【by Hannah Duffy】

I was bred by Charles Darwin—all twisted gore and humongous foreheads, lurching over lolling black eyes—that’s right, I was born with this scientific knowledge. Heaven meant little to me, and hell was a swear at the television (my grandfather, jumping to his feet; the Angels were losing). God was a creature of mystery. When I was young, I imagined he was quite like me; he wore the flowers and the bangles and the granny dresses, oh Lord, those ugly dowdy dresses. They could have looked swell on someone, but not on me. 

I was a supposed descendant, I told you, of Darwin—and that came with quite a lot of responsibility, I tell you. I was bred to be responsible. Supposedly the cord clipped clean from my body, the blood steadfast in its slowness, like a glacier, and I was an easy child. There came the teenage years, and those were swell. My grandmother would tell you. That’s when all this show business stuff came about, I was standing in the middle of a square, singing for peace—I had a terrible voice. She told me, too. She never believed I’d have some kind of career in music, that’s how honest a woman my grandmother was—but she knew I was bred for the stage. I gave up on the dirty hippie works, gave up Darwin, gave up realism and modernism and whatnot—but I still had that woman, and she had my dreams spun like yarn in her skinny tan fingers. And until that play, the one play in which I was finally revealed in 1974, she had not seen me act before in her lifetime. It was the first and final play she would ever see me in.

I was twenty-two. It was winter in ‘74; it was snowing in the Sierra Nevada; it was burning eighty degrees in the desert. And it was a rendition of Hamlet, a kind of operatic prose-pruned piece that relied on the audience’s own wit to make it happen. I was mighty proud of it. I was going to play Ophelia, the love interest. It was the very first time I had ever been depicted as someone lovable—a soft, pleasant being with pretty pink skin, sweet enough to muse over, and I was playing the formidable role; I was never one to be looked at with such pride. My partner, a man called Ray, stood nearly six foot four, slouched-backed and stubbornly handsome as he paraded across the stage in fits of distemper; Hamlet, melancholic, bitter, obsessive. When my grandparents came to look in on the venue, a little old church in the sweet suburbs of California, they found Ray sweeping across the stage in his tudor tux; Gram, applauding, hands clasping her golden cheeks, cried that he was quite cute; Grandfather, shaking his head, admitted that he was really a man.

In my twenty-two year old opinion, I believed Shakespeare, in all honesty, to be a load of junk. I knew nothing, really, of the English realm; I studied the tapping of velvety soled feet on the stage, dramatic gestures, solar-powered angelic grafts in the throat that let loose a wild array of obtuse vowels. I had never dealt in the creation of words. I knew only science. Metafiction meant nothing to me, God was an enigma, and I had never even pretended to pray for a second of my sour life. But Hamlet would come to mean more to me. There would be one conduction of the play; a quiet, black Friday night; my grandparents, tucked away in the dark audience, were watching.

The opening night was a bundle of nerves. Ray and I pattered in the back rooms where the nuns had once gathered, strapping band aids to our bleeding heels, quoting and requoting lines so as not to forget. And Ray was saying, “Heaven make thee free of it!”, and I was thinking of him, Grandfather; the Japanese boxer, the proud owner of gongs and various passports of Arabian descent; the fuzzy haired, little man that had once sat on his porch in the East, snacking on cracked crab legs. Ray was saying “Heaven make thee free of it!”, and I was thinking, what freedom is beyond that of heaven?

My descendants were rigid in their morality beliefs; heaven did not exist, God was the supposed “strength within” a meager human being—humans, of course, the warped images reflected from the domed foreheads of the whooping apes. And Ray was saying, he was staggering onto the stage, all dramatics and sparkles, “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?”, and that very camel to my view, no, a cumulus, a stratus—I leapt onto stage. I was a drowned ghost girl in haunting drapes, making wishy-washy willow tree waves. Once a Darwin, the granddaughter of a boxer, a knitter—how had I come to such a place of imagination?

“Your sister’s drowned, Laertes.”

“Drowned? Oh, where!”

They beckoned to me, as I lay, cheek against the cool floor, the shepherds fluttering about, littering my body with garlands of nettles and daisies, crafted with hot glue from the Rite Aid. The willow branch was broken; I had struggled, waterlogged, in the brook, until Death—who is Death? I blinked wearily on the floor; can they see me, all the way from the audience? Should I tell them, dear Gram and Grandfather, that I am not dead? My pinky twitched.

The audience was one large hole. Their faces glittered with bemusement and sorrow. The projected little statue of Saint Francis gaped kindly at them from the wall—I heard his whispers, his sighs of the angels and behold—I sought out my grandparents. It was the first and last play they would ever see. The last bouquet of flowers ever bought. A final toss onto the stage—roses—and then no more. The curtains would close and they—they, of all people, my loves—would die. I had gone first, drowning amid jets of light and daisies—no. No, they may have been gone, but still they would clap.

Gram—had she really kissed Elvis? And he, Grandfather, had he really killed those 

Germans? Had they come to California, bags and babies in hand, what kind of gut did that take—did I have it? My eyes dimly opened and the audience clicked into focus. There they were, front row, but not for long. The play was coming to a close.

I told you, you know, that I came from a long lineage of knife fighters and monaka-cake bakers, born through the twisting of deft, skinny fingers when it counted, bred with neatness and security, born from science and love and a teaspoon of sugar. I told you that I was made of Darwinism; I was as evolved as I could imagine, my knuckles never thickened and my eyes never lolled and my forehead never hung forward like a Neanderthal. I’ll tell you now that I gave it up to feel just a little bit of peace.

And then we were standing, Ray and I, hands clasped in friendship, bowing before the 

applause—roses were flying. We were victorious. And those words on the wall, that little Saint, how he smiled because I could see them so clearly. They were so far away, and I was so very evolved now with my superhuman vision that I would never believe in evolution again. The curtains closed:

“Make yourself familiar with the angels, and behold them frequently in spirit; for without being seen, they are present with you.”

– Saint Francis de Sales