dark fingers turned to claws, gripping like the legendary beast's talons about William's shoulders as sorrow turned again to ever-burning anger.

But the Poet, for all his silvered words and golden pen, could say naught to defend his words, and flopped silently in his creation's clutches, his own hands drawn feebly up to clutch at thick strong wrists where the evidence of manacles and chains lay, helpless to stop the Moor.

"Speak, knave! Thou wrote Iago, as much as my Desdemona, as much as I; what cruelty lies in thee, that you could envision aught so terrible, as man forsaking master and husband smothering wife? Speak!"

Still, nothing could be said, and thoughts could only whirl beneath the onslaught. Will lay helpless as an unweaned babe, caught up by this great, mad creature.

"You will not speak? Fine." The shaking paused, and the black embers that were Othello's eyes flared brighter still. "Then thou shall listen, and well. You will go back, and you will undo what ill you've done. Desdemona will live, unharmed. I, you may have slain, or I shall slay myself, your preference, thou ill-nurtured miscreant, or by 'sblood, I swear, here you'll stay evermore!"

"But—" Now the Playwright found his tongue, stuttered with it. "I can do naught, nor for you, nor anyone. It is done; I have writ it down, for ever after."

"Then pray your soul is clean enough, foul murderer, that God in Heaven sees thou worthy; for myself, I seek to keep you here, that among your fellow demons you'll dance, as I do, o'er coals!"

He died in the night, an hour or less a'fore the gloaming. Three days after, laid to rest was he, the Poet, on the date of his Christening. His grave was marked with words his own, for none other had quite the skill to craft them, and encompass all that needed be said of the earth's newest and most venerable guest in so short a space as a mere stone's width and breadth. And in the following years, that grave would be lost. But the words, and the stories, even the Moor's unhappy tale, lived on.