ENTITLED: Empire, Crumble
FANDOM: King Lear
LENGTH: 728 words
SETTING: Leading up to Act I
DISCLAIMER: Shakespeare stole everything?
NOTES: I literally had to write this for a class. By the way, I graduated from university!
SUMMARY: As a woman, Goneril's destiny is blood. Its color is a murky auburn. Nobody has ever chosen her.

Don't you know there's a man in the house?

These are the words tattooed on her brain, the words she hears in sleeping and waking.

Don't you know I'm the man of the house?

—Father, tyrant, chosen one. He is the sort of man who is always repeating the same words, a man of five topics precisely, each relating back to himself. His blood is somehow a brighter red than other men's, marked by the light of divinity.

(As a woman, Goneril's destiny is blood. Its color is a murky auburn. Nobody has ever chosen her.)

Goneril, eldest, remembers each of her mother's pregnancies, each miscarriage, each new bride. Five baby boys are buried. This is how she learns humanity's secret. Below their muscle casings, men are brittle. Their strength means that they can snap.

Goneril, eldest, not a son. Her greatest transgression. She learns to cry, papa, papa! at this roaring dragon. She learns to lie, the most soaring lies, because none of them are burdened by guilt.

For years there are only two children, two daughters, pushed into a battle wielding nothing but sticks. She conditions herself into believing parts of what are said to her, conditions herself to smile constantly, to be pleasant and unassuming.

(To her sister, she is carefully vicious. It is the only way she knows to prove that what they have is real, that what they understand is the same.)

And then the lily-girl is born, ten years apart from her elder siblings, the final product of a long and frustrating war against an unwilling field, a woman's body. Her birthing is slow. She comes out over the course of three days, shattering her mother's spirit into such deep exhaustion that she cannot stand to look at her baby, her torturer, until the girl is past nursing, past taking anything more. Woe to the midwife, for the girl had been born with teeth.

Of course, this could not be attributed to the baby. There was no way to claim an infant at fault, for anything. That was simply the nature of Cordelia, that innocent, pure-minded destroyer.

(Goneril and Regan look down into the crib, their baby sister's beating fists, her skin like the powder of a cloud—lily-girl, beautiful and stupid. Goneril takes the whole of her new sister's cheek into her mouth, resting her teeth against that soft, precious skin. How easy it would be, to tear the flesh away.)

Lily-girl, baby-girl, too young to play with, too young to compete. She grows up so easy, a child when her sisters are married, their father relaxing with Goneril's pregnancy, his line now secured. Cordelia's life is devoid of deception, of begging, so easily is she favored, so stupid beneath her title of Honest, Fair Maid. Maid, the word for virgin. Only virgins are capable of honesty, it seems.

(Goneril's child is a boy, breakable as a sword in the river's current. Nothing can last without changing. She hopes she is dead before he grows into her father.)

Her father, chosen one, dragon, King of Britain, bowing now to age, crawling or carried to death, ruining her to his last breath, snatches her son's inheritance for one last fancy. In his ceremonial bequeathment, he sets rules to a contest already decided, and she performs love with hatred, for her son, for her son.

Regan, her sister. As always, "What she said, but more."/ "Well, I love you times infinity. Infinity times infinity!"

Lily-girl, baby-girl, stupid-girl, cannot speak. Cannot satisfy the ugly, perverted pride of a spoiled old man. Her small white teeth nip into her lip as their father roars, but never once does she cry. Her eyes stay light. Perhaps her blood is orange, perhaps gold; perhaps she does not even bleed.

Goneril keeps her peace, watches her territory grow. She and Regan look at each other from across the map of land, which—rightfully, lawfully—belongs to her son alone. Goneril, stomach tight, eyes turned down from Edmund, her spoiling sisters, stares at the miles and miles of land she must conquer.

Cordelia, her lily-skin held in the hand of another king, flashes the teeth she was born with as she strides coolly from the room, offering her love to no one, whispering only, "As if a third should ever be enough."