Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

XXXVII. Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair

11
Macbeth
Chicago, Illinois
Shakespeareʼs Twelfth Night Pub
October 31st, 2014
Time: 6:30 AM
_____________________________

The night was Carlos Santanaʼs Maria Maria wrapped in a Roseville peanut farmerʼs cheap five-dollar-and-ten-cent cigars, and as Macbeth smoked, the silhouettes of the ashes of Dunsinane kissed the sky as ghosts. Skirting along the planes of hard muscle and harsher skin of the city. The flames around them rose, hissing with futile envy at the smoke, and the lovers in Chicagoan flagrante moaned. Moaned with the shrill ecstasy of the Scottish men and women in Fife, Dunsinane, Inverness, Glamis. Chicago was on fire, and as he approached the Twelfth Night with shaky hands, he too was the Windy Cityʼs paramour. Aroused by her violence, by the fiery blood in the air that possessed the fury of ten warships, by Chicagoʼs licentious kisses.

  And then there was Ingibiorg, his brotherʼs wife.

Ingibiorg was the Rose of the West, laced in the deadly sins of their past and vintage rosette curls, and when the guitarʼs sorrow bled into the sky, so did his resolve. His brotherʼs wife was an Arabian storm that caressed the air with plumes of dark, original sin, an Arabian storm that coveted the clouds the way Ingibiorgʼs blind eyes coveted sin, sodomy, and salvation. When the chimeras hissed with delight at the sight of the Twelfth Night, plundering and pillaging its roof their pincers, they prowled towards her. Atop a bleeding chair of brass and bone, she sat – stroking the chimeraʼs chin – until her blind, silvery eyes followed his.

"So itʼs true," Ingibiorg mused in a thick Middle Eastern accent, chuckling. "Even the devil himself didnʼt want you."

Macbethʼs face hardened, and as Ingibiorg stroked the chimeras, she stared at him with that same look: a dark, treacherous face, deep and maniac in its muffled rage.

"Where is Marjorie, Ingibiorg?" he asked, patient.

She tskʼd.

"The chimeras are unique pets of yours. Portuguese breeds, I reckon; your dark flower had a penchant for exotic animals when she was a queen," she hummed quickly, reminiscing.

"She always wanted things she couldnʼt have, and after: bringing the world to its knees the first time you ruled alongside her, several assassination attempts, the death of your children, and spending nearly a millennium in Hell, one would think the King of Scotland himself would also avoid wanting things he couldnʼt have."

Ingibiorg smiled wolfishly, baring her teeth as she rose to her feet with his chimeras wrapped around her ankles. They hissed, they writhed in sheer anger, and as she strolled towards the bar, she writhed in red-hot emotion. Pouring wine with fingers painted in carmine colors. Leveling a mischievous gaze, Ingiobiorg watched Macbeth with a darkness to her, a cannibalistic darkness, a hungry darkness, and she beamed up at him, conspiratorial.

"You look good, Macbeth; or rather, sound like it. An Ozymandias archetype."

"And you look like a demonic succubus."

"I take it back," Ingibiorg chuckled. "I look good. So good for my age. Crazy good. You, on the other hand? You look like a Molochian demonʼs experiment of meek desperation and child sacrifice gone horribly wrong." 

The wine was poetry; gospel as she drank with him, and with every dirty look, every inferno of sweet elation, every jerking and aching movement in her steely eyes only added to her poetry. Her theatrics, her scheming.

"Enough stalling!" Macbeth barked. "Did you really think I wouldnʼt know that you brought me back to life, that you sicced the DeMarcus girl on me? That you were in cahoots in Marjorie, with Shakespeare, this whole time to use the memory of my dead children against me? Exploiting children to do your bidding and bringing back the dead? Please. I taught you that entire play move-for-move."