Bard's Bones

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so."

--Hamlet, from Hamlet (2.2.115-7)

I was four when I realised I was copy. Like so many of us, I discovered it by staring into my own face.

I knew I was a Bard. I can't remember not knowing. It was one of those things you know by existing, something you might omit, but others won't let you ignore, like your hair colour or your gender. Our identity is imposed in our genes, and I knew that with the same certainty that I knew that floors were grey. But I didn't know, until I saw her eye staring into mine, that I wasn't even unique for now.

She wasn't long, but it didn't matter. They could make more. They'd made all of us. Broken.

"Deshy," I said, "You're dripping ink all over."

He looked at me blankly. He was chewing his fountain pen, the feather rammed deep into his mouth, nearly choking him. Ink splattered his face, his synth-doublet, and his bare feet, which were standing in yet more ink.

"Deshy," I repeated softly, taking the pen very gently, picking bits of fluff from his tongue. "Would you like to sit down?"

He blinked, once, and then gave a big gasping sob. "It's okay, it's okay," I murmured, clutching him, rocking, stroking his hair. He's much taller than me, but I managed to get him seated, sneaking him a tiny paper bird to play with.

I limped back to my own desk, my pain still sharp and wincing with each rasping drag. Sharlen watched me from his bed, fine features pinched with worry. "Sasha?"

"I'm fine," I cut, snarky. I shook my head, sighing. "Really, Shar, I'm fine." I pasted a pale smile and reached out to pat his hand.

How do you bitch to a guy who can't get out of bed? Who can't even sit up because it would crack his spine to salt? Of course, we weren't shorts, but that doesn't help like you want it to.

When I was seven, I broke my foot. I wanted it to match the other one, so I broke it and set its toes forward. When they found me, they went into my records, found the scans, and studied them for three days. Then they broke my foot again, and put it back, backwards. A precision exercise.

I was roomed for six months.

They could fix me. They could fix all of us, I imagine. But that would taint the results.

I smoothed my hand along the synth-parchment, the blank white making me queasy. I flicked a finger at the fill-quill pen, but I couldn't make myself pick it up.

Prissy was scrawling in the corner, her feather scritching as it attacked the scrolled paper. If I looked, she'd have that smug dopey smile she gets, the one she gulps over even when she's talking to you. I like to think maybe she's Bacon's. She has that elitist pig thing down chilled.

She's the only one in the room writing.

I know I should write. I know they want me too. Badly. But I feel sick even hearing her scratchings. If I had a window, I'd stare out it, but there's just the floor, grey as it is.

When I was thirteen, I wrote Hamlet II.

They couldn't publish it as Shakespeare, of course. We're all Shakespeares, but we're not. That's the problem. They scoured the earth for samples, and they got them, including the supposed Bard's dear dust itself. But contamination? Degradation? Suspect historical record? Was this the guy? Who's the guy? They tried to pull progeny, descendents for elimination rounds, but the revisionists got fists in, swinging. Bacon, Oxford, Marlowe, or Fluas? That could be the guy. Anyone could be the guy! Or girl.

We couldn't be proven or discounted, none of us, and, thanks to the 2043 ruling against Benedick Lot #363217-C, we couldn't copyright. The Conservatory owns the rights, they own us, patent and all.

They publish as The Bards.

I followed Hamlet the Sequel with Charles and Camilla, then Hitler (which featured, as its finale, a swordfight with Churchill, in which Winston flees, gibbering, every bit the Falstaff), and finally Enron Alight. I wrote them all with a bitter quill. Call them satires, farces, or parodies, or merely mockeries. But it didn't matter. They were taken seriously. Bought and praised and performed with gravitas.

I never finished Hamlet III: Hamlet in Hell. Sometimes I'm almost tempted, just to get it out. But knowing where it will go, what it funds, it's...too much.

I'd doodle on the foolscap, but hey, they'd use that too.

I looked over at Shar. He was staring up at the ceiling, faintly rapturous, his lips slightly curled. "What are you seeing this time?"

"Butterflies," he breathed. "Well, just one. Wings full spread. Antennae twitching."

I lolled my head back. "I just see speckles, buddy. Speckles in some ass-ugly cheap tiles."

"No imagination."

"Natch." I slumped deeper, folding my hands on my stomach. "Should I see telomeres?" I glanced over out of the corner of my eyes.

He rolled his corners back at me. "Should I spit in your eye?"

I stared topside again, limping my neck a little. "I see a fan."

"Folding or whirling?"

"I don't know. It's not moving."

The hall is hopelessly dark. I can feel myself shaking, and I know I'd see the tremble in my hands. If I could see anything but the twinkling tumble of grey matter rushing at me in the black.

I have suck ass night vision.

I'd reach out an arm to brave the way ahead, but it's not brave at all; it's afraid of what it would find. So I'm mincing, shuffling, but without the speed or the rasp.

I know there's a body out there. I can taste it in the back of my mouth.

Something brushes my cheek, and I flinch, squeezing. It comes back, cupping my face.

"Ruen," I whisper into a warm dry palm, "you scared the shit out of me."

"Really? Let's check."

I swatted him. "You shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be here."

He snorts, a puff of air against my cheek. "Truer words." I wrap my arms around him, tight, then tighter as if I can pull him right into me. Keep him there, keep him safe. "I say we blow this cherry stand," he lips into my ear. "Let's leave on a quest, a merry crusade, all band of brothers. Hmm, doll?"

"Oh yeah, twit." I sighed into his shoulder. "We'd be confiscated as stolen property before morning."

"Not if we got far enough."

"Ruen, baby, the universe ain't far enough."

He chucked my chin. "You're so jaded, kid."

"No, I'm reality."

Another soft snort. "Isn't all the world a stage?"

"Sure. A stage of horrors."

I felt him smile. I wanted to see him smile. Even in moonlight. Of course, I'd never seen moonlight. Or sunlight. No windows, no outside.

Of course, there is no outside. It's a dream, a fiction. Something people want to believe, sure, they need to. To have something, somewhere, beyond where you are. Even if you could never reach it. Maybe especially.

Dreams are grey in real light. Ashes.

I choke, and I realise there's burning in my throat, in my chest, the trembling barbs of tears. Stupid.

Ruen knows. He holds me tighter, kissing my hair. "I know, I know," he murmurs, rocking.

"We have to stop. I can't--"

"Sasha." He kisses me, his lips as dry and gentle as the brush of parchment. "I'll stop. I'll stop this."

The tears raking down my neck are hot.

But I feel cold.

I woke up queasy, with a bitching headache that screamed, in throb: stay in bed, or better, just die. I rolled out very very slowly, struggling to not lose my stomach or my skull. Although a cranium crop was fairly tempting.

Things blurred for a moment, and when they crisped up again, there was Shar, giving me a look like I was a beetle on its back. "What?"

He looked at the floor. "Ruen..."

I tasted vomit and pain. Clutching at my stomach, I smothered my mouth with my hand, bending into my lap.

"He's been roomed, Sash."

I bit my fingers, sitting back to shake my head around as much as the throb could stand. "Dumb fuck," I mumbled into my flesh.

The Head Director's office is plum grey. Among its lush attractions is a synth-aged map, burnt yellow, that fills the right wall. It has California as an island.

The Head is squatting in front of his desk, nearly as wide as it is, and almost as tall as his precious map. Tufts of red hair explode above his ears, as if they had suddenly burst into flames. He's grinning at me.

"Look," I repeat, "Ruen is--"

"Who?" His teeth flash even more condescending. I doubt he can show them in any way that isn't malicious.

"Benedick Lot #363217-C," I say, trying not to noticeably grit my teeth. "He's a fool. He doesn't know how the stage is played. But he isn't dangerous."

"He's the little tragic hero."

"Then don't give him a villain. That just gives him direction with the casting."

His grin went grinnier, and he moved around me, now blocking the door. "He applied to the Registrar for a marriage license."

The cold came again.

"I wonder what direction he was going in."

He stepped closer to me, and he was far too close before.

Sweat beaded me harder, and my eyes lurched around, as I clutched my stomach and tried not to cast my crumpets. My orbs were caught. At the corner of the desk, in an ornate upright holder, was a sonic pen. When I was ten, they had used it to erase my diary, line by line, as I watched. I swallowed, and glared back at the Head.

"Hamlet Lot #423069-A," he sighs, breath like the putrefying undead sauteed in rotten charred onions. "We're not against you sharing code, swapping fluids, marring pens," he confided, still grinning. "Just not with each other." His flesh grabbed at mine, hard enough to bruise.

Being roomed is to be dropped into oblivion, an oubliette, a space thirteen by thirteen, in inches. That's not enough space to step, or even sit. Standing at normal rest, my shoulders are seventeen inches wide, so I have to twist, keeping one arm pressed to hip and thigh, the other clenched tight into chest, breathing only in tiny strained sips. The space is exactly sixty inches high. I'm sixty-eight, so I have to wrench my neck, spine, hips, knees, ankles--anything to compress and fit. Once a day, a susan spins out a two cup bowl that has exactly one cup of powdered liquid. It also picks up the bowl of the day before, along with anything else you'd like to return, which you better hope doesn't exceed two cups. There's also a fill-quill and synth-parchment. Sometimes, just for, I eat some parchment. What else would I do with it?

There's no light. No sound. Just tight and nothing.

I'd spent more than six years of my life roomed, before I put a sonic pen into an ear, through to some brain meat. It went deeper than I expected, not that I'm complaining. It's not that I didn't mean to kill him, you understand. I'm just surprised. I'm stronger than I thought.

Ruen's here too. Somewhere. We're two spoons in separate drawers. A horror and a comfort. Sometimes, when my cheek is pressed sweating to the wall, I wonder if he's on the other side, an echo, and we're dancing cheek to cheek, Beatrice to his Benedick, corpses swaying in the crypts. I whisper in his ear, through a crack that will never come. The walls are his arms, and they can never hold me tight enough.

Oh, you know it was Pyramus and Thisbe that made Romeo and Juliet.

A patent can't file copyright, a product can't marry, and a property can't commit murder. To try me would make me real.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

No, I can't be real. Not to those who understand.

But I'll be here. We'll stay here. Both. Forever, as they plan. Benedick Lot #363217-C is nineteen. Hamlet Lot #423069-A, sixteen. There's not a one of us who has survived twenty. No longs as long as that.

I can wait.

The walls are thin. All walls are thin. I close my eyes and I whisper.

"Good Frend For Jesus Sake Forbeare

To Digg The Dust Encloased Heare

Bleste Be Ye Man That Spares Thes Stones

And Cursed Be He That Moves My Bones"

--Shakespeare's Epitaph

Marlo Dianne lives on a naturally reclaiming acreage in Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Dianne has had more than fifty works published in such venues as All Possible Worlds, Tales of the Talisman, Forgotten Worlds, Raven Electrick, From the Asylum, and Amityville House of Pancakes Vol.2. Upcoming oddities will appear in Down in the Cellar.

A photographer, podcaster, and public domain junkie, this writer, artist, and wondergeek is found at Forbidden Dragon.