Waiting for Banquo was first published by Crack the Spine in April 2017.
Waiting for Banquo
Lighting tore through the sky; illuminating – in flashes – three hooded figures huddled together on the heath. They were just standing there, their hands tightly entwined, as though together they might somehow silence the storm.
“The weird sisters, hand in han– ” Marge suddenly stopped herself, before opening her eyes to glare intently at her sisters. “Why haven’t you two joined in yet?”
“I thought we were waiting for Macbeth and Banquo to get ‘ere first?”
“We can’t just launch into it once they get ‘ere, Maggie, it’s about creating a sense of atmosphere before they arrive.” Marge searched her sisters’ faces for any sign of comprehension, but like a couple of taxidermy creatures – both were devoid of any expression. “We have to make it look like we do this kind of thing on a daily basis, and that those gents just happen to have happened upon us in the middle of the act!”
“But we don’t do this every day…”
“Yes, Lizzie,” Marge began, “I know that, you know that, Maggie knows that, but Macbeth and Banquo haven’t a badger ‘bout it!”
“So…” Maggie hesitated as she picked like a crow inside her head for the right set of words. “We’re just saying this bit about land, sea and dancin’…even though they probably won’t hear any of it?”
Marge nodded patiently. “We’ve got to sell them the whole package if we’re ever gonna be convincing!”
“But,” Lizzie ventured, “do you think he really will become king?”
“I don’t have a monkeys, do I?!” Marge all but snorted. “But if he does, he better be bloody grateful to us!”
“You think there’s a reward in this, then, Marge?”
“Banking on it, Maggie.”
“Hang on, didn’t you say something similar to another wannabe ruler? You know the one…” Lizzie suddenly started to snap her fingers in a frantic, frustrated fashion. “Oh, it’ll come to me – with the nephews!”
“That boorish cripple?!” Marge guffawed. “In fairness, he did become king in the end!”
“For all of five minutes, Sis!” Lizzie jerked her hands up in the air like a demented puppet. “And he went out crying for his damn horse, what a way to go! You could have at least warned him to bring a spare…”
“That man never heeded his own dreams – and from the sounds of it, it’s hardly as though their meaning was bloody complex. I mean, ‘Despair and die’, really?” Marge let out a long sigh. “What hope was there he’d ever have listened to any more of my predications, eh?”
Growing impatient with both of her sisters, Maggie wrenched up the tattered folds of her robe and plodded through the mud towards Marge. “What have we got to show for you little predictions anyway?”
Both Maggie and Marge locked eyes as a thread of lightning landed a little way off in the distance. The pair remained unyielding, neither seemingly phased by the sudden explosion of light across their ghastly faces. Lizzie was left picking nervously at her filthy, bloodied fingernails – knowing she was unable to do anything once her siblings had go themselves into a duel of this kind. Just as Lizzie was beginning to feel completely hopeless, though, the sky roared with the threat of thunder and something of a smile started to spread across Marge’s sallow face.
“Actually, dear sister, I half expected the Dukedom of Gloucester for giving ol’ Dickie the confidence to become king!” Marge declared pompously, her left nostril rising into something of a sneer. “Not like he’d be using it now anyway…”
“You’d have been lucky with the Barony of Evesham, Marge!” Maggie clapped her hands together gleefully, savouring every sinister second of making her sister squirm. “You, a duchess?! Please!”
Sensing the growing hostility in the group, Lizzie took a stride forward before finding one of her feet slowly sinking into a hidden bog. “I guess telling fortunes and castin’ the odd curse don’t pay so well anymore…” she muttered absently as she wrestled to free her foot.
“True that, sister,” Marge mumbled back, “true that… Folks have just gotten less gullible, I remember back when even a humble, well-placed handkerchief could break up the most solid of marriages. Remember that moor?”
“Otello?” Maggie replied, the confidence lurking in her voice ebbing away almost as soon as she opened her mouth. “Something like that, anyway.”
“Oh, oh!” Lizzie raised herself onto her tiptoes, making the rain thump her matted hair into even more of an entangled mess. “What was the name of that Egyptian charmer who gifted that handkerchief in the first place – Cleopatra, was it?”
Marge rolled her eyes. “Fairly sure that was the Queen of Egypt, Lizzie!”
A whisper in time passed before Marge realised both her sisters were staring vacantly at her. Not wanting to lose a modicum of her inferred authority, Marge lightly brushed down her robes and nodded knowingly at her siblings.
“What are you two waitin’ for, then? Let’s give this another go!”
The three weird sisters, once more, moved wordlessly towards each other to begin their chant anew. As soon as their hands were joined, however, Marge glanced sideways at her youngest sibling.
“Lizzie, would you be a dear and light a fire, say, a little ways over there?” Marge motioned her head towards somewhere vaguely in the distance.
“A fire?” Lizzie’s bushy eyebrows began to furrow, making it look as though a living creature had suddenly taken up residence on her face.
“Yes, and send some of the smoke in our direction? It’ll lend us an extra bit of credibility, you know?”
“Like we’re the ones causing it?” Maggie chimed in.
“Yeah, like we’re the ones causing it…” Marge pondered for a moment. “With magic or some such.”
Obeying her sister’s command, Lizzie glanced around her immediate surroundings for anything even vaguely flammable. The small pockets of heather might have made passable tinder on a drier day, but with the maelstrom worsening by the minute – everything was utterly, unusably sodden.
Lizzie turned back to her siblings and went to open her mouth, but on seeing her eldest sister’s entirely impassive face, she quickly thought better of it. So, despite the rain attempting to pummel her into submission, Lizzie busied herself by gently pawing at the same two bushes of heather whilst trying desperately to avoid her sister’s gaze. For a while, at least, this seemed to be working well, until a sufficiently awkward amount of time had passed and still no fire had materialised.
“Are you quite finished caressing that shrubbery, Lizzie?” Marge scoffed, her one eyebrow raised into a look of utter contempt.
“I don’t think this is gonna work, Marge…” Maggie breathed. “We can’t even start a fire like proper witches.”
“Not with that attitude!” Marge snapped as she whirled around and scuttled towards Maggie. “There are people out there who’d be envious of our powers!”
Lizzie cocked her head to one side like a bemused owl. “Like who?”
“Well…” Marge hesitated. “Some of the girls at witch school thought we were pretty powerful…”
Maggie shook her head. “No, people at witch school called us weird…”
“Yeah,” Lizzie added, “the weird sisters.”
“That was a compliment, you morons!” Marge said, throwing her hands up to the heavens in abject despair. “It means fate! They thought we were like the Grecian Fates! You know, because of my divination skills...”
No one said anything for a moment, but it was clear from the two youngest sisters’ faces that some serious contemplation was occurring. As though taking pity on the pathetic sight before it, the tempest seemed to subside a little, giving the witches time for some self-reflection.
“Didn’t you girls wonder why we were using that nickname in our opening chant?” Marge waited for the slightest hint of a response, but quickly moved on when one didn’t seem forthcoming. “Do you really think I would have got us to say it if it were offensive?”
Maggie and Lizzie shrugged, apparently unconvinced by their sister’s explanation and in their own latent magical abilities.
“Macbeth and Banquo will be ‘ere any minute now, girls!” Marge rubbed her hands together, initially as something of a nervous twitch, but not wanting to dishearten or alarm her sisters any further – she quickly tried to pass it off as a way of showing her excitement at their victims’ impending arrival.
“Oh, drop it, Marge,” Maggie sighed, “no one is gonna be convinced by anything we do…”
“Yeah,” Lizzie began, “you can’t even convince us that you really can see into the future – if you could, why don’t you know the exact time those two will get ‘ere?”
Marge quickly glanced between both of her sisters before fluttering her eyelids in a mysterious fashion and pressing two muddied fingers gently to her forehead. “They will be here in two minutes and thirty six – no thirty…thirty seconds!”
Maggie and Lizzie looked to their sister with a look of absolute awe and wonderment before reaching out to hug her.
“Get off!” Marge flounced around as she tried desperately to worm her way away from her sisters’ embrace. “You silly ol’ hags!”
“Marge is right, Maggie,” Lizzie declared, “we can do this, we are witches! We’re not the con artists people think!”
“I guess we heard it so often,” Maggie sighed, “we started to believe it ourselves?”
Marge suddenly stepped away from her sisters and sauntered over to a grassy knoll – just beneath the most ominous cloud the storm had to offer.
“I can divine the future better than the soothsayer of Caesar’s Rome!” Marge shouted into the worsening storm.
Wordless for the briefest of moments, the other two weird sisters came to join their beloved sister.
“Proud Titania will blush when she sees how I’ll switch up the seasons – by moonlight or otherwise!” Lizzie cried at the gathering clouds.
“And I’ll make the oceans ebb and flow faster than Sycorax ever could!” Maggie bellowed into the unknowable darkness of the surrounding landscape.
“Speaking of, whatever happened to her anyway?” Lizzie’s gaze left the darkening clouds and came back to rest with her sisters. “I haven’t heard a peep from her since witch school?”
Marge waved a hand dismissively. “Stupid wench got exiled to some island somewhere, last I heard. Deserved what she got, always showing us up with her proper magical powers…”
Lizzie raised both of her hands into the air and began to flap them about like a penguin attempting tai chi. This bizarre act lasted only a brief spell before Marge laid a sympathetic but firm hand on her sister’s arm.
“Lizzie, what is this?”
“If we’re really gonna be better than Sycorax then we’ve got to master the basics.”
“So you’re doing…what, exactly?”
“Trying to summon a fire.”
“You know what, leave the bloody fire. Screw the whole thing – Rome wasn’t built in a day. Just try to look as creepy as possible, warble your voices whenever you can, ad lib it a bit and let’s try this again!”
The three sisters immediately hunched themselves over and tottered back into a huddle. Somewhere in the distance, footsteps could be heard between the great crashes of thunder, causing Lizzie to get slightly carried away and let out a deranged cackle. Acting on an instinct hitherto unknown to them, her two sisters joined in until their three voices rose to challenge the very sky itself. As the footsteps drew ever closer, Marge raised her arms to the heavens before offering her open palms to her sisters, bringing them both further into the fold – as close together as the day they were born. Unwaveringly committed to their roles now, the sisters’ zeal shone like a beacon in the darkness – the three frozen like statues as the tempestuous storm raged around them.
Only once the foreign footsteps seemed practically on top of them, did the three sisters spring back to life and begin, for a final time, to chant in almost perfect unison: “The weird sisters, hand in hand…”
“The weird sisters, hand in han– ” Marge suddenly stopped herself, before opening her eyes to glare intently at her sisters. “Why haven’t you two joined in yet?”
“I thought we were waiting for Macbeth and Banquo to get ‘ere first?”
“We can’t just launch into it once they get ‘ere, Maggie, it’s about creating a sense of atmosphere before they arrive.” Marge searched her sisters’ faces for any sign of comprehension, but like a couple of taxidermy creatures – both were devoid of any expression. “We have to make it look like we do this kind of thing on a daily basis, and that those gents just happen to have happened upon us in the middle of the act!”
“But we don’t do this every day…”
“Yes, Lizzie,” Marge began, “I know that, you know that, Maggie knows that, but Macbeth and Banquo haven’t a badger ‘bout it!”
“So…” Maggie hesitated as she picked like a crow inside her head for the right set of words. “We’re just saying this bit about land, sea and dancin’…even though they probably won’t hear any of it?”
Marge nodded patiently. “We’ve got to sell them the whole package if we’re ever gonna be convincing!”
“But,” Lizzie ventured, “do you think he really will become king?”
“I don’t have a monkeys, do I?!” Marge all but snorted. “But if he does, he better be bloody grateful to us!”
“You think there’s a reward in this, then, Marge?”
“Banking on it, Maggie.”
“Hang on, didn’t you say something similar to another wannabe ruler? You know the one…” Lizzie suddenly started to snap her fingers in a frantic, frustrated fashion. “Oh, it’ll come to me – with the nephews!”
“That boorish cripple?!” Marge guffawed. “In fairness, he did become king in the end!”
“For all of five minutes, Sis!” Lizzie jerked her hands up in the air like a demented puppet. “And he went out crying for his damn horse, what a way to go! You could have at least warned him to bring a spare…”
“That man never heeded his own dreams – and from the sounds of it, it’s hardly as though their meaning was bloody complex. I mean, ‘Despair and die’, really?” Marge let out a long sigh. “What hope was there he’d ever have listened to any more of my predications, eh?”
Growing impatient with both of her sisters, Maggie wrenched up the tattered folds of her robe and plodded through the mud towards Marge. “What have we got to show for you little predictions anyway?”
Both Maggie and Marge locked eyes as a thread of lightning landed a little way off in the distance. The pair remained unyielding, neither seemingly phased by the sudden explosion of light across their ghastly faces. Lizzie was left picking nervously at her filthy, bloodied fingernails – knowing she was unable to do anything once her siblings had go themselves into a duel of this kind. Just as Lizzie was beginning to feel completely hopeless, though, the sky roared with the threat of thunder and something of a smile started to spread across Marge’s sallow face.
“Actually, dear sister, I half expected the Dukedom of Gloucester for giving ol’ Dickie the confidence to become king!” Marge declared pompously, her left nostril rising into something of a sneer. “Not like he’d be using it now anyway…”
“You’d have been lucky with the Barony of Evesham, Marge!” Maggie clapped her hands together gleefully, savouring every sinister second of making her sister squirm. “You, a duchess?! Please!”
Sensing the growing hostility in the group, Lizzie took a stride forward before finding one of her feet slowly sinking into a hidden bog. “I guess telling fortunes and castin’ the odd curse don’t pay so well anymore…” she muttered absently as she wrestled to free her foot.
“True that, sister,” Marge mumbled back, “true that… Folks have just gotten less gullible, I remember back when even a humble, well-placed handkerchief could break up the most solid of marriages. Remember that moor?”
“Otello?” Maggie replied, the confidence lurking in her voice ebbing away almost as soon as she opened her mouth. “Something like that, anyway.”
“Oh, oh!” Lizzie raised herself onto her tiptoes, making the rain thump her matted hair into even more of an entangled mess. “What was the name of that Egyptian charmer who gifted that handkerchief in the first place – Cleopatra, was it?”
Marge rolled her eyes. “Fairly sure that was the Queen of Egypt, Lizzie!”
A whisper in time passed before Marge realised both her sisters were staring vacantly at her. Not wanting to lose a modicum of her inferred authority, Marge lightly brushed down her robes and nodded knowingly at her siblings.
“What are you two waitin’ for, then? Let’s give this another go!”
The three weird sisters, once more, moved wordlessly towards each other to begin their chant anew. As soon as their hands were joined, however, Marge glanced sideways at her youngest sibling.
“Lizzie, would you be a dear and light a fire, say, a little ways over there?” Marge motioned her head towards somewhere vaguely in the distance.
“A fire?” Lizzie’s bushy eyebrows began to furrow, making it look as though a living creature had suddenly taken up residence on her face.
“Yes, and send some of the smoke in our direction? It’ll lend us an extra bit of credibility, you know?”
“Like we’re the ones causing it?” Maggie chimed in.
“Yeah, like we’re the ones causing it…” Marge pondered for a moment. “With magic or some such.”
Obeying her sister’s command, Lizzie glanced around her immediate surroundings for anything even vaguely flammable. The small pockets of heather might have made passable tinder on a drier day, but with the maelstrom worsening by the minute – everything was utterly, unusably sodden.
Lizzie turned back to her siblings and went to open her mouth, but on seeing her eldest sister’s entirely impassive face, she quickly thought better of it. So, despite the rain attempting to pummel her into submission, Lizzie busied herself by gently pawing at the same two bushes of heather whilst trying desperately to avoid her sister’s gaze. For a while, at least, this seemed to be working well, until a sufficiently awkward amount of time had passed and still no fire had materialised.
“Are you quite finished caressing that shrubbery, Lizzie?” Marge scoffed, her one eyebrow raised into a look of utter contempt.
“I don’t think this is gonna work, Marge…” Maggie breathed. “We can’t even start a fire like proper witches.”
“Not with that attitude!” Marge snapped as she whirled around and scuttled towards Maggie. “There are people out there who’d be envious of our powers!”
Lizzie cocked her head to one side like a bemused owl. “Like who?”
“Well…” Marge hesitated. “Some of the girls at witch school thought we were pretty powerful…”
Maggie shook her head. “No, people at witch school called us weird…”
“Yeah,” Lizzie added, “the weird sisters.”
“That was a compliment, you morons!” Marge said, throwing her hands up to the heavens in abject despair. “It means fate! They thought we were like the Grecian Fates! You know, because of my divination skills...”
No one said anything for a moment, but it was clear from the two youngest sisters’ faces that some serious contemplation was occurring. As though taking pity on the pathetic sight before it, the tempest seemed to subside a little, giving the witches time for some self-reflection.
“Didn’t you girls wonder why we were using that nickname in our opening chant?” Marge waited for the slightest hint of a response, but quickly moved on when one didn’t seem forthcoming. “Do you really think I would have got us to say it if it were offensive?”
Maggie and Lizzie shrugged, apparently unconvinced by their sister’s explanation and in their own latent magical abilities.
“Macbeth and Banquo will be ‘ere any minute now, girls!” Marge rubbed her hands together, initially as something of a nervous twitch, but not wanting to dishearten or alarm her sisters any further – she quickly tried to pass it off as a way of showing her excitement at their victims’ impending arrival.
“Oh, drop it, Marge,” Maggie sighed, “no one is gonna be convinced by anything we do…”
“Yeah,” Lizzie began, “you can’t even convince us that you really can see into the future – if you could, why don’t you know the exact time those two will get ‘ere?”
Marge quickly glanced between both of her sisters before fluttering her eyelids in a mysterious fashion and pressing two muddied fingers gently to her forehead. “They will be here in two minutes and thirty six – no thirty…thirty seconds!”
Maggie and Lizzie looked to their sister with a look of absolute awe and wonderment before reaching out to hug her.
“Get off!” Marge flounced around as she tried desperately to worm her way away from her sisters’ embrace. “You silly ol’ hags!”
“Marge is right, Maggie,” Lizzie declared, “we can do this, we are witches! We’re not the con artists people think!”
“I guess we heard it so often,” Maggie sighed, “we started to believe it ourselves?”
Marge suddenly stepped away from her sisters and sauntered over to a grassy knoll – just beneath the most ominous cloud the storm had to offer.
“I can divine the future better than the soothsayer of Caesar’s Rome!” Marge shouted into the worsening storm.
Wordless for the briefest of moments, the other two weird sisters came to join their beloved sister.
“Proud Titania will blush when she sees how I’ll switch up the seasons – by moonlight or otherwise!” Lizzie cried at the gathering clouds.
“And I’ll make the oceans ebb and flow faster than Sycorax ever could!” Maggie bellowed into the unknowable darkness of the surrounding landscape.
“Speaking of, whatever happened to her anyway?” Lizzie’s gaze left the darkening clouds and came back to rest with her sisters. “I haven’t heard a peep from her since witch school?”
Marge waved a hand dismissively. “Stupid wench got exiled to some island somewhere, last I heard. Deserved what she got, always showing us up with her proper magical powers…”
Lizzie raised both of her hands into the air and began to flap them about like a penguin attempting tai chi. This bizarre act lasted only a brief spell before Marge laid a sympathetic but firm hand on her sister’s arm.
“Lizzie, what is this?”
“If we’re really gonna be better than Sycorax then we’ve got to master the basics.”
“So you’re doing…what, exactly?”
“Trying to summon a fire.”
“You know what, leave the bloody fire. Screw the whole thing – Rome wasn’t built in a day. Just try to look as creepy as possible, warble your voices whenever you can, ad lib it a bit and let’s try this again!”
The three sisters immediately hunched themselves over and tottered back into a huddle. Somewhere in the distance, footsteps could be heard between the great crashes of thunder, causing Lizzie to get slightly carried away and let out a deranged cackle. Acting on an instinct hitherto unknown to them, her two sisters joined in until their three voices rose to challenge the very sky itself. As the footsteps drew ever closer, Marge raised her arms to the heavens before offering her open palms to her sisters, bringing them both further into the fold – as close together as the day they were born. Unwaveringly committed to their roles now, the sisters’ zeal shone like a beacon in the darkness – the three frozen like statues as the tempestuous storm raged around them.
Only once the foreign footsteps seemed practically on top of them, did the three sisters spring back to life and begin, for a final time, to chant in almost perfect unison: “The weird sisters, hand in hand…”
