Chapter 38 – Carry that Weight (2)

Tuesday.
5.57 AM.

Eppie awoke to her phone blaring.

On the screen, the text read: It’s number one. Kellie is number one. Lucia is number two.

She put on the snooze.
Around the world’s imagined corners, all was right with the universe.

“ACT V!” Dr Kirby shouted over Eppie, as if a student credited with writing a Hot 100 Number 1 did not exist. This was classic Kirby, a quality that Eppie and her class greatly appreciated.

“The fifth Act was homework reading.” Kirby scanned the room. “The Banquet. What has happened? James?”

“It’s the climax,” James replied in his deep, trombone voice. “The ‘mad’ Titus puts on a show; he invites everyone to dinner, including the queen and her kids. He sets the table, and he is also the cook.”

“Is his role a disguise?” Kirby asked, her eyes twinkling.

“Not really, he really did cook,” James continued. “So er… He’s killed Chiron and Demetrius, and he’s ground their bones into meal, and their flesh into mince, and he’s made a pie. He serves the pie to Tamora, their mother.”

The kids gagged. Kirby smiled. “More?”

“He then kills Lavinia.”

“Indeed, he does, but the devil is in the details. It is… the order of deaths that makes the play great. This sequence—it pertains to a legal procedure.” Kirby turned her eyes to another student. “Atkinson. Was it proper for Titus to murder his own daughter? In what sequence does it happen?”

“Before the banquet.”

“For what reason? What was his motivation?”

“Sorry, Miss, I am not sure,” the boy apologised for not being a know-it-all like Eppie, Kirby’s pet feline.

“Eppie?”

Two dozen pairs of eyes coalesced on the girl of the hour.

Eppie felt the hair on her neck stand on end, not unlike Mr Chin’s whenever a stranger walked in. “Er… Titus kills his daughter with his own hands by citing a Roman precedent, the tale of Virginus, who killed his daughter to save her from violation. Maybe that’s where the word ‘virgin’ comes from?”

“Miss Fontaine,” Kirby’s voice lashed like a steel whip. “Please refrain from spreading populist misinformation in my class.”

“Sorry…”

“You’re not off the hook yet. Continue.”

Is this bullying? This feels like bullying… Eppie’s [Script Analysis] scoured her frontal lobe, then delivered the answer her teacher sought. “In Titus’ mind, he is mercy killing his daughter so that she does not have to live with the shame, the shame of living in a society that shames her for being a victim of sexual assault.” For not even Mio could escape that shame.

“And is it right that Titus offers this mercy?”

“No,” Eppie said firmly. “It’s bullshit. It is wrong. VERY WRONG. In the context of Shakespeare’s time, the ecclesiastical zeitgeist would not allow it. The bard knows it’s wrong, his audience knows it’s wrong. He writes it anyway because…”

She paused.
She was too worked up, much too worked up.
Mio’s thing was melding with her mind, messing with her head.

“Because?”

“Because Titus is a man so bound up with vengeance, wrath, cynicism and cyclical hate, that he’s stuck in his own spiral of vengeance. Via his scheming foes, he has been reduced to a mere tool of reciprocal revenge. To a Christian audience, he’s a horror show.”

“Very good.” Kirby clapped just once. Ten points to Ravenclaw! “Tool of vengeance. All of you. Write that down.”

Eppie sat back in her chair.
She topped up her stamina.

She had to stop thinking about Mio, about what the Goddess Nike once copyrighted, to Just Do it.

The class scratched their pens against paper. The age of iPads and laptops had yet to arrive.

“But of course, there is more,” Dr Kirby returned to the whiteboard with a tricolour of markers. “Let’s look at the events as an automaton of revenge.”

She made the first mark. “The banquet is a TRAP. It is Catastrophe.”

“Before the banquet, before the killing of Lavinia, Titus had given her daughter the satisfaction of revenge. Our once-noble hero had captured Chiron and Demetrius, the Queen’s sons and Lavinia’s rapists. He has killed them nice and slow, like sacrificial cows, slitting their throats while Lavinia holds a basin to collect their blood. This is deliberate. Why? Madison?”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“She wanted revenge?”

Kirby shook her head. “Anyone else?”

The class remained mum.