The Happy Dagger

Day 4 of my 30-day creativity challenge.

I wrote a monologue imagining Juliet at 56: a merchant, a translator, and a girl who walked out of that tomb and kept walking.

She’s talking to a thirteen-year-old girl who’s crying over a boy. She has opinions.

Full text + video below.

THE HAPPY DAGGER

by Ana Del Castillo

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JULIET

aged fifty-six

Fie on your salt tears, child! Dry your eyes. You weep as if you’ve lost a kingdom, when in truth, you’ve only lost a pup who barked too loudly at the moon.

Oh, he speaks in sonnets, does he? He swears by the “inconstant moon”? That is just the breath of a boy who hasn’t enough blood in his veins to speak plain prose.

I know of which I speak; I was the patron saint of such delusions.

You ask of that night? The tomb?

The air was thick as a usurer’s heart, and it smelled of ancestors and damp rot.

I woke to find my Romeo… well. He was ever a boy of great speed and little breath. He’d emptied the vial before I could even say “Good-morrow.”

And there stood the Friar, trembling like a wet dog, urging me to a nunnery—to hide my head in shame and live as a shadow among shadows.

I looked at my “happy dagger.” The steel cold but my blood was a riot. It was a mutiny of red!

And as I felt the wind through the cracks of the tomb—what was to be my tomb—I thought: why should I play the punctuation to a boy’s poorly-rhymed sentence?

Why let my story end with a thud in a basement to satisfy the “ancient grudge” of two old men who couldn’t even remember why they hated in the first place?

So I did not strike and I did not die.

I took the Friar’s gold and Romeo’s cloak—he had no further use for it—and I walked out of that vault into the dawn. I left the name “Capulet” in the dust with the bones. I became a ghost.

And oh, child… the freedom of being a ghost!

These forty years I have been a merchant of spices in Alexandria, a translator of Euclid in the courts of the East.

I have outlived my parents, my nurse, and the very memory of my “shame.”

Verona has forgot me.

And that, my girl, is the kindest thing

Verona ever did.

I became a woman who understands that a rose by any other name is still a bloody rose, thorns and all—and that it grows much better in open soil than in a crypt.

Romeo and I were never “star-crossed.” That is a pretty lie we tell young girls to keep them dutiful and in their beds.

My dear, the stars are not crossed; they are indifferent. They are fire and distance. I learned to sail by them, not to die by them.

My Romeo… I remember him as one remembers a fever. A bright, brief heat that nearly burnt the house down. He was sixteen. I was thirteen. Your age.

We knew each other—what? Four days?

In four days we had married, murder’d, died—or very nearly.

It was not a love story, child. It was a house fire.

But a woman cannot live on heat alone. She needs the cool of the intellect, the weight of the purse, and the opportunity to say “no” to a tragedy written by a world that finds a dead girl more “poetic” than a living, breathing, complex woman.

So, go. Take thy lace and thy sighs. Weep tonight if thou must—I’ll not forbid it.

Even I wept, once. I am not made of stone.

But if thou find’st thyself in a tomb of another’s making… if the walls close in

and some kind fool is offering thee a blade

and calling it “the honourable end”—

don’t reach for the dagger.

Reach for the door.

The world is vast, and the “villain” of Verona has been, these forty years, the Queen of her own life.

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