

Women and Monsters

J. M. McDermott

~~~

Text Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved

Images from the Public Domain

~~~

Sing, Muse

Sing Whatever You Want

~~~

Table of Contents

1: Korey

2: Ariadne After Theseus

3: Nemean Lion

4: Daphne

5: Gaia

6: Menae

7: Charybdis and Scylla

8: Io

9: Cerinytis

10: Siren

11: Tiresius

12: Eurydice

13: Arachne

14: Iphigenia at Aulis

15: Deianira

16: Gorgon

17: Medea

18: Helen of Troy

19: Circe

20: Hestia

21: Aphrodite and Athena

22: Nausicaa

Epilogue

~~~

1: Korey

At home, Demeter curses her for ingrate   
while she moons, and goes ignored: her daughter's lost to her, and to this world. She's got her own.

– Nicole Kornher-Stace, Persephone, Returned

1

My name was just Korey, then. I was my mother's only child. I had no father I knew. I grew up in a small town, in the country.

A carnival came to the big field, back behind the house I shared with my mother. I didn't know the carnival was coming to town that day. Just passing time and I saw it. I climbed over the back fence, and stood in the field behind the house where the grass grew wild and our small town ended in fields and fields and fields of long grass right up to the mountains. It was evening twilight. The stars were already peeking out from beyond the veil of the blue sky. Bugs jumped from stalk to stalk. I held my hands out to run them along the wispy tips of the grass. The bugs were going to the carnival, too, I reckon, after the bright lights and the sweet cotton candy. I heard the music over the hill. I wasn't expecting music like that – old music, like the kind they'd play for tap dancers. I wanted to go.

My mother said to me "Got the brain of a frog sometimes, girl" when I asked her. Then, when I asked her again, "No, and I mean it. You've got work in the morning."

I'm eighteen. I leave for college over the mountain and in a big city in just three weeks. I should be old enough to know if I can stay out late one night, be bleary-eyed one morning. I shouldn't have to listen to my mother go on like that anymore.

Nothing ever changes here. It is that long summer before the freshmen year of college, when nothing ever changes. Every day, I work at the gas station, watching cars come and go. I hand out cigarettes, beer, and lottery tickets and check IDs for the underage kids from my high school class that think I'll let them pass with their fake IDs. "Come on, Korey... Please."

"You know I can't. I could be arrested."

"Fuck. Just fuck."

Got the brain of a frog sometimes, those boys, buying sodas and lingering at the counter to tell me all about what they'll be doing next year, as if anything will change between us. They will always be the hometown boys, too shy to try to kiss me behind the diner when we're walking home from dates and too embarrassed where anyone will see. (The man who runs the seed-washing truck is old and tired and complains of all the companies coming in to monopolize the seed whether folks are listening or not and he's drunk, again, shouting about it, and stumbling around the alley to piss and there we are - us kids looking at him, boy and girl - and he nods at us before pulling his business out and pissing at the wall as if we weren't there at all.) None of the boys will kiss me in this town. I'll go through a whole summer and never kiss anyone before I go to college, and when I finally get to college, and finally fall in love, the boy'll lean over at me all expectantly and I'll lean in, and then he'll get confused and embarrassed because I'll be kissing all wrong.

I remember the ferris wheel rising over the fresh-mowed grass like an insect's paradise - all lights and intricate architectures of girders and beetle-shell cars. All those colors, and all those smiling faces. Used to go all the time, my mother and I walked up the dirt path to the traveling carnivals - past the rusty pickups pressed together like prize-winning pumpkins in the grass. All those people, and all of them people I've seen around town forever and ever, except for the ones in grease paint - smiling, walking on stilts, balloons in hand.

I wondered if they were real. In that long summer - that in-between summer - I couldn't imagine the world beyond the mountains, where the carnival came from. Then, I looked up at the full moon on a clear night sky and tried to imagine how big the planet was by how far away it was in the sky. I couldn't imagine it. I couldn't imagine a continent over the mountains, teeming with people I didn't know, who had lives that did not concern mine, and who didn't live in the kinds of cities where you can't change the toilet paper, the people don't hear about it. How could any boy declare his love when he knew it would stay with him \- hanging over his head - and all the good people of the town would never let him go from his words?

How could I disobey my mother's will when everything I did would be home before I got there? Whatever I thought I was doing at the carnival that night, I knew it would haunt me in the morning.

2

The piano in my mother's study reminded me of the coffin. We had to get men to move the piano. It barely fit in the front room, by itself. There was no room for coffins, unless they placed the body on the strings inside. The piano had followed my mother from her mother, who had inherited it from my great-great-grandmother who was once an opera singer in Europe. It was all we had of her. It was out of tune, and neither one of us knew how to play it.

I wore a blue dress, and I thought about the piano in the front room.

3

When I sat at the piano, pushing down the keys one at a time, bored. My mother was in the kitchen, listening to talk radio. I don't know what she was doing in the kitchen. She was either making something, or cleaning up after making something. Either way, she wasn't listening to me, and she didn't want me going to the carnival.

I asked my mother if I could watch the carnival lights from the back porch, at least, until bed time, after dinner. "Want to waste your time, go right ahead, but you be in 'fore dark." She would sit in a chair, watching cable news loud enough to drown out the carnival music in the living room, I knew.

I watched the bugs collecting on the carnival lights, and all the people in my world walking among the newcomers. This was the kind of carnival run by art school dropouts \- that's what my mother called it. I liked it. They had gypsy costumes, and jugglers with greasepaint smiles to make them always look happy. They had feats of strength, mimes, fire-breathing men, and strange stage shows that were probably metaphors for something.

I never should have jumped the fence, but she couldn't define my life forever. In three weeks, I was to be alone in a city I had barely driven through once to visit the campus, teeming with new people. I could go to the carnival one night in summer. She couldn't punish me anymore.

At supper, mother said she knew what I wanted to ask her. She poked her beans with a sour face. She started to speak, then stopped. She ran a hand through her hair and tried again. "Korey, have you been reading anything good?"

"Not today."

"I worry you not reading enough. When I was your age, I read all the time. All the classic stories, mostly. They're all love stories. They're fun."

I nodded. I didn't say that I never knew my father's name. I never said that.

"Read something. Anything you want. College, they'll be making you read all sorts of crazy shit. Best get in the habit."

"Can I go to the carnival?"

"You got money you ain't takin' with you in the fall?"

"Please?"

"Girl, you know you'll be worn out for work in the morning. What I supposed to say you all cranky and everybody blames me?

"Come with me, ma. We won't stay out too late. When's the last time you left the house."

"Fresh strawberries for dessert. You like strawberries. Don't be mopin' about."

"It's just a carnival, ma - Jesus fucking Christ."

She pursed her lips.

"What?"

"Nothin'. Wouldn't listen to me anyhow. Going out late when you got work in the morning is no way to go through life."

After supper, we cleared the dishes together. She washed them. I dried them.

I was drying the last dish. She pressed her lips into the back of my head.

"Good night, babe."

"Good night, mom."

She went into the living room to watch the news.

I put the dish down. I walked to the back porch without even looking over my shoulder, to get to a candy apple, warm and sweet enough to make my jaw hurt from the flood of sugar beneath all the lights pulling the bugs of the fields into the bright to brighten the fields in what looked like television snow. I stood in line for the ferris wheel with a boy named James who had hair like Elvis and smelled like his father's pig farm no matter how much he washed his face and hands and doused himself in cheap cologne. I didn't mind, but he would never believe me if I said that. He wasn't going to college in the fall, and he had this faraway look in his eyes when I offered him a bite of the apple. He didn't want to open his mouth because he had crooked, yellow teeth. Poor kid. I didn't care about that. I just wanted someone to keep me company. That's all I wanted. He took a small bite. He said the apple was too hot for him. We waited in line at the ferris wheel.

"James Marshall," I said. "I have known you all the days of my life. Jesus fucking Christ, James, I've known you forever. What are you going to do about it?"

"We're next in line." He gave the tickets for the ride. We sat down in the swinging carriage.

"It reminds me of the sun," I said.

"Why's that?"

"The chariot of the sun, you know. How it rises and it sets. And the god of the sun rides in the chariot. That's what it's like. All the lights."

He smiled and looked away. "You can see the town from here. All of it."

We spun down together, and I thought it would be all right if he kissed me once - just once - but I wouldn't want more than that. I had known him all my life. I knew everything strange there was to know about him - his first girlfriend's last name that he knocked-up one county over and she had had an abortion, the color of his swimming trunks when he was eight, and how he always carried a firetruck with him in elementary school because he wanted to be one when he grew up – a firetruck, literally. He loved the flashing lights and the size of them.

That's what I remember about him, anyway. I could do that with anybody in this town. Nothing changes here. It is the long summer between high school and college, and I knew I was leaving him behind for the city, and a new life. When he didn't kiss me, I pushed the rest of the candy apple into his mouth and ran off, laughing, from him.

Inside a tent, at last, I paid three dollars to see the escape artist. He was an old man, in a white tuxedo. His stage make-up couldn't smear away the lines of his face. He had hands like a gorilla's. He was tall and thin, with these giant hands. I think his hat was big on purpose, to make his head look smaller. He had a big head.

His hands were huge and strong, and I couldn't believe how he slipped the handcuffs off like toys. An off-duty park ranger in the audience tested the handcuffs, and they were real, and no one could get out of them if they were clamped down hard enough, but the escape artist got out of them like they were some kind of hologram every single time. Then, the escape artist was tied in ropes. He was lifted into the air by these ropes, with his hands in more handcuffs and locks and chains. The rope pulled him up into the air. His hat popped off his head. We all watched the hat fall. We missed it when he slipped out of the ropes and chains. His suit stayed in the air. It was magic.

We cheered for him. His make-up had smeared and the black edges of his lips had mussed up into a maudlin grin. His eyebrows had been wiped away entirely. He had on funny underwear, with red hearts, and suspenders over a white tank top. He acted surprised. He clowned embarrassment for a moment, before he threatened to tear off his clothes. We shouted for him to do it. We were a crowd that wanted our audience left naked on the stage, with nothing left to show us and no more tricks. He ripped off his clothes to reveal brightly-colored swimming shorts. We cheered for him, of course.

Of course, he brought out a water tank. Of course, we cheered when he climbed into it. We wanted to see him defy death one more time. The off-duty police officer bound him up in chains and locks and tied his feet together. They helped him up to the top of the staircase over the water. We cheered for him.

There was music playing. I remember there was music. Katchaturian, I think. Russian classical music. Romantic stuff. Piano music.

In went the escape artist, into the pool, with a big splash. He was underwater. He was bound up. He wriggled around like a water worm. Bubbles of air fled his nose for the surface.

He sank. He sank and sank. He was on the floor of the big, glass tank of water. He struggled.

We watched. We cocked our heads. We held our breath. He struggled more. More air left.

He stopped moving. He became very still. We gasped. Was it just a trick? No one from the carnival had rushed on-stage. No one was doing anything. It had to be a trick. This had to be the act, and he's going to jump up any second from the cage.

"Somebody..." a shout, but I don't know from whom, "Somebody do something!"

Oh, God, we watched him die! We stood there, like we were expecting him to escape.

His body limped in the water as if in formaldehyde, his make-up giving him that formaldehyde look the way it caked against his swollen skin. His eyes opened a little, but not all the way.

We didn't know what to do.

The curtain closed. The show was over. Everyone of us went home. No one said anything. The off-duty park ranger ran up to the stage to try and figure it out. I heard the sound of a splash, but I knew it was too late. The escape artist was dead.

In my room, that night, I stared at the ceiling and tried to forget what I had seen, but I couldn't forget. None of us could forget. We'd be telling this story for years, about the magician from the carnival that had drowned right before our eyes. At work, people asked me if I had been there, that day. I was selling them cigarettes. They asked me if I had heard about the man who had died - the escape artist. I said that I had been there, and I had seen it.

My mother never said anything. She sat in the piano room and sipped her tea and read a book. She was dwarfed by the instrument, and I had to crane my neck to get a good look at her. "Mom, want me to make dinner?" "Sure, hon. Anything you want." "Okay. I'm going to get pizza." "Got cash?" "My treat." "Save your money. Get a twenty from my purse. You'll be needing money in college."

I remember the things I found in her purse. First, there was a pack of gum. Second, there was a screwdriver. Third, there was a package of kleenex, mostly empty. Fourth, used kleenex. Fifth, her wallet. Sixth, a small photo album. You can tell a lot about a woman from what isn't in her purse: pens, pads of paper, tampons, a phone, a gun.

Twenty dollars, wrinkled up like a kleenex, slammed in between the receipts and coupons, slipped into my back pocket.

I had to go two blocks for the pizza. It was in a corner store where they kept a grill and a pizza oven in back, dwarfed by the cases of beer and snack foods and cleaning supplies for sale. Some people from the carnival were sitting around a table together. One man sat sideways so he could place his leg over the woman beside him. He leaned forward to blow cigarette smoke in her ear. Smoking inside was illegal. She laughed and smacked his hand. They kept ash in an empty beer bottle. The other two carnies were both men, and they huddled over pizza like someone might take it from them any second, devouring it like drinking in gulps.

I wanted to go over and tell them how sorry I was, but I didn't know what to say.

Then, the escape artist came out of the restroom. He was still damp, and he still had the remains of the paint on his damp skin. He sat down like it was the most normal thing in the world for him to sit down. He reached for a slice of pizza.

I was afraid to look, then. I stared at the people I knew in the kitchen, making pizza, taking phone orders, preparing to make the drive all over town with deliveries. I wanted to eavesdrop on what they were saying behind me, but they weren't saying anything.

I turned, and looked. I was rude and stared. A puddle was forming at his feet where his shoes were soaked through and leaking. He had a plain, white shirt on. His wiry arms were like white marble, oozing water.

The group of them - the carnies - got up to leave when I got my pizza. They went out a different door, and I assumed I was alone in the night.

Out the door of the pizza parlor, all the shop fronts were closed for the night. I had a block to go until I reached the street where I lived, the road where I had always, always lived.

Headlights came up from behind me. I looked over my shoulder to wave, but then I knew I didn't know who it was. I didn't know the truck, or who owned it. The carnies, I guess. It slowed down. A window came down. An arm waved at me. "Hey! You live around here?" I walked over. "You live here, right? You live here?"

"Yeah."

"Because we're lost."

"The highways only way outta town. North and south. It's back that way..."

I turned to point back towards the pizza parlor.

I don't remember anything after that.

4

There is an orchard somewhere in California \- pomegranates - and I'm in a blue dress below the pomegranate tree. The escape artist is here, all dry now. He's collecting the ripe fruits in a basket.

You awake?

"Oh... Hello."

Been sleepin' a while.

"Where am I?"

Here, bet you're hungry.

He hands me one of the fruits. It's small in his hands, but huge in mine. I almost drop it. I don't have any way of opening the pomegranate. I don't have my purse with me. I don't have anything.

I put the pomegranate down. I look at it. The fruit is purple and beautiful and it smells so dark. The orchard smells like darkness. The escape artist sits down, leans against the tree. He smashes the pomegranate to open it. The juice is all over his hands. He licks his hands. He hands the fruit to me. He puts his filthy hands behind his head and closes his eyes.

What else do I remember?

There was a space of time between the truck and the orchard, but how long, I can't say. "Can I use your phone?"

What? Don't be silly. No phones here. No need to call anyone.

My mother will come here, to the orchard. Everyone does. That's right. I just have to wait a while, and think about what I remember and it will all make sense.

The carnival trucks come for us. They've got places to go. There's a big, black van in their entourage. It's huge. It seats almost everyone. The escape artist helps me into the very back seat. I'm surrounded by people I don't know. "I'm sorry, but I don't know what's going on."

Relax. We're just going down the line. Big show, tonight.

People are trying to sleep in the van. They close their eyes and lean into each other and they breathe quietly. They fart in their sleep. One of them's snoring, but I can't tell who it is. The driver doesn't look old enough to be driving. He doesn't look back.

I look at the escape artist's face.

He's asleep, and he looks like he's dead. I'm looking out the window at all these trees and houses and buildings passing by, and I don't know what's real and what is only a color blurred into a shape by the moving car.

If I can just remember what happened, then I can find a way back home. This can't be real. Nothing ever changes for me.

I remember my mother made a plum cake, with cream cheese frosting for my birthday. It was a green color - kind of strange if I just looked at it - but it tasted good.

We were alone, in the kitchen. I had come home from school, and done homework at the kitchen table. Mom baked the cake while I worked. It smelled so good. When it was done, I got up and checked on it. Then, it was green and I kind of didn't want it, a little bit.

I sat back at the table. I did more homework. Then she came in with take-out - burgers and fries - and we sang happy birthday together. I probably shouldn't have been singing. No presents, just cake. It was enough.

The escape artist is looking at me funny.

What's your name, kid?

"Korey. Hey, what happened in the big tank. I thought you died. Everyone thought you died."

Yeah, it's just a trick.

"Mean trick. You really scared people."

It's good for us. The lights turn off. People go home. Good for them. See something, never thought they'd see.

"You die every night?"

Check my pulse if you want. I'm an artist. I only live for the stage.

They set up the rides and tents at the edge of town. The grass has to be mowed down before anybody could do anything. Men reap the yellow grass with scythes. I pluck flowers from their sweeping blows. No one asks me to do anything to help. Then, the tents blossom high and proud in gold and green and purple and red. The ferris wheel stands up on the supporting beams like an insect palace of flashing lights.

A kid sits on a bench at the gate and the turnstiles. He has a filthy face and a smile with missing teeth. He has to squint to see me because the sun is right behind me. Folks off work early wander the tents, smiling. Children chase each other around the tents. The boy at the gate, taking tickets, watches the other children playing like just watching was enough to be playing with them. He laughs when they laugh, claps when they clap. He looks wistfully at their backs when the children dash around a tent, out of sight. I have to snap my finger to get his attention. Oh, hey. You comin' in?

"Hola, muchacho. I'm comin' in."

He looked at me and frowned. What'd you call me?

"How much?"

He pointed at my hand.

That a flower?

"It's a chrysanthemum."

Pretty.

"You want it?"

No. Fifty cents gets you in. Unless you got one eye. Then, it's just a quarter. Pay by the eye. No discounts for blinkers.

I buy my ticket for fifty cents. I have some money left over from the pizza. The carnival tents inside the yard surround the ferris wheel. Folks meander among the tents. Farmers hear about the carnival and come in from the fields for the night. They wave at me from the ferris wheel, all the lights glowing like something from the television and people happy getting on and off. I tell myself it is too soon for me to ride the wheel. That's the sort of thing for the end of the night. First, I want to see the tents, have my fortune read, witness the freaks and tricks and dancers, and I want to find the escape artist again, wherever he is.

Carnival barkers wave their walking sticks and shout at us all. I stop in front of a picture of a monstrous creature – part tree, part man – hand-painted like something from my mother's childhood.

From Peru! From the dark, pagan tribes of wild negroes in Peru! A wooden idol - part man, part tree! Do you risk the curse of the devil!

Inside the hut, some kids huddle in the center of the tent. They don't look up at me. They stare at the curtain. I hear footsteps, and a heavy object getting placed in the center. A gramophone creaks to life with pagan drums, and the singsongs of men chanting strange languages. The barker from outside closes the doorway in with rope and jumps up to the stage. Ladies... And... Gentlemen! Ladies... And... Gentlemen! All the way from Peru, deepest, darkest Peru, I have a wonder of wonders to show to you today! Part man, part tree, and all monster! A Christian Missionary deep in the jungles of Peru discovered a native tribe worshipping this idol like a god. Recovered from the tribe, the whispering of this dangerous, devil drove the Missionary mad on the voyage back to civilization and science. They say his whispers can steal your very soul!

The curtain pulls back. The idol holds still, posing like an Egyptian Mummy. His hair is wrapped with twigs and branches. His skin is jagged as strips of bark. His naked torso disappears into the stump of a tree. He looks like something painted in a children's book. He has an Indian face. He has a stern expression, closed mouth and eyes.

The barker gestures with a cane at the wooden idol. Behold the sleeping face of horror! Whosoever hears his rasping whisper will lose his mind.

"Hey!" One of the kids in the audience raises his hands.

Whomsoever he touches becomes infected with the darkness. His skin turns a deep greenish-brown. His tongue turns black.

"Hey, fellow!"

What is it kid?

"He's fake! Look at him."

The kids boo and hiss.

The idol, like a cigar-store Indian, did not move a muscle in his defense. The kids threw bits of popcorn at the still idol. Hold it, now! Hold it, now! Just... You there, lady! What do you think? Think he's real? Want to inspect him?

I shake my head.

Come on, lady, for the kids!

"I want to inspect him! Why can't I inspect him? 'Cause he's fake, that's why!"

For the kids, lady...

"I'll inspect him," I say. "I'm an expert at plants and trees."

I walk up to the stage. I investigate his skin up close. Bark is glued in sheets to a man painted with dark brown greasepaint. The idol opens his eyes. He winks at me.

"Oh, my... He's real! I think I hear him whispering something..."

Get out of there lady! He'll drive you mad!

"I think I am feeling a little... Odd."

I place the Chrysanthemum behind the wooden idol's ear. I recognize him, now - the escape artist - an old man with skin wrinkled like tree bark. He is gaunt enough to be a tree, with thick, ropy palms like five-fingered monkey wrenches.

"You're lying, lady! He's fake! He's fake as Santa Claus!"

The barker tries to calm the kids. He tries to calm them down. I turn back to the escape artist.

"He's real." I lean in close. I smell the real him, underneath his costume. His real smell. It's a sweet rot, like diabetes.

"I'm mad! I've gone mad!"

I press my lips into his with my eyes wide open. His eyes open in surprise. They are dark brown, and warm like summer water. He has crow's feet like a grandfather. He reeks of brillo and greasepaint and his own smell underneath.

The children scream.

His hands wrap around my shoulders. His legs crackle free. He hefts me up, over a shoulder. I laugh. I wave at the children, as I'm carried away. Off-stage, he puts me down behind the tent.

Thanks.

"Are you really from Peru?"

He chuckles. He shakes his head.

"Where are you from?"

Los Angeles.

"What's it like in Los Angeles?"

Oh... Like here, just... bigger. More people. Everywhere is the same, really.

"I don't believe that."

The old magician smiles. He pulls out a handkerchief and wipes off the places on my skin where his greasepaint has smeared into mine.

I pull away. "Don't."

I take the handkerchief from him. I use it, myself. He watches me using it. He says nothing.

"What?"

You know what? Keep it. I think you're just beautiful, kid. You going home, tonight?

"I guess..."

Well, don't stay too long. Good having a pretty face around.

He walks back into the tent where he performed.

I buy a candy apple. I ride the ferris wheel. I let a boy throw a baseball at milk jugs to try to win me a prize; he fails but I bend over to kiss his cheek anyway. I leave a small smear of brown greasepaint behind. He takes me to the freak show tents. We see a man with claws for hands, and a woman with a beard. We see a lizard man, and dancing midgets. The boy is too shy to hold my hand. He is so young. He slips away to buy us sodas, but I leave him in the dark, alone. He is just a boy, and I' tired. I was ready to go home and sleep and face the disapproving morning after, where my mother would move gracelessly through the kitchen, collecting dust with the hem of her house dress and abandoning cups of tea all over the house because she won't talk about what happened.

I climbed back into the truck and tried to get some sleep while the carnival played on, late into the night. In the morning, they'd have it all packed up, and move down the line.

And I'll go home when the carnival makes their way back to my town.

5

I shouldn't tell anyone this secret, because it doesn't change anything.

I remember exactly what happened when the truck took me away. The escape artist was in the truck. He held out his hand. He said that he knew my mother way back, and he had seen me back when they were still together, but I was so young that I had forgotten. He hadn't forgotten me. I didn't remember him at all, but he said that I was real young when my mother was done with him. He said that he came to this town all the time because he wanted to see my mom and me.

"Why?"

Thing is, I've been trying to... Jesus, this ain't easy.

"What?"

Get in, kid.

"No."

Just get in the fucking truck, okay?

The door opened. He reached out a hand to mine. He pulled me into the truck. There were two men in the truck with him. They held me down. They drove me away to the orchard.

I dropped the pizza. I remember that I dropped the pizza. I remember thinking how I had just ruined dinner because I dropped the pizza. "Where are you taking me?"

Would you be quiet, kid? Would you just be quiet?

Boys I knew my whole life found me in a pomegranate orchard, like that. My mother came for me. She leaned over me. She was crying so loud that birds flew away. Jesus fucking Christ, what's the point of all that shouting? When it was happening it hurt for a while - it really hurt there for a while - but then it passed and I was alone below the pomegranate trees. The escape artist was there, with me. I was hungry. He held two halves of a pomegranate, torn open in his strong hands from cracking it on the tree. He held them up with juice all over his hands. The juice ran through his fingers like purple blood.

Then, I got in the new truck with him, and we drove away together. Instead of college, I spent my long autumn and winters at the carnival until the summer.

I like it here, I think. I'm meeting new people. I'm seeing new places. We'll turn our way home, soon enough.

When we do, I'll walk back through the fields to my home in the dark. I'll climb the fence, and my mother'll be asleep in her chair. I'll put a blanket over her. I'll take her tea cup from the piano to the kitchen sink, and I'll wash any dishes I find there.

I'll go upstairs. I'll look out the window at the town and nothing will have changed while I was gone. Then, I'll close the blinds, and go back downstairs. I'll peel the dress off my back in the dark. I'll put on my night gown and crawl into the piano, like a coffin. I'll sleep poised upon the strings. This will mute the piano.

In the morning, we'll have bacon and toast and probably a grapefruit half - one half for each of us - and it'll be just like it was, like it always will be.

Nothing changes here.

2: Ariadne After Theseus

Is there, then, no Beyond?

Is this our goal?

Is this our goal?

-from Ariadne on Naxos, an opera by Richard Strauss

Everyone always wants to know about when we were young and a little famous, and it's really the most boring part of my life.

My father is dead. The dashing young man is famous somewhere else. I don't know where. I don't keep up with him. He left me because we were young, and confused, and because we knew – both of us knew – that what I wanted wasn't him and what he wanted wasn't me, and leaving me on an island was better than trapping me in a new palace labyrinth in some rich house in Athens. He was doing me a favor. Really, we both had just wanted away from where we were, and running away together had been the natural way to do it at the time. I moved on long ago. I wouldn't even call him my great love. I wouldn't even call him my pretty great love. Honestly, we never even made love. I've never been with a man.

You are probably about to be my great love. Look at you, you. You're adorable. I mean it. You're as delicious as hot chocolate in winter. You're a goddess, to me.

Anyway, that's all there is to know about that boy. Let's talk about something else from my many travels.

Do you see this weird, squishy thing? It's a box and it's alive, and I think it's lonely.

I bought the box in my favorite curio shop, and the owner, whom I was supposed to call Hecate, told me it was a Living Box and all it did was sit there, waiting. It had a fleshy, squishy look to it - all pink and a little fuzzy like a square peach. It felt like a sausage patty with a heartbeat in my palm. I felt its tiny heartbeat. I watched the spidery blue veins beneath its skin pumping blood.

I filled this lonely box with small things. Here is a large, brass button I stole off a former lover's jacket imprinted with a cheerful anchor that always made me melancholy. (Minnie lost it in my car, and I had lied to her for weeks before the end came that I had looked for it beneath the passenger seat. I never looked until I was looking for a piece of her because she wouldn't return my calls. Did I ever tell you about Minerva? I will. I promise. And soon.) There was a fossil seashell collected from the side of the Anthropology building where I had spent days tugging loose my prize from the limestone wall beside my desk. I've kept that with me for years. I have no idea where my diploma went to, but I kept the seashell. (I haven't been to the ocean since I was a child. We should go, you and me. We should go before we forget about what we remember.) Finally, a snow globe from childhood assured me that Rock City was awash in holiday cheer and small bits of flowing white plastic.

No matter where I put my living box, when the lid to my box was closed, my box looked lonely. I gave up trying to put my box somewhere happy. I placed it on a high shelf between a ship-in-a-bottle that my father had given me and a picture of myself from when I was young.

This, too, just made me sad. My father has been dead for years, and my smiling girl's face has new marks in my canvas. I will never have a father again. I will never be so beautiful again.

Minerva - Minnie - would have said I was being superstitious about the box – which isn't exactly what I was being, but she was not one to parse details like superstition and taking something too seriously.

Minnie was never superstitious. She was my last serious girlfriend. She was a mechanical engineer. She folded her clothes, and ironed them, and even used a little deodorant-stick-like-thingy to take out tea stains in white blouses. I couldn't imagine a life more complex than pulling the clothes straight from the dryer – hot, hot, hot – and throwing them on slightly damp, and running to work at my computer in the bedroom. I never knew what to do about stains. Sometimes, in the night, I resorted to emergency club soda and it either worked or it didn't.

Minnie called me reckless. I thought that she was telling me I was beautiful and daring when she was calling me reckless, because that's what that word meant to me.

The day Minerva left might be the last day I ever vacuumed in that apartment.

I miss her. Of course I do. I miss all my lost lovers – even that boy. I'll miss you when you leave me for a younger girl, with bright eyes. I'll be so jealous I'll dream of pouring acid on her face in her sleep, or poisoning her with black magic from Jennifer's Curio Shop.

I've never poisoned anyone with black magic. I poured some acid on a girl's hand once, in high school science, but that was just on her hand, and it was probably an accident.

Minnie, believe it or not, was the one who showed me the curio shop, where I got that lonely little Living Box.

Magical omens and mystic portents: the thunder was terrible that day, but it hadn't rained at all. The boiling clouds tumbled all over each other, mustering up the courage to fight the ground. Styrofoam packing and dead leaves and papers danced in a windy bacchanal.

Minnie and I were riding bicycles on a Sunday morning, to a café, trying to beat the weather, because we thought it would rain any second. When we got to the café, we sat in the window. We sipped lattes and read the gigantic newspaper that spilled all over our little table like a cat on a toy piano.

Minnie looked up from the newspaper.

She said, I have a gift for you.

Gimme! I held out my hand.

She took my hand in hers, and lifted it to her lips for a quick kiss. I'm going to take you somewhere, she said.

Where?

You'll see, as long as it doesn't start to rain. If it rains, we'll just stop wherever we are and wait for it to stop raining.

We took off immediately. We raced up a hill, and I won, and she shouted at me to turn the corner on 14th. I asked her which direction, but she couldn't hear me shouting, and I couldn't hear her at all anymore with all that wind.

I turned left. I got as far ahead as I could. I had guessed correctly. I rode as fast as I could over bumps and rough blacktop. Dense city buildings ended at a railroad bridge with brown grass taller than trees growing where a sidewalk should have been. The grasses were bowing supplicants to the winds. Minnie called out to my back.

I laughed back at her, though she didn't hear me. Catch me!

I passed into a neighborhood of houses, some converted to businesses and law offices, some not, where older folks sat on porches and watched the sunrise from between the giant downtown streets.

Minnie shouted at me.

I turned my head long enough to see that she had stopped at one of the little businesses, there. She was waving at me and shouting. I skidded to a halt. I turned my tires back to her.

Ariadne, what are you doing? Get over here!

Fortunes Told

Palm Readings

Tarot Cards

Curios Galore

Minerva's gift to me was a palm reading. I would have preferred Tarot Cards, because they look so beautiful and you never know which one will flip over to look back at you. Palms never change. They get older and older, but the lifeline never shrinks like you think it should.

See, Minnie was the one that took me there. She never thought it would be dangerous because she wasn't reckless like me. To her, it was just a distraction on a Sunday afternoon, like a bad movie or a good book with tea. She gets palm readings. Women like her want the same things said in a reading, over and over, like going to church.

The gypsy lady that read fortunes - her name was Hecate the first time we met, and Jennifer after I had been there a few times, but I was supposed to call her Hecate if anyone else was there – dressed like a hippy and had long, black hair. Her father was from the wooded mountains of Lebanon, and her mother was probably mostly Irish. She had black hair, and it curled naturally and tumbled all over her body like a gown.

Every bookshelf had strange things for sale: eye of newt and bat's blood and gross, squishy things in jars and vials right inside the door: gator skulls and the fossilized teeth of dinosaurs under glass and books and gorgeous candles and strange oils and books, books, books all old and leathery and covered in dust and smothered in dust, and Jennifer dusted them all the time, but dusting never worked.

When she read palms, she sat on a sofa and asked her visitor to sit next to her, and it's like holding hands with a lover, and she pretended to seduce everyone a little.

Jennifer told me that she lost her virginity to the old man that taught her to read palms. I believed it.

The man was her father's cousin, and he had come over from the mountains of Lebanon to sweep floors in a train station. The man had slept on the couch for months, and drank Ouzo with Jennifer's father. He called the beautiful teen Hecate instead of Jennifer, and he begged her for help with his sputtering English. One night, he read her palm on the couch. Six days later, he was thrown from the house with all his belongings by her angry father.

I went back again for another reading, and another.

Hecate turned the card over – Jennifer really, but she was playing gypsy, so I'll call her

Hecate. Five of clubs. She raised an eyebrow. I touched the card with my painted fingernail. I asked her if she had ever made love with a woman.

She sipped her tea. She turned another card. Queen of Swords. No, she said.

I asked her if the cards had ever lied to her.

She shrugged. If they are wrong, people do not come back to tell me. If the cards lie, I lose customers. I do not know. If the cards are right, people come back and tell me that I am right. Isn't that how it always is?

I guess that makes sense.

No, don't misunderstand me. I'm not just talking about gypsies and fortunetellers and witches. I'm talking about love. We know only from the ones that stay. We do not know what it is that makes people leave us, because they do not return to speak of it. Unless, of course, there is an accident. Two people meet on a train, and must sit next to each other long after the passion has burned down, and now they are forced to spend hours either speaking to each other, or pretending to be strangers – pretending to read.

Nobody takes the train, anymore, you know. Now it's airplanes or cars.

Don't argue with me. I'm the gypsy, here, not you.

Sorry, Hecate. It's a wonderful fortune. I wish you were a lesbian so we could have a future together.

I do not see that future in the cards, either.

Minnie would hate it, too.

Jennifer tapped the Queen of Swords. She shook her head, sadly, but she said nothing.

I bought windchimes that called the butterflies to my window. I woke up each morning, and every breezy day, I could reach my hand out the door and let the tiny, gorgeous creatures dip their tongues into my fingernail polish and try to drink. (I always wear very colorful fingernail polish, you know. My favorite color is Everything.)

I bought that painting over there that moves when no one's looking at it. The tree gently blows in the winds and shepherds watched the flock of sheep that nibble in an Alpine valley on a beautiful spring day. When I bought it, I liked to blink at it, to watch the clouds roll in and out. Eventually, the painting weirded Minnie out too much, and she made me move it in front of a mirror where the painting holds forever still, looking upon itself.

What else did I buy? Nothing gross. I liked the beautiful things, like Jennifer. I did not like the dangerous things Hecate sold to the mean women who sought revenge.

Candles, I remember. I bought lots and lots of candles. They never really seemed to do anything – Jennifer told me they were just a cheap gimmick - but the scented ones smelled so nice and candlelight was so romantic.

Minnie found the blackened wicks and cut them off and waved them at me. You didn't leave this untended, did you?

I didn't, Minnie.

Because I know how you can be.

A candle isn't like the oven, you know.

I'm just saying, I know how you can be sometimes, when the windchimes are ringing and all you want to do is chase butterflies...

Just because one person - not me - one time, burned down your house...

And the butterflies are all over the bathroom! How did they get into the bathroom?

I thought it would be nice. We could take a bath together. Light some candles. We'll angle the painting away from the mirror and make love with the butterflies and candles. We'll make love in magic. It will be magical.

Oh, Ari, what am I supposed to do with you?

Run the hot water. I'll get matches for the candles.

No candles. Butterflies are more than enough.

But I like candles.

I won't be able to relax with open flames all over the place.

Minnie showed me credit card statements. She begged me to spend less. I had called a telephone psychic. I had spent three hours discussing my love life with a woman that was probably a fake. I had gone to a different reader of fortunes, wondering if my loves were all doomed. I sent in a prayer pledge to an Evangelist to beg for his help keeping my lover forever and ever.

Minnie was very upset. She asked me to be reasonable. I asked her if she loved me.

Of course I do, Ari! But, please...

No 'buts'!

Ariadne...

They all think you're going to leave me, you know. Every single one of them. Except the televangelist. But, I know he's wrong, because he's a televangelist, and I had hoped he would tell me you would leave me, so I could believe you must be staying.

I'm not going to leave you, she said.

Jennifer has amazing teas that do magic. I want to try them all. I want to see if I can find a different future, or conjure something new that way.

We can't afford all this nonsense. If you keep trying to see the future...

I'm not trying to see the future. I'm trying to find a future with the woman I love. They all keep telling me that you're going to leave me, and I hate that! I hate that people leave me!

I'm not leaving you, Ari! I love you! Buy the damn tea. I don't care. Just don't blame me if you turn purple or turn into a man. Tea wears off, you know. Everybody tries it once, and it wears off! It's just magic! It's a bunch of stupid tricks!

I bought tea from Jennifer. I told her that I didn't want to know what they were supposed to do. I wanted to do a blind study of the effects.

I spent the next few weeks experimenting with the magic teas.

My hair turned blond.

My heartbeat slowed to a crawl, and I felt like I was some kind of undead monster with barely a heartbeat, and I was so cold.

I won the lottery – just five bucks in a scratch-off – and I walked around with five dollars in my pocket and all these men kept hitting on me and asking about the lottery. My boobs got bigger. Then, they got smaller. Then, they returned to normal. The last teas made me sleep for days as if I was dead. I was wandering, in a dream, through a maze of paintings that moved when I didn't look upon them.

Once I found the next painting, I fell into it and out of the last in the dream.

And my lovers were all in the paintings.

First there was the boy, standing in my father's house, looking back at me like he pitied me for being trapped there. (No, I don't hate him. He did fine by me, actually. Don't believe the tabloids, okay? Anyway, this isn't his story. I've had a long life, since. The boy and I were together for a while, and we didn't have a lot of options back then, and then we were not together and I didn't know myself any better at the time.) After I escaped his painting for another, the girl with the acid burn on her hand clutched her hand in a corner and every time I looked, more tears had fallen, filling the painting with water enough to drown me if I didn't escape in time. The next painting was a woman walking down the street, with the sun pouring over her and a smile on her face that burned my skin.

So many lovers.

I came to Minerva, and we were sitting in cars at a red light, waiting for it to change, making moon eyes at each other. The next painting was hanging from my rear-view mirror, and it was so small I could barely make it out, because it was such a small thing we did together. I moved on to the next painting, to women I hadn't met, yet, and then the next and next.

I saw every woman I have ever loved – whether we had made love or not – and every woman that I would ever love. I saw my mother's face. I saw Jennifer. I saw your face. I saw every woman in the whole world, and I loved all of them, and they all loved me as long as I kept them from moving by staring hard. Deeper and deeper into the painted heart of this maze of glowing oils, I found, at last, a room as black as a catacomb, all painted stones like oil fungus and pastel smoke. In the center of this terrible room, my doomed brother, the minotaur sat on his throne with sallow skin and small horns. He was a weak thing. He was draped in fine robes that hid his deformed body. His sunken eyes looked at me like they were already tired of looking at me. I knew he was my minotaur and not a devil, because he looked like my father, and because he had a tail that ended in a paintbrush. The tail whisked side to side, painting the flickering shadows of the catacomb when I wasn't looking to hold him still. I asked the minotaur what I was supposed to do now. He didn't move when I looked at him. He barely moved at all. He didn't say a word.

This was – I realized – the last painting. I walked straight up to the monster with my eyes wide open. (Minnie told me later, I was sitting up in bed, at last, and my eyes were wide open, but I was still in a hazy trance from the tea, and she watched to see if I would try to sleepwalk.)

I tore at his canvas skin with my fingernails. The paint was still wet. It got all over my nails, all over my body. I scraped and scraped it all away until the monster was gone, and a blank canvas looked back at me.

Then, I woke up. I had – apparently – been shaking the windchimes to call the butterflies in through an open window. Then, I had killed them, and smeared their guts and wings all over the white walls.

Minnie was there, with a bucket of soap in one hand and a large sponge in the other.

Are you awake, or are you still in a trance?

I think I'm awake. How long was I asleep?

Too long. Do you want some coffee? I can make you some coffee.

I'd love some. No more tea for a while.

Have you ever dated an addict?

Yes. Have you?

Not until now. You're addicted to magic.

I'm not addicted to magic, I said, I'm addicted to my quest for your love.

You're either addicted to magic, or you are in love with Hecate.

Her real name is Jennifer, and don't be foolish.

I love you, Ariadne. I wish I had never shown you that silly store. Then, as an afterthought – almost under her breath, but loud enough that she could hear it, and use it to hurt me – If you truly loved me, you wouldn't obsess over leaving me. It's like you're looking for an excuse.

I would never do that.

Of course I was in love with Jennifer, who called herself Hecate. But I was also still in love with Minnie terribly, and I didn't want to hurt Minnie.

We spent the rest of the night in silence.

I held Minnie in my arms. She held me. We shrank away from each other.

In the morning, we drove to the store to return the teas, the wind chimes, and the moving painting. Hecate frowned at us. No refunds, she said.

Throw them in the trash, then, said Minnie. I don't care what you fucking do with them.

Minnie tossed the box onto the couch where palms were read. She stormed away, back to the car. A cool wind caught her coat, and she hurriedly tugged her jacket around her, stumbling at the hole where she had lost the button.

I looked out the window at the woman I loved and she was driving away from me, in her car. I had no way home.

You shouldn't have been mixing teas, said Hecate. Some of them make enemies of lovers and lovers of enemies. Who knows what spell you cast upon your apartment.

Do you have a tea that will make her love me again?

Of course I do, but what's the point? When it wears off, she'll still be mad at you.

This was when I noticed the strange, fleshy, living box next to the skulls and vials of blood. I plucked it from the shelf. I marveled at it, how it felt alive in my palm. I paid cash for the box – it was cheap because life is always cheap – and I put it in my box of non-refundable curios.

Minnie had taken the car, so I had to walk home, carrying my box, and wondering if I should be mad at Minnie that she had driven off in the car without me.

I had bought the box and kept my magic things as my own petty revenge.

Every time the windchimes clanged or bumped, butterflies chased the sound. A trail of butterflies followed me all the way home. I felt sorry for them. They ought to have been looking for love. Time was too short for them to follow me. I decided I was definitely going to stop using windchimes.

I liked the painting, though. I wondered what had happened to the canvas since it had been placed in the box and out of sight. I wondered if night had fallen among the sheep, and wolves circled the shepherds with bared teeth. I wondered if it was snowing.

I decided, instead, that I'd hide the box of my magical things in the trunk of my car. I'd go upstairs and insist upon a foot rub, because she owed me one after making me walk home like that. I'd swear off magic for a while, just for her, and instead try to figure out how to make her late for work every morning with lovemaking, just for fun.

And I went upstairs to the apartment. I opened the door. I called out her name.

And she was gone, with her clothes, and her computer, and her books.

She was gone. No note, no word, nothing at all.

I was sad for a long time. I cried and clutched at the empty space in the bed. I brought women home from bars that weren't that pretty, or weren't that nice, or they smelled funny. And when they were gone, I washed the bedroom and scrubbed the couch, because I was disgusted that I had brought those awful bar women into my apartment, where Minnie and I had been in love.

I dug through my car, searching for the lost button that I knew had to be in there, somewhere. I clutched it as if it were magic. I wept and made a wish with all my heart.

But it wasn't magic, and I put the button inside the Living Box, and hid it on a top shelf and tried to imagine a world where people don't always end up alone.

Then, I moved out of the apartment.

Then, I met you.

I don't need a gypsy to tell me what will happen to us someday, my beautiful one. I don't want you to argue with me about it, either. I was raised above the labyrinth and abandoned on an island all alone. I drank the tea. I stared the minotaur in his sallow face. I tore his painted skin to pieces with my own fingernails. Everyone faces life and death alone - truly alone.

When I am old, I will sit in a retirement home alone, and I will watch the news and wonder at the world outside my little room, and I will die alone.

I've already shown you the Living Box. I don't want to show it to you again, because it is so lonely, and it is too much of me.

I can show you the wind chimes, if you like, but it always makes me sad to bring butterflies here when I think about how little time they have before they fall like autumn leaves.

The painting, though, is up in my bedroom. I'll have to show it to you.

(Maybe this is a ploy to take you to my bedroom. Will you let me use my little ploy, I wonder?)

In the painting, the sheep have grown up, given birth to lambs, died. The shepherds are all married off and old. Their grandsons guard a flock of lambs, while the old grandfathers hide in the mountains. If you look real close, you can see their geriatric lovemaking in the firelight.

They're so small, I know, but if you get a magnifying glass, you can study them carefully. If you blink fast enough, you can even watch them moving a little bit. They seem happy. I wonder where they go when they die. I wonder if they have souls. But, I wonder the same thing about all of us.

I talk too much. I'm sorry. Will you stay with me, tonight, beautiful one? Will you love me for a while?

Will you love me forever?

Will I love you?

~~~

3: Nemean Lion

...And when his host would have offered a victim in sacrifice, Hercules told him to wait for thirty days, and then, if he had returned safe from the hunt, to sacrifice to Saviour Zeus, but if he were dead, to sacrifice to him as a hero.

-Apollodorus' Library

I was his first labor for a reason.

The man was neither strong nor beautiful, as he should be if he were truly a god's blessed son. He was ugly and short, with weak arms, and ragged teeth. He was naked. He was either a starving beggar, or an ascetic. He bowed before me. He warned me that he was the son of a God, and if I did not do as I was told he would destroy me. He told me that I was to leave my canyon forever. I was to flee to the south and farther.

I roared with laughter. I devoured the little man, flesh and blood and bone. For days after, I had terrible headaches, like someone screaming in my ear all the time. My insides ached like they were being burned in fires. I sprouted a mane as if I were a man, and then I could barely move with such high fever. I burned down below where something cancerous grew out of my flesh.

I vomited anything I tried to eat. I could outrun nothing, so all I could eat was grass and gravel. I was dying from the inside. I crawled down from the mountain, scraping my impenetrable fur along the stones. I moaned for a wise woman to ease my pains.

Hera was there, waiting for me. She called me by a name I had never known.

Heracles...

The transformation fulfilled upon my new name. I rose up to two legs. I had hands strong as steel and a face in my mouth with ragged, strong teeth.

I had eaten the divine, yet the divine had eaten me.

Heracles, she had said. Bastard son of my husband, once, but my son and my glory, now.

Slayer of the Nemean Lion, reborn to my will.

I fought back. I roared when I could. I struggled against my new self. I watched through my own eyes while I became something else, until even that sight failed me, and I was long dead. My body lived on, in its way.

All that was done after my destruction - all that was saved – was born of a young god wrestling with me to be born: monster and hero in one flesh.

I watch through my own eyes, but it is not my sight that I see. I watch and roar somewhere only I can hear.

~~~

4: Daphne

So flew the god and the virgin- he on the wings of love, and she on those of fear. The pursuer is the more rapid, however, and gains upon her, and his panting breath blows upon her hair. Her strength begins to fail, and, ready to sink, she calls upon her father, the river god: "Help me, Peneus! Open the earth to enclose me, or change my form, which has brought me into this danger!"

-from Bullfinch's Mythology

The first time your car was stolen, you were sleeping in the backseat in a pile of all your belongings. The thief didn't know. He didn't bother to check the back seat. He popped the lock and hotwired the car. The thief drove your car to the 24-hour grocery. When he left, to go to the store, he left the engine on. You were quick to take back the front seat and steal your own car back. Driving away, you saw him in line, buying a quart of milk. It was 3 AM, and none of the buses were running. You imagined him, with a baby that needed milk at 3 AM, and you couldn't bring yourself to call the police on him.

At least he had somewhere to go. You had walked out on someone, after two years. You wanted to stay in the city, even if it meant sleeping in your car a few nights. If you went anywhere else, he'd find you – at your mother's house, or a friend's. He'd never find you in your car, deep in the heart of the city. You had nowhere to go, at the time, and you couldn't hate the man who stole your car while you were sleeping in it because he had somewhere to go, for milk, with milk.

The second time your car was stolen, you wandered up and down the shopping complex parking lot until a security guard let you watch some suspicious activity on the security cameras. A woman led her toddler up to the car, and made him wait while she popped open your car door. She put her kid in the back seat, and her purchases in the back seat. She had stolen your car with her kid right there with her. If you could find her, you'd grab her and shake her and shout at her - Why would you do that? Why? Right in front of your child! But you know, people like that, you can't reason with them. You can't reason with their kids, either. You can pick your battles, but you cannot pick your family. The cops found your car under an overpass and said they'd look into it. They'd let you know if anything happened. You had been in the city long enough to know that nothing would happen.

You remember, that time, the cab driver who you called cursing in a foreign language because he had to fit a television into the back of his cab. You watched him struggling. He was from Ethiopia and he was tall and strong with a sharp crease on his jeans. You felt awful, and said to him that maybe you should return the television for a full refund because maybe you couldn't afford it now that your car was missing. He rested the heavy television against the bumper of the car, and looked at you intently. This is no way to treat me unless you were my wife, he said. He forced himself into a smile. Come, he said. The fare will run.

You touched the cab drivers back and paid him five dollars at the counter where a bored clerk said you could only get store credit. The cab driver cursed you, the store, and the television, and argued with the Indian man in charge of management in French until a refund appeared. It was like they were magicians, dueling somatic French phrases. You tipped the cab driver twenty dollars and kissed his cheek. He was your hero. In the cab, he talked about how the city was a beautiful place compared to his home country. He had a rosary dangling from his window. He talked about how he had seen a boy carrying a rifle shoot a woman in the face on the street, back in his homeland.

The third time your car was stolen, you were out late at a bar and coming back from the bar alone. You saw them. They had popped your lock and had begun to steal the loose change from your cupholder along with anything they could find in the dashboard or under the seats. They were dressed for clubbing. The girl that was their ringleader had a red striped dress and high heels you couldn't afford. When you ran over to them, they looked at you all terrified. Two of the kids ran for it. They had flat-soled shoes on.

The ringleader didn't have athletic shoes. She jumped into the car, in her heels, and locked the door. It took her almost half a minute to get the car started with her bare hands and whatever she had in her little clubbing purse. She kept the door locked. You pounded on the glass and shouted. Just go! Just get out! Just leave! I'll let you walk away! I won't call the cops on you!

She didn't listen. She got your car started. She drove out about a quarter of a mile before she crashed it into a tree. The cops told you about it, later, in serious tones. She wasn't wearing her seatbelt, and she had flown through the windshield, into the tree, at 65 miles per hour.

The car, stolen three times, was finally totaled. Even if it hadn't been totaled, you couldn't imagine driving it after someone's brains had been splattered everywhere.

You got a deal on a used car, considered yourself lucky.

The fourth time your car was stolen, you were at work, working overtime to pay off your used car. A drug addict had slipped into the office parking garage and run off with your new car. You saw your new car only one more time after you parked it, and that was on the security cameras next to the chief of security, who pointed it out to you - how the man had slipped in behind a sleeping security guard, and chosen your car out of all the cars, even though it wasn't the nicest car or the fastest car or the easiest car to steal. Bad luck, he guesses. You had parked in the spot that was most hidden from the sleeping guard. The sleeping guard got fired. It didn't bring back your new car, and you didn't want him to be fired. You felt like it was your fault, that your cars get stolen and that it wouldn't have mattered if the guard had been awake or not, because your cars get stolen.

That car's gone, now. You'll never see it again.

You buy a cheap car, next. You let trash pile up in the back seat, hoping that no one would steal the nasty, cheap car. After a few months of security in your filthy car, you were driving home from work late at night, and you saw someone walking down an empty highway, and you pulled over, you asked him – he was handsome, and he was wearing a nice suit – if his car had been stolen. He laughed, and confessed it had been stolen, along with his wallet. You offered him a ride. He peered into your car for a moment – your dirty car, that smelled like take-out wrappers. He looked back with a blank smile. He said he'd be all right. He was going to be fine as soon as he found a phone. He waved good-bye and kept walking. He was sure.

You drove away. You watched him from the rear view until the road bent and traffic piled up and there was nothing you could do. He had seen you, imagined a filthy apartment, dirty children, him far in the future, lying in a mess in his old man diaper and you not helping him with it and him getting a painful rash and his grandchildren all have painful diaper rashes. He had looked in your car and saw a future of food wrappers. You remembered sleeping in a pile in the back seat of a car, once, and how it felt to you exactly like confessing you slept in your car when he looked back there – like maybe he thought you slept there.

And, anyway, what if your mother ever came to visit again? She'd stop what she was doing and immediately clean the car. Then, you'd have to drive her to the store and she'd be mad at you for being such a mess. She had failed as a mother. She'd say Look at all those criminals walking around with grocery carts, dirty and sleeping on the street. I remember a time when children played there, and ate ice cream with their friends. This used to be a wonderful place for a family. And it would all be a secret code for how come your car is so dirty? What did she do wrong to you as a child to make you grow up into that person with the trashy car.

The city has changed - gotten harder - like it used to be a cute kid and now it's a reckless teenager stealing cars and fornicating before marriage and listening to angry music. You've changed, she'd say, in her way. You'd tell her how you came to the city because, you see, a man, and when that was over but he didn't know it was over and he was shouting and waving his fists over his head you got in your car and then you were asleep in the back seat of your car, with everything you owned; when a stranger stole your car, with you in the backseat, and drove to the store for some milk, you swore to yourself that you wouldn't be weak again, like you used to be, but even though you'd say that was when you made your personal discovery it had happened gradually, over months and months of thought and time without a man chasing after you. You didn't swear that to yourself until you were telling the story to your imaginary mother during her imaginary visit much later on. It was true, though, that you swore to yourself not to be weak.

You can't afford a new car, and you can't imagine what would happen if your car was stolen again.

That night, you went to a dark parking lot, in a bad part of town. You turned off your lights. You climbed into the backseat, and hid under a blanket. You had a knife and a can of mace with you, there. You waited for someone to come and steal your car.

You fell asleep in the back seat, under your blanket, and dreamt of how things used to be. When you woke up, you were alone in the parking lot, in piles of food wrappers and trash you had put back there to keep your car from getting stolen. Your whole body ached. The knife was missing somewhere under the seat, and you didn't know where the mace went in the trash, but you could smell it all over your shirt.

You were lucky to get home in time to shower, and change, and get to work on time.

You tried again that night, and again the next and the next.

A man came. He opened your locked door like magic. He smelled like sandpaper and bleach. You smelled him before you saw his face. When you saw his face, he startled at you, in the back seat. He looked like the kind of man you'd meet at a backyard barbecue, with a ball cap and clothes dirty from painting the fence. If he wasn't stealing your car, you'd think he was the kind of salt-of-the-earth blue collar guy you see on buses giving up his seat for old women. Maybe that's who is in the daylight.

Relax. You can have the fucking car. Before you take it, I want you to teach me something.

What the fuck are you doing sleeping there?

Seriously, I just want you to teach me how to steal a car. I don't care if you take this one.

What the fuck are you talking about? Who do you think I am, Nicholas Cage? I ain't here to help you.

Though that made no sense, you were confident he was sober enough to be an effective teacher of grand theft auto. You told him your name. You showed him the mace, the kitchen knife as big as your arm. You told him that you needed to learn to steal cars. You just wanted to learn how to do it, then you'd leave and he could have your car. You begged him to talk you through the act, while he steals your car, so you could learn.

He was pissed. He grabbed the steering column, yanked the plastic away in a mighty pull. He pointed at the wires like it was obvious, or it should have been.

You're a fucking bitch don't know how to jump it?

He got out of the car as suddenly as he arrived. He looked at you from the other side of the window, so angry he could kick a puppy. He walked away slowly. He shoved his hands in his pockets and wore his hat low.

You climbed into the front seat. You played with the wires. You didn't know what you were doing with these wires. You were afraid to cut them because you didn't know which wires to cut. There were more than two wires. They all looked the same. What was the difference between power steering, the horn, cruise control, and the turning of the key?

You guessed which wires to cut. You pushed them together. Nothing happened. You tried with some different wires, and still nothing happened. You were in a cop movie, standing over the bomb, but instead of defusing it you were trying to set it off.

It was your bomb.

You wanted it to explode.

Nothing happened. Now, the key didn't work. Now your car was probably not going to steer very well, even if you managed to get it started, because maybe you cut up the power steering pretty bad, and maybe the horn wouldn't work, and maybe the cruise control would be broken forever.

He had pointed at the wires like it was all so obvious, but it wasn't.

How did they get their start, these thieves? You imagined them, out late at night with an uncle or an older brother, because stealing cars seems like the kind of thing that you learn from uncles or older brothers. Your uncle never taught you that. He wore a suit in the early morning, arrived on time somewhere, to do something involving either insurance benefits or logistics, you can't remember which. He never took you out late into the city to steel cars, or into the woods to shoot guns at animals. He never taught you anything. His Christmas cards were always vague and forgettable. Your older brother was in marching band, and late at night, if he wasn't practicing for state orchestra, he and his friends were playing video games in the basement. They could teach you how to steal cars in a video game. He could teach you how to win a fight in a video game. Your family never taught you anything you really needed, like stealing cars.

It's 3 AM, now. You know that no one is going to teach you how to steal a car. You've got mace. You've got a kitchen knife the length of your arm. You smell like spoiled fast food after another long night among the trash in your back seat.

You walk into the city, into the night.

Bad people didn't walk anymore if they can steal a car. You figured it was safe to walk, because any bad people around here would steal a car and drive somewhere where something bad is happening.

Everyone has somewhere to go.

In the morning, you called in sick at work. You did feel sick, but not in a hospital way, but in a way like you've been on a roller coaster too long, and you just stepped off.

When you were walking home, you could hear your footsteps on the concrete. All the lights of the city poured up into the sky. All the architectures and infrastructures of concrete and steel cast shadows all around the lights. You were alone in a vast desert of sidewalks. You were alone in a place built for millions. You walked through the world of the night watchmen, where silvery clouds shimmered over the moon, and the wind whispered through the artificial canyons between the skyscrapers.

At night, there's a whole new world in the city, where cars wander off as if on their own and graffiti blooms in the shadows. At night, you were alone and you were doing the things you weren't supposed to be doing, and you knew it because there was no one else there. If there was someone there, they were part of it – that other city.

You have a roof over your head, and you are stronger, now, though you couldn't explain why. You don't care that your car will be stolen if you leave it there, or that it will be towed, impounded, auctioned, lost. You can get a new car, eventually. Everything can be replaced, made new, and continue on, running into the night away from the long hands and shouts of the man that would press himself over you and sneer. For now, you walked to the bus stop, take it to the train, and rock to the hum of a thousand songs playing in a thousand headphones that a thousand people use to stand alone.

You can only just make out the hum of the song over the train wheels, rolling and rolling. All of you standing there, holding the nooses that carry you off to the next station, like a forest, all of the people standing still, windblown, packed into each other in silence.

The train sounds like a womb.

~~~

5: Gaia

'My children, gotten of a sinful father, if you will obey me, we should punish the vile outrage of your father; for he first thought of doing shameful things.'

-from Hesiod's Theogony

I did nothing to deserve the way he treated me. All that nonsense my children talk about endlessly – a wedding, a war between titans and children of titans and all for our sake, him and me, heaven and earth – don't believe a word. All that really happened between us was just the argument that broke out because we hadn't quite invented marriage so we couldn't quite divorce when he invented infidelity.

Here's the true story. I was asleep in a field. Goodness, I was the field. He came by like a cloud over me. His shadow passed over me like nightfall. He looked down at my beauty, at how beautiful I was as a field, naked and asleep with nothing to cover me. He wept because I was so beautiful. Then he did more than weep tears. That's what woke me up.

Back then, two lovers just allowed themselves to be in love. This is the truth about marriage: we invented divorce long before we invented marriage.

Think about it, and you'll know it's true. She and he move in together. Before this they both have their own things. He has his things, and she has her things, and they are separate piles of things. Then, they move in together. The piles of things, and the children, all get messed up because everyone loves each other and wants to share their things with each other. The two lovers are feeling generous. But, they were innocent and did not sign a prenuptial agreement because these things had not been invented, yet, and there was no need for a public ceremony because there was no need for any witnesses to the love. It just was.

I woke up and he was over me, and the stars in his hair and the way the light shone through his marvelous form was like nothing you've ever seen in your life. It was certainly the only time I had ever seen it, before or since. No one even thought of remembering who was responsible for what in the affairs of our household. We just did what we wanted to do, and if it was a mess later on it was all just stuff we didn't really care about because we cared more about hurting each other at that point, and breaking stuff we knew the other wanted.

And, this is how divorce was invented in all that mess of tears and missed phone calls and blame and gifts sent back and gifts destroyed and all the messy – pardon me for speaking so Cthonically – truly fucked up shit that happens in the end: my children – our children, all of them, but these in particular who are my children loved me more - caught him running around with our best and brightest chariot and our best and brightest daughter, doing untoward things to my baby girl, and she was letting him do it because she loved her father and no one had ever taught her the boundaries that we had to learn later after we got sick of dealing with all this trouble – so don't judge her, if anything it was his fault, and mine, but mostly his, because I was just lying around when he came upon me, and I was just lying around afterwards not knowing any better while he was scheming. My swift-footed children, some with more arms and legs than could ever be fought away even by ethereal men, and my ugly children with tentacles that harden anyone to stone in a blink, and my vengeful children who sleep in my breast and relentlessly seek the true nature of unjust hearts - all of them found him with our best chariot, leaving me alone down here for my bright-eyed, beautiful daughter. They were trying to escape, him and her. Our whole family was too much for them both, with our tusks and tentacles and jagged flesh. All of my beautiful, hideous children were too much. He was a man whose head was always in the clouds, wanting idealized things. I had been trying so hard to keep him involved with us, and to pull him down to our level, where the muscle meets the mud, and there he was with our most beautiful daughter, trying to flee. So my children caught him up, and her, and there was a divorce. If you want to get technical, it could be considered a war. There was certainly fighting, and tears and bloodshed, and the dividing and conquering of our shared territories. All's fair in love. So, we, right then, we invented divorce long before anyone thought of a marriage.

Anyway, all the stories you hear – all of them – are wrong. Especially about me. I was just lying there minding my own business when he wept over me. I woke up. I was so ashamed by my own nakedness, and how he was crying over it, that I pulled a long green robe over my body. He did nothing to cover himself, because he was a man, and you and I both know what he was about to do.

Then, we had children. Then, we invented divorce. After this, when the blood had seeped into my skin, and he was still looking down on me with thunder in his heart, we all decided there ought to be some kind of ceremony before all the fighting, where everyone could take sides – his or hers – so that everyone would know how things stood if it got ugly. If the sides were pretty even – which was best – no one would kill anyone or imprison them deep inside their mother's heart on account of the divorce. I don't have to tell you how awful it was when so many of my children took his side, and I'm stuck down here unmoving. I would have liked to know that sooner, so it wouldn't come as such a shock.

He's up there, right now. He's looking down at me all the time. He regrets it; I know. He cries about it constantly, but I just throw his tears up as high as I can push them, and I roll those tears around where he can see them, and take them back when they burn away. I don't want to take in his tears if I can avoid it.

Deep inside of me, the good children that took my side are forever pounding and howling at my bones. I have a giant heart. I have the largest heart in the world because my heart is the whole world. I'm all heart, and don't let him or his tell you any different. I have this huge, huge, red heart. And, it's so hot. It has so much love that it burns hot.

Listen to me going on. That was all so long ago.

I can't believe anyone even remembers it anymore, to gossip about it.

~~~

6: Menae

The Fifty Menai were goddesses of the lunar months, daughters of moon goddess, Selene, and the mortal, Endymion, asleep for her love for all time. Some deities are echoes of older ones, supplanted by the Olympians and fading into the background of myths, quiet and mostly forgotten.

She stood in the doorway covered in flour from the moon, like a light layer of snow. First, though, she had been out in the backyard with my sister and me on a tire swing.

Her parents were divorced, too. She had told us that about herself when we met. My sister and I didn't talk about more than that, because our parents were divorced and it was the greatest source of fear and loathing in our lives to that point and we didn't want to talk about our own parents any more than she wanted to talk about hers.

We let her come over because she said she was lonely at her house, all the time. She ate dinner here, and spent the night. The next day we walked to school together. Coming home with us, she didn't even knock when she arrived. She walked right in like she lived here, too.

Then, we played this game where one person rode the tire and the other two tried to smash each other with the tire swing like sumo tetherball. First person knocked out of the dirt pit around the bottom of the tire swing is the loser.

We were playing hard, all sweaty. She was throwing me at my sister when my foot caught my sister's jaw and both of us, my sister and I, tumbled to the ground.

Then we were all fighting because maybe she had done that on purpose with my leg and my sister.

Then all of us started throwing body parts at each other. We were all mixed up and covered in dust and we were tumbled all together like that, like we couldn't tell one girl's leg from the other's. I looked up and the moon was out in the evening sky like a milk-white mole in the purple twilight. A full moon like that, and we knew her mother was coming to get her soon, if she remembered that her daughter was over here, with us.

Then we thought it was snowing. White powder drifted down from the sky - from the moon, it does that sometimes - like dusty snow. We were happy at first, when we thought it was snow. We clapped our hands and imagined missing school in the morning and making snow angels and snowballs and snowmen.

But it wasn't snow.

It was flour.

Flour descended from the full moon and dusted the world in the starchy weight. We started coughing.

Into the house, she stopped at the doorway, only inside enough to breathe and no farther. She was covered in snow. We heard the knock at the front door. Loud, sharp knuckles bit into the glass window that decorated our door.

"My mother's here," she said. Her eyes were covered in flour. The flour mixed with the damp of her eyes like sleep, but silver - solid silver.

We never saw her again after that, except in the sky for a little while.

Soon, I knew my sister and I would be like her, a hanging stone passing in the night, just hovering up there where the occasional footprints of brave, strong men found our pristine faces, but mostly we'd all be alone inside our own skins, and that would be that for the rest of our lives.

So, I remember our friend, and the last time we saw her, and I hope she's doing better than my sister and me.

~~~

7: Charybdis and Scylla

Monsters are made, not born. Transformation, like lost virginity, is a crossing that can't be undone.

1

Neighbors all our lives and no one else looks after us since our husbands died so we take care of each other until we're killed by this stranger. Who else will? There's this thing that happens to women who live long enough. It's like people only look at us to sell something. Used to be, when I was a pretty young thing, sunlight beaming at me from everywhere and everyone all the time enough to make me ashamed of myself, and then I got a certain age and it was like I was a whirlpool threatening to swallow everyone whole if they so much as looked at me in the face. I thought I looked like still water - a nice old lady – and I cultivated that look.

I have to tell you about me, that I'm not a nice lady. Neither is Scylla. Don't you forget that about us. We know better than to let people push us around, and we don't go gentle into that good night.

We've been neighbors since our weddings, and no one else looks after us, now that our men have passed. Neither one of us got kids. She's got her cats, of course. Smells like them. When we're having tea at her place, I have to wipe down the cups before I drink anything to get the cat hair out.

Neighborhood's been trying to get those cats for years, but I won't let them. All she has in her life are those cats. Be devastating to lose those filthy, disgusting animals.

Besides, I used them too. We worked together, Scylla and me and her cats.

That's why I was so worried, that lady came by on a Sunday - a lady with hard hands like a man's, work boots, and no make-up standing on the sidewalk in front of Scylla's yard with a clipboard. Lady was counting cats on the porch, in the windows. She had parked her truck around the corner so she wouldn't make a scene, but I could see her truck from where I was, across the street, a city municipal truck with cages in the bed, and nets. I was watering my lawn. I watched a bit, see what she'd do. Didn't do anything but count cats. Got sick of just watching. I turned off the hose, walked on over. Howdy, ma'am, anything I can do ya for?

She looked up at me. She looked down at her clipboard. She wrote down a number, then came back to me with a civil servant smile. Hi, ma'am.

What are you doing out here? Counting cats?

Afraid so. Seems like someone has gotten in a little over her head. Against city code. Neighbors are complaining. You ever see so many cats in your life?

I'm her neighbor and I certainly didn't complain about anything. She likes 'em. Loves 'em, even. Got no kids. Neither one of us had kids. She takes care of strays. Hardly any o' those are actually her cats. They just come by 'cause she feeds 'em. It's their own mistake, though, 'cause she'll get 'em spayed and neutered soon as she can get 'em in a box.

Good for her.

The lady pocketed her pen, and held her clipboard in a way to hide it from me. She knew I was curious about what she had written.

Hey, you from the shelter, ain't you. You folks a "no kill" shelter?

Oh, we rarely have to put an animal down. We really don't do that very much.

Right. Be a lot of cats to take in, all at once. Hard to find 'em good homes.

We don't put down animals unless they're dangerous to themselves and others. Maybe one a month, often less. Dangerous animals only. Pit bulls, and sick and injured animals that ain't getting better.

Had a pit bull long time ago. Such a sweet dog. You know that TV show "Little Rascals"? Old show. Old as shit.

I think so.

They had a pit bull, too. Used to be a family dog, especially for them boys liked playing rough. Cute as babies, them pit bulls, and so patient with the boys. Sweet too, just like mine was. Good dogs.

They can be, by themselves, with good discipline. Bet you kept him in line.

Oh, sugar, you know I did. He was a sweetie, but I had to keep an eye on that boy. Boys is all the same, you know. Gotta watch 'em close. Listen, you want to come by for some tea? I have just the best tea in the world right inside. Oolong. Fancy, fancy, all the way from India. Ever been to India?

Sorry, but I have to file my report. Have a good day, ma'am.

She wasn't done counting, but why would she need to? She knew enough to know that she was coming back, and she'd file a report about it. Maybe not that day, but soon, the trucks would come, with a warrant and a social worker and a cop and animal service folk from two or three counties. Who knows what they'd find inside with the cats, so they'd be ready to be cautious and move careful.

I went back over to my yard. I poured more water on the grass. I acted like I was just minding my own, but what I was doing was thinking. Someone had to do something, because Scylla loved those cats, and they were so useful.

When I was done with my lawn a couple times over, I looked up the shelter in the phone book, called them up. Wasn't the lady with tough hands answering. Was some fellow didn't seem to care much about anything. I said to him, I said there was a stray pit bull in the field behind the elementary school. Said I saw one with half an ear missing, and a scratched up chest, jumping out of a dumpster when I took my granddaughter to the school playground after church. Scared us half to death, it did, and she's still crying. Pit bulls are dangerous. Oughtta be put down, I said. And right by the elementary school.

Point of fact, I got no grandkids. Got no kids, either. Had a husband once, and I lied to him too, all the time. Needed to buy some time, is the reason for it, and keep those officers busy hunting after real trouble.

I went over after to Scyllas for tea with a fresh bag of cat treats I got from this landscaper didn't work hard enough. Knocked on the door, and heard her watching television. She didn't do much else, the poor dear. Had to keep it loud, too, on account of her hearing's not so good anymore. Cats were already at the door, meowing up a storm. Never could tell the animals apart as there's so many. Least a dozen at the door howling for my treats they see me coming.

Scylla got up from the TV. Flipped it off with her hand on account of her remote was long busted. Came to the door like she didn't want anyone coming in. Had that look about her, like she wasn't sure what I was doing here and maybe I was going to yell at her again like I did last time, when I had to take care of her little mess with the landscaper didn't work hard enough, and we had to get him over to my house in the middle of the night like we was smuggling a dead body.

I didn't come over to yell, this time. I told her I had something for the cats. She lit up when I took an interest in the animals. I sprinkled around the little bits of meat I had in the baggy.

Your yard's a wreck, she said. Ain't seen your man around a while. Growing wild, again. Keep watering it like that, you'll need a new gardener soon.

I shrug. I go through those gardeners. You, too. Men, I say. Mind if I come in for some tea.

Ain't Tuesday, yet.

I know, baby, but it's an emergency. Come on, now. Serious stuff.

In her house, I gave her the number to call, and a tip to talk about a pit bull, yellow with an ear missing, running around the school yard like he owns the place. Then I told her the why of it. Needed to buy us some time, come up with a plan about the people coming for the cats.

She crumpled up the paper and threw it at me. Said it was all my fault. It wasn't. I yelled again. I hit her in the face. Knocked her over. Most cats ran out of the room. Some of them looked at us curiously. They don't know what to make of their benefactresses. Scylla was crying on account of the bruise on her cheek.

Serious stuff, Scylla. No fucking around. They're coming for your cats, and they'll find everything, goddammit.

Language.

I hit her again. We're going to have to leave town. Can't think of anything else for it.

We have to take the cats.

I know, baby. I know.

Then Scylla started howling. She was down on all fours and she curled her head back and howled like a dog. Then she was just crying, curled up into a ball and weeping.

I looked around for something I could use for Kleenex. Couldn't find anything. I didn't carry that in my purse.

If you could have gotten her before she escaped...

2

Wasn't always like this, you know. Once upon a time, we were normal, normal woman. We were so normal that people still think we are. We had husbands. We went to church. We waved at the grocery store at our neighbors, and bought decent, respectable food. We were decent women, once.

Also, used to be were pretty enough to get looked at when we didn't have money in our hands. Used to be men listened to us, and respected our opinions. Actually, they just listened because we were pretty, and they never respected a damn thing.

3

I kicked her until she stopped talking, but I couldn't get her to stop crying.

Look, I've thought about this, and I know exactly what we'll do. Trust me, Scylla. I'm the only one you can trust.

4

Next day, I get all packed up and ready to go. I rent a van with the landscaper's credit card at a place I know had no cameras running, and they couldn't care less if I was a man or a woman or even to look me in the face. Some folk won't even look at me to sell me something.

It's life. People grow old. I don't blame anyone.

I rent a nice, big van. I pull it up to the garage, all full up on cat nip. We don't know how much time we got, so we got to hurry. Start in the bedrooms. Chase out all the cats we can. Scare 'em out. They howl and hiss and swipe at us. Feral creatures, not too far from nature.

Everything smells like cat piss in her house. Shook up the furniture to run the cats out, and little flecks of cat hair and cat piss take flight and up in the nostrils. Should have worn a mask. The cops coming are going to wear masks. Wasn't thinking about it. She's in the garage, sitting in the van, cooing for all her babies to come rest at her breast. Some of them do, but it ain't because she's calling them. It's the big bag of catnip I put in back, cut open to smell strong. She's sitting on it, and the cats come to her, gonzo stoned and chasing their own tails from the catnip.

She looks like her heart is being ripped out, and I guess it is, but it's better this way than if we let the shelter take them all. Can't let anything bad happen to her cats, and can't get caught.

She's filthy. Been filthy forever, since the beginning of it, when her mother was still alive and living with her, and she only had the two – boy and girl – then the kittens, then came the strays and the kittens and then more kittens. Lord, did she stink all the time.

Cats will always find a way home, I said. I touched her arm. I was driving us out of the city. I was thinking how if it smelled so bad in that house, the cats could find it from miles away. If they didn't like where we was going, they could stumble back home in a couple days after everything blew over. Maybe we could stumble back, too. Old women were invisible.

I remember back when we were married.

That, I did. Never forget it.

My man was a drinker. Came out to check the mail, he was still drunk. Wasn't the type to hit somebody. Never bruised me, but I never saw him sober. He was a janitor until the factory closed. Then, he was nothing. Sat around the house, watching the TV like he was sitting on the catbird seat, and church on Sunday like it made him righteous. You die in a house with a cat, and you don't feed it, the cats'll eat you. Don't you forget it.

Hers was friends with mine. They went on hunting trips, fishing trips - anything else they liked. We were stuck with them. Even if we had left them, where would we go? This wasn't a big town, and we had spent so many years with their hands on ours at church. We were accustomed to our men, and our life. So we did what had to be done to keep our life the way we wanted it.

Now this. We drove the cats, in our rented van, out onto the beach. We drove into the water.

We kept driving down. The water was all over us, but we kept driving. We pushed our way over kelp beds and sunken trash piles. Used to be a city out this way, until the water swallowed it. I know it's still there, like Atlantis, except it was never really a jewel to be remembered.

They probably found your cat treats already, Ms. Charybdis. No turning back now. My friend, if she were really concerned about me, would have reached out her hand to mine. She stroked a cat's head and stared at her cat when she talked to me. I think maybe she named her cat after me, and that was whom she was talking to.

I had taken one cat treat with me in case the animals got restless. I said, Hey, can you look in the dashboard?

The cats perked up when they saw the treat I had brought. She didn't recognize where I had gotten it. She looked at it a moment before tossing it into the back at the nervous, mewling animals.

We're getting old, Cary. When we were younger it was easier.

It was. We kept driving into the sea until we reached the city. There were other cars there. I pulled in to a spot at a motel, next to one of those classic cars with big fins – a real gas guzzler. On the other side was a little foreign car, cheap as plastic, I reckon, and drives for miles on a single tank.

Went inside and wasn't anybody behind the motel desk, here, so we just took the keys to a room that looked good, and swam in with the cat nip and the cats. The cats hated the water. They poured after us into the room, mostly, with Scylla clicking her tongue at them. Bunch of them swam off, but there was still plenty following us into the room. The cats hated it, but there was nothing to be done for them, now. They'd either accept it, or they'd drift away, and wash ashore in a heap somewhere, strays at birth and emerge from the water strays again.

My babies... She was reaching for the ones that were floating away, trying to chase after them.

Let them go. They'll find their way home. We can't go back, and we ought not to get lost chasing cats our first day. Look at all the ones made it, anyhow.

I threw the soggy bag of catnip into the room, with what was left of the cat treat. Most of the cats went after the food and the drugs, and were probably going to have sex under the motel bed once they settled, and birth their kittens in a heap in the closet.

My little babies...

We'll find more.

Always stray cats need a good home.

There's no going back from this place. Both of us know that. This is our new home. We aren't alone here. I ventured out of the room, told Scylla to wait.

Fish swimming around in schools like a postcard. The rusted ruins of a normal town, where the white picket fences were all driftwood with rotten nails and little crabs running around like cockroaches up and down the walls. People floating on by like jellyfish, here. Not a one of them waving at me. Guess this ain't the sort of place one goes to find friendly neighbors. I poked around a bit, just to get the lay of the land. Swam around the motel, to see what was close. Saw a bunch of rotted out houses, and the shadows of sunfish like inkstains on the concrete sidewalks, and schools of something silver and wide-eyed passing on the left of a slow-moving car.

Octopi have moved into the dumpster behind the motel. They got one of the cats, wrapped their tentacles over it like a skirt. The cat didn't stand a chance against the animal. Scylla didn't notice, and I didn't tell her. I saw it happen because I was out swimming around, looking for a place to get food. I was waving at the other people here, underwater. A woman pushed a baby stroller while she swam. She ignored me. I don't think there was a baby in the stroller. A man with long hair, and a big, white smile, gets out of a room near ours. Gets into that big car with fins. He waved at me. He was an ugly old man, and it said a lot about him he was treating me nice, when I was invisible on account of my age and infirmities. He was the type for troublesome behavior. No one'd miss him.

A woman in a wedding dress with a long, long train swam aimlessly down the street, bouquet clutched against her chest, and her white train shimmering, collecting fish in its shining wake, and she was singing a wedding march. Siren, I guess. Men took up after her. I saw headlights deep and away through the water haze. Worse than smog, that water, and the cars had to drive slower than school speed limits with all the liquid resistance and darkness. There was a man in the center of town, hanging off a self-made watch-tower in a homemade cape, surveying the streets. He had a harpoon and everything. I guess he thought he looked heroic, and I guess he was heroic, but when you first looked at him, he reminded you of the kind of homeless man you'd find climbing trees and throwing trash at people in the park.

There's nothing to eat but oysters and kelp, because you can eat those raw. No heat to cook things with. Maybe a sushi chef would brave cutting into something, but the blood attracts other fish, and sharks.

I had told Scylla I'd go get some food for us. That's why I was poking around. She was trying to calm down her babies. She hadn't noticed the octopus, but the cats had.

At the lunch counter, the waitress asked me what I wanted – oysters, or oysters shoved on soggy slices of bread, or oysters shoved into opened cans of soup, rank with seawater. Cat food came in 10 pound bags, so soggy I could tear the bag open right there at the table with my bare hands, and I guess people ate that down here. A man in a back booth was certainly eating the cat food. His cheeks bubbled in and out like a fish's mouth when he was chewing the big mouthfuls. He didn't use his hands to eat. He let the catfood float in front of his face, then darted his head out to get it like bobbing for apples.

I got a bag of cat food to go, but stuck around to eat some oysters.

The waitress came by and asked me if I was new in town.

I was.

She said not to worry about the sharks. She said there was a man who took care of them before they bit anybody – Captain America, they called him, our own personal Federal Disaster Preparedness something-or-other. Anyway, all anyone had to do was flip the sharks upside down and they fell asleep, and then anyone could cut them up so they'd start floating up, over the town. Then other sharks would get to them.

She pointed at the water.

See how it's kind of red, a little bit. See how it's like a little bit red when the sun hits it?

I couldn't see anything.

Blood, she said. That's him. Captain America does that to any shark comes into town. Got one just before you came in.

It wasn't a big town. I guess there was a mill at the edge of the city, or some fishing boats. People didn't go over to that side of town, because there wasn't anything left in the larger buildings. When the businesses went bankrupt, they were liquidated, and that meant fishing boats and mills were washed clean before the waves came. Anything worth anything in this town was in the houses, where women had clung to their heirlooms with iron claws, holding families together around heirlooms when there shouldn't be anything but ocean. And the men? Most of them were gone. Treasure hunters and scientists came in scuba gear. They weren't like us. They rummaged through empty houses. Best to ignore them, if any came by, or go find a room in a hotel for a day or two until they were done where you were living. No stopping them, unless you wanted to draw attention from the outside, and nobody wanted that.

Thanks for the advice, I said.

No problem, she said. Then, she kissed the wild-eyed man in the back booth and put a bucket of oysters in front of him with a sturdy Phillips head screwdriver. He picked up the screwdriver and started work shucking those oysters. He was one of the few men, and that's how he earned his keep, here.

There were a few other men. The town doctor drove his vintage Packard from his storefront to his home back out of the water along the mainland every day. You could set your watch by his arrival. He wore scuba gear, and carried extra oxygen tanks. He wasn't one of us. He was just committed to his work. Folks went to see him, if they had the money for it. Often they paid in barter – oysters and the sorts of baubles treasure hunters came down to get. The doctor was the only commuter I knew about. The sheriff was a man, but he never did much. He drank cold coffee. He drove around town in his car, waving at people. He shot his gun at sharks that were too big for Captain America to flip alone. He pointed out the places where the sea life had settled in to anyone curious enough to ask him what was going on in the neighborhood. The octopi liked our dumpsters. The barracudas were partial to the dead trees piled up around the elementary school playground. Stuff like that.

In the city jail, the man who was responsible for bankrupting the town is bound to his cell, and there won't be any trial for him. Every time he starts to heal up, sheriff sends a catfish through the bars, after his old wounds. I bet a few cats have made it over there, too. They'll eat human flesh like it's nothing. No one ever lets that fellow go. Not after what he did. Nobody told me what he did, exactly, but it must have been bad. Prometheus stole fire from the gods to get chained up like that. Maybe he stole all this water, brought it down on people's heads.

Waitress told me all about that stuff. She's a small town, lunch counter waitress. She could probably tell me the last time anyone had ever fallen in love in that city. She could probably tell me about what happens when the divers chase after the woman in the wedding dress, and all the rumors about the things that man in prison had done to this town.

The man who was eating cat food and shucking those oysters was named Ulysses Grant Smith, after the president, the waitress guesses. He was a soldier for a while, too, just like the president had been. Never quite made it home from the war to his war bride wife, probably thinks he's dead. Then, he fell in with some of the women in town trading favors for clothes, a place to sleep. Waitress said I needed a man to come around and do a little work around the house, he was the one to ask, but I shouldn't expect much from him. No point fixing the plumbing, and the paint'll never dry.

When he got done shucking, he went over to the payphone outside the counter and looked at it like it was about to ring. He swam away when he saw the woman in the wedding dress coming back around the block.

I chased after him.

Mr. Ulysses, I said, Hello?

He didn't look at me.

I touched his arm. Hello? I heard your name was Ulysses.

That's me. He said it like he was standing inside of a jail cell, but he wasn't the one screaming like a whale.

Call me Carey. You know, you look a lot like my husband. When he was alive, he was a man just like you. Look at these hands...

I took his hands, and ran my own over them. His hands were wrinkled up like prunes, but strong. They reminded me of gardener's hands, soaked in lime. He's spent so long under water, that his skin is bloated and puffy, even with his strength. He's pale in all this muted light, and he smells like an oyster. He looks down at my hands, soft and weak and not even as wrinkled as his. I smile, mercurially, and I let him go. I drift away towards the door, and talk over my shoulder. The bubbles of my words float up to the roof and break there, in a burst of smaller bubbles. Anyway, it was nice to meet you, Mr. Ulysses. I leave him there, in the diner. I have to check in with Scylla.

My clothes are soaked through all the time. I'm wearing the same thing I wore when I left our houses up on land. A big pair of sweatpants, and one of those shirts that doubles as a nightgown, no bra. I had my hair in curlers, but that doesn't work down here. Everything is just soaked, all the time. Scylla's hair is the worst. She has long hair, all the way down to her waist and gray because she never dyed it. It went wild underwater, like a shriveled-up sea anemone. Tiny fish and mollusks collected there already and we were barely there a day.

I don't feel like we belong here, she said.

We belong here, I said. I brought you some cat food.

I tear the wrapper on the cat food and throw the soaked cat food everywhere, for the cats as if they were astronauts eating in space. Cats flailed around after the soggy bits of food. They were not natural swimmers. They struggled to get to the wet food. It must have been like eating Styrofoam. Some of the cats coughed it up, and got sick all over the place. They were catching cold.

I met a man in town, I said. Just my type.

The cats won't be any use, here. They like the fish.

Sharks, I said. Barracudas in the elementary school. Fish everywhere. Crabs. We won't need cats. We just need a current. A good, swift current and it'll all float away forever when I'm done with him. Come on, I want you to come with me. You're all cooped up in here. You should get out.

Do you think they're already looking for us, on the mainland?

Probably.

I want to go home.

If you find someone, you'll settle down. I promise. It'll relax your nerves. I saw someone you might like in the motel.

The fish are so ugly.

Try to make the best of things. This is all for the best.

It's hard to sleep at night when the covers float up and away, and it's all so clammy and damp and cold. How do people stave off infection, here? I'll have to find the doctor and ask him. I sleep, as best I can, in the water. The electricity doesn't work, so we all just have to go to bed when it gets dark. If the world above the water gets a little dark in evening twilight, we get so dark you can't even see your hand in front of your face. Ocean water swallows light. It's like the algae in the water are soaking all the light up - eating light - and there's none left for anyone or anything else.

I asked Ulysses about all of this at the diner the next day. He was shucking oysters for spare change and a free meal, again. He had a metal spike he was using that looked like it came from a railroad. He didn't say anything about what happened to his Phillips head from yesterday. Odd to find a man don't keep track of his tools, but I reckon that should have been the first sign I should have taken to steer clear, but I didn't. He jammed the spike into the oyster's mouth and pushed hard. No hammers or striking blows under water. Too much resistance. He just had to push and push and push and push until...

I don't know anything, he said. About algae, I mean. I know a thing or two about trucks. Had to repair an engine in a hurry once or twice. Everybody has to pick up something about their work, they do it enough.

Learn anything about oysters, yet?

Maybe. What do you do?

Nothing. We're retired. We're new in town. We're staying at the motel.

We?

My friend, Scylla. She was my neighbor on the mainland, and now we're sharing a motel room. We share it with her cats.

Bet they hate it.

Some are taking a liking. They like fish. We leave the windows cracked enough to let minnows swim in, but not wide enough to let the cats out.

That's good, he said. Ain't the biggest hunters in town, them cats. He leaned into the oyster hard. He had his weight down on it, and his legs braced against a bar along the floor. He was straining. His veins were coming out of his head.

I held my breath.

The oyster popped.

All this hard work, I bet you haven't had a massage in a while.

I reached out to his shoulder and felt the knots there. He didn't pull away from my touch. He didn't lean into it, either. He just took it, like I was a barber cutting his hair. He's been underwater a long time.

I do a little acupuncture, if you want it. I learned it to help my husband with his stress, back when he was alive and still working. Worked for a clinic a while at it, with them needles. It's the best for stress relief, I always say. I was lying. Really help you relax. Ancient Chinese medicine. Old as shit.

He nodded. He had another oyster to shuck.

You could use it, you know. Look at how hard you're working. When do you get off?

I don't know. When she says I'm done.

I'll wait here, then. Take your time.

At the counter, I hung out and introduced myself to everyone that came by. A woman in a summer dress told me I was doomed – DOOMED – and the end times were coming. The floods were already here. The lunch counter waitress threw her out. I saw Scylla, walking around the block – probably going to take her cats to the doctor – and she had a bunch of her cats on threads tied to her clothes. They drifted around, aimlessly. You'd think they'd be dead and floating the way they looked except that they were stretching and swiping at each other and trying to pull themselves free of their ropes. Cats don't take to leashes much. I saw elderly, overweight women pushing strollers around. Most of the strollers had rocks and oysters piled up inside of them, with some clams. The rocks weighed down the strollers, kept them from floating away.

My husband would do something like that, if he were here. He'd duct tape rocks to the bottom of his shoes so he could walk instead of swimming. Landscapers and gardeners would do that, too.

The woman in a wedding dress swam past, and I saw she had caught a fish in her mouth like a seal. She waved in at the lunch counter, but no one waved back. Her dress trailed away like jellyfish tentacles. Then, jellyfish spilled out from her dress. They must have been drawn to its sparkling torn wedding train.

This made me think of my husband. I could think of little else for a long time. Marriage was like standing at the bottom of a very large well, wondering if he was ever going to come along and pull me up. That's what I told Ulysses when he came over for some acupuncture.

He said, It couldn't have been all bad.

It wasn't. It was. Were you married long?

Not really. I guess, technically, I'm still married, but it's been years. Married just before I shipped out. Came back, and got mixed up in all sorts of shit. They let us out in New York City. Had a good job right there on the docks. Figured I'd save a bit, first. Never could quite save up a bit.

Where does she live?

Out west, last I knew. Don't know where she is, now.

Couldn't you just hitch?

Probably thinks I'm dead. Probably, moved away. Probably, when you think about it, I didn't want to go home right away, and that's probably why I didn't. Wound up with this gypsy – living like a gypsy. Crazy times, you know. Lots of drugs and shit.

I stuck a sewing needle into his neck gently. He didn't even flinch. I have a confession to make. I know nothing about acupuncture.

I had opened the window, to get some fresh water flowing through the room. Octopus from behind the house could smell the little flecks of blood from his neck. Their eyes peered over the ledge like alien periscopes.

Anyway, he said. Enough about me. What about you? Were there good times?

The war was good times for us. We were just married, then. He was doing well with all the young men off at war. He sold cars. Young soldiers got their enlistment bonus were buying cars for their wives. Minivans. Sportscars for themselves. We had all kinds of money. We bought a house. We made friends with the neighbors.

How you end up down here?

Does your neck feel better? You still feel tense.

I had another needle. I shoved it near an artery, just to make him bleed. I missed. I pulled the needle back and touched the tip to my own tongue. I wanted more blood in the water. The octopi had crept into the room. I was watching from the corner of my eye. They could change their skin to blend with the furniture, but I could see their shapes moving. They loved the taste of blood in the water. They were crawling in the shadows of the sodden, moldy carpet, and they probably smelled like mold because they were camouflaged so good.

Don't fear the reaper, he said. What are you waiting for?

What?

Come on. I can see your reflection in the television. I can see your face. I know what you're doing, lady.

I looked up and saw myself in the dark television screen. I was a shadow looming over him like a jellyfish, fat and soft and all my clothes and white hair splayed about the water, collecting bioluminescent algaes and mollusk eggs. I was awful looking, like some kind of monster. Gosh, no wonder nobody looks at me anymore, if that's what I've become. Old. Gosh, I looked old. Breaks my heart to think about how beautiful I was, how I could be the center of the world just walking down the street. I looked myself in the face, and my hands fell away. I couldn't imagine doing anything to anyone. I was horrible looking.

I was just offering acupuncture. I think we misunderstood each other.

No, he said. He stood up slowly. He turned to face me. I know what you're doing. He put his hand over mine. He was strong. He had the strength of an underwater oyster shucker, and his hands could crush mine like lobster claws. He looked me in the face. He took my hand with the other needle in his own hand. He placed the needle against my neck.

No...

Don't fear the reaper, he said. I felt the needle pressing into my soft neck.

It hurt. God, it hurt. It hurt so much for such a long time. Then the octopus came. They swirled around me.

Hey, he said. Hey, I avenged somebody.

There were cats with the octopi, then, pouring from the door as their ropes broke loose. Scylla was back. She saw what was happening. She was screaming. She pounced on him, but he held her back. He was stronger than her. They were both swimming around, in a whirlwind. Scylla had her hair around his neck. She was trying to strangle him with her hair. He was getting strangled, too. He clawed at her face with his strong hands. He couldn't punch good because of the water resistance, but he tried. Then, he got the knitting needle out of his neck, where I had jammed that first one like acupuncture. He yanked it out and stabbed her in the throat with the knitting needle. Got her hard. She looked at me, bleeding and dying there, for the sharks. All this blood whirling around us, the currents of the water revealed by blood. The blood was salty, because our ancestors had walked out of the ocean, way back when no one knew any better, and now we were back in it, nothing but salt water. Scylla swirled around the room, checking on her cats, even as she was bleeding out. She was checking on her cats, and tying them to her dress, and to her hair. She didn't want to die alone. She didn't want to die and let sharks eat her. She wanted to be eaten by them. She didn't spare a thought for me, and we were friends for so long. She had attacked Ulysses because she hadn't done a fellow in a while, and it was getting her on edge. It wasn't me.

Cats bolted for the window, and Scylla wasn't dead, yet, so she could hang onto Ulysses and me, out the window, where the octopus pulled on our bodies and nibbled at our skin. They couldn't hold us down with the currents flowing. We started to float up, and the octopi came up with us. Cats came, too. Ulysses and Scylla and I, Charybdis, floating up and up, caught in the currents, with the cats and the octopi eating at us, until the sharks could get to us. Then, the currents ripped us away from each other. Scylla to her shore, Ulysses to his, and me to where I would go next.

On the farthest shore, of the stillest lake, I beached in a heap of dead cat, mollusk eggs, bathrobes, and all of that shit.

This was the first time a man had turned on me before I could get him. They had always been so gentle. They had been trying so hard to convince me they were gentlemen, who would treat me with kindness and respect and never hurt me. Until Ulysses, the men had always smiled and turned the other cheek, because I was invisible to them, even my husband.

You remember about that fellow was just sitting there, shucking oysters and waiting for the end of the world. He was the one who never thought for a minute I might be what I seemed. He was the one who killed us. He was the one who saw me – really saw me – and you don't get like that without a reason.

And, that's all I got to say.

~~~

8: Io

"For I am full of fear when I behold

Io, the maid no human love may fold,

And her virginity disconsolate"

– Aeschylus, from Prometheus Unbound

1

I speak bee. No one believes it, except maybe my friend Europa, but I learned the language. My mother taught it to me, when I was very young. What you do is you place honey on your finger, your nose, and then a splash of floral perfume upon the back of your jeans. Then, you go into a field to speak to the bees, who find you because of the smell, and then they watch you to see what you have to say. You shiver, and move forward, then shiver again. Shivering looks like shaking your butt, like shimmying, but it's not. It's shivering. It's a complex language. It took years of practice. I've gotten so I can get their attention even if I don't have any honey or floral perfume.

My mother was an expert Apiarist before her marriage. She could guide the flocks of bees over the highway, into safe harbors all over the city. Someone had to keep them safe from the killing men, that came in fancy trucks to spray the streets. Someone had to protect the bees from the changing places, where the old buildings that should have been a refuge were doomed to be rebuilt.

In this world, no one cared about the bees. Father doesn't care about them. He doesn't believe in my mother. He says the powerlines have changed everything. Everything will be connected together that's human, and anything that can't ride along the lines might as well be forgotten.

My mother agreed with him when he says that, but she still taught me to speak bee.

Fly away from this place to an older country, little sisters...

Do not heed the call of the lines that beckon without breathing...

The flowers of the hills are sweeter for the absence of our painted walls...

Bees are not like us. When they hear a word, it is like a command to them. When they speak a word, it is like a command to others.

Momma says it's like with electric things.

There's input.

Then there's output.

It's like how God would speak to us, if he wanted to do it.

2

Father is the name of God in most of Nebraska all the way through Colorado and Iowa and Texas, too. We lived in the big Western sky, and when we stood up we were the tallest thing for miles around, and we imagined a man so tall he could look down upon us. Nothing was imagined taller than this man. He was the tallest. We called him Father. We looked behind us for a son who always had our back. Lightning meant something out here. When it struck, it started fires, destroyed our towers and demanded cattle in sacrifice. The powerlines ran underground, and we felt them buzzing when we walked over them, and saw the passing souls emanating like an aura that were swallowed by the uninsulated places in the wires. Our fathers mostly worked for power companies and farms, and we saw them pushing cattle around, driving tractors around, and backhoes, and reaching into the cloud of soul to fix the lines.

We work hard, Hi-Ho and off to work we go. My father works so hard. He buries power lines, digs them up, and runs them along the side of houses, through fields and up to transformer stations that glow with an unearthly light.

He came home from work and he said someone died, today. My mother stood up from her chair.

-Oh, my God, who?

-You didn't know him. New guy. New in town. Was wiring street signs together on a cherry picker and forget to ground out, bumped the line. Lit him up like a turkey. Poor kid was just twenty-nine. Just out of the Army. New in town. Shoulda watched him closer.

I was doing homework when my father came in he hasn't sat down, yet. He stood in the kitchen door with all his gear on, his work jacket and his tool belt and gloves like he had seen a ghost. Maybe someone he recognized in the wires. We all held still, waiting for someone to move, like how the air hangs still and pregnant with water before a storm. I decided to get a glass of milk. Mother had to move to let me into the fridge. Father disappeared into the bedroom to change for supper and no one said anything about it again all week.

We have powerlines near the school. The ghostly fog of flocks of birds and bugs glisten along the lines in the morning dew. We push each other up to the edge, laughing. Powerlines running under the ground, swallowing the electricity of souls. Some animals-squirrels running like horses in herds, some shadows of horses and the ghostly haunt of the men in workmen's uniforms, all electricity subsumed into the flow of lines. The man who died will be in the lines forever, imprinted at the point of death, not a soul they say, but like a copy of one. We girls and boys push each other up to the edge of the flowing lines, laughing, until someone falls in. It's me, this time. It makes the hair on my arm stand up. I'm laughing. It tingles. A ghost of a man flows over me, his melted eyes opening after me. A hand reaching. I fight the others until another girl is thrown upon the line. She's scared by it, but nothing happens to her. She gets up screaming. We're laughing at her.

Father says he's done with all of this. He says he wants to be a farmer, raise chickens and maybe pigs, and lots of soy. Soy is a great cash crop, he says.

-What do you know about farming? You've never touched a live chicken in your life.

-I know enough about it to know the chickens don't steal your soul. A chicken isn't civilizing our wild prairies, or demanding sacrifices of our boys and our birds. A chicken is food with legs, and nothing but.

-Don't talk like that in front of the kid.

-She's old enough to learn...

-Superstition. Father in heaven, you know there is nothing greater than God. Nothing can steal your soul except the devil, and the power company aren't devils.

-The power company might as well be a God. We pray every day in the miracle of light. We flip switches and we have light day and night. We got radios and tvs and it's like a miracle. Zeus has wormed his way back into Christian country. Old gods are back. They're taking what's theirs.

-Ten more years until the pension. Hold down. This restlessness will pass. He was a good boy, I'm sure. They always are. We'll mourn him. We'll mourn as a family.

I never imagined my father was afraid of the lines, but he was. His hand was on a cup, and trembling a little, and pale.

I was a girl named Isabella. My name means I am beautiful. I was in the tenth grade. I am going to go east to college if I can, to a good school away from this huge, overwhelming sky, and I will make something of myself. I want to be part of the future that comes from these wires, I think, even as I dance to speak with bees like my mother taught me.

This was not a small town. This was a rural community, and it grew up around the power factories and reactors and cables and trains that came for all our crops. We had come to expect electricity when we plug our devices into the walls.

I think my mother was right to speak this way to my father. In school we are not allowed to use our cellphones. We had to turn them off, put them on silent, and pretend like we didn't want to spend all the hours of the day staring at the screen in our palms. We had to pretend that we didn't worship the blinking and the lights in our hands that are so much more interesting than algebra.

3

The bees are dying. I do a report on this for class. I explain that the bees get confused when they get near power lines. Their souls are so small, so weak. They are pulled towards electricity the way we are pulled towards air conditioning or moths are pulled into street lamps against their will. Even if they escape the electric fields, they forget what they were doing, and bumble around. People have to help them through the fields near the electric factories, power stations, and junctions. I want to show a video of bees dancing their warnings to each other, about the place where they became very confused, and how the wings and thorax are clearly swirling a little bit to demonstrate their confusion to each other in their very precise language. No one would believe me, though.

-Very interesting.

My teacher probably doesn't believe me.

-I speak bee.

My teacher isn't listening. The class isn't listening. They're all staring at their hands. My teacher is taking notes on my presentation. The students are using this as an opportunity to IM each other. I'm alone, in front of them all, and there's nothing I could say that would be heard more than this: I burp as loudly as I can, with the widest mouth I can muster.

Everyone looks up. People are giggling. I smile and shrug.

-Excuse you.

The teacher's attention is mine, now.

-Hey, do you ever wonder what it is like to be a bee, and to be riding the edge of certain doom, to work so hard and so hard, but there's nothing you can do because the powerlines are coming, growing, spreading, and all your forests and fields are being devoured? Do you ever wonder what that's like?

The teacher, a young man, fresh out of school, and handsome. He folds his arms and thinks a moment.

-I think it would be terrible. That's true. But, bees aren't people. They don't have feelings.

-You're so sure?

-Insects don't have feelings. They don't feel pain.

-How do you know?

-Because they don't. They don't have nerve endings.

-Do you have a degree in insectology? Do you know that for certain.

-It's called Entomology. My degree is in psychology and English. I was a double-major. Still, I know that bees don't feel anything.

-They do. They just don't feel it the same way that you do. Would you feel it if your hand was cut off?

-Enough. Take your seat.

-Because when you cut off a bee's limb, they may not feel pain, but they do feel the absence of it. It isn't the same, but it is a feeling, and it is not a good one.

-Isabella...

-Fine, whatever. I'll sit down.

-Thank you.

By the time I was in my seat, all the cellphones were put away. I had kept a distraction going, but we were all ninjas. We knew when it was time to put them away, to time it just right to get the most out of our phones, without getting found out and losing them.

I looked around me at all the students. I wondered if anyone else spoke bee.

My phone vibrated. Europa was smirking at me. She had sent me a message on the phone.

U spk bee?

I texted back: Ya ;)

cool. show me.

kk

3

My father was working on the line near school. He was monitoring the digging from the side, while another man ran the backhoe. The line wasn't powered up. I could tell because it wasn't running the ghosts through the wires. My father didn't see me coming up to him. When I tapped his back, he saw me, and flipped off the digger so we could talk in peace.

-Hey.

-Hey, kiddo. Good day at school?

-Sure. What're you doing?

-Fixing the line. Funeral tomorrow. You don't want to go?

-I guess. Nothing else to do.

-You shouldn't go if you don't want to go.

-Well, I didn't know him.

-I'm going. You're mother's going, too. You can stay home, if you like. You can make dinner.

-Can we order Chinese?

-No. Isabella, I got work to do, now. Go on back to class.

-School's over, dad.

-Go home, then. See you there.

He turned away from me and waved at the man to start the backhoe again. The man was smoking while I had distracted my father. He threw away his cigarette and stretched his arms over his head before starting up again. He looked tired. I watched him reach down and poke at the wire in the ground. It was a cable at least a foot around, and my father pulled at it, lifting it up like a heavy python with a groan. It had been burned and broken. It was frayed and fractured. He pulled out the ripped up parts. Backhoe had done it on purpose, he would say later. They were installing a filter to keep the souls down and away from the air, keep it all locked up in the wires. Ought not to frighten people like that, if it's going to be taking over the world, in every home and every classroom and every hospital bed and church. Have to hide what it is, he would say.

-Momma says it isn't anybody's soul, Dad.

-Your Momma's right. Whatever she says is right.

-What is it, then? Who's right? You or her?

-Everyone's right, all the time. Respect other people's point of view.

Instead of speaking to gods, we speak to fathers. I sat in his lap like when I was young because he asked me to sit there. I let him stroke my hair. I wondered why he wanted to hold me like I was a child. Tomorrow he was going to the funeral for the man who died on his line. I haven't decided if I want to go or not, yet. I didn't know the man, but I might go just to help dad through it. I saw the man's picture in the paper. He was so young. Dad cut out the picture and put it on the wall next to the other pictures of the men who had died on the lines.

Momma says being close to children is the best way out of the death fear that comes, sometimes.

Still, I didn't know the one who died. Why should I mourn him when it would be dishonest of me? I'm staying home. I'm going to try to make Chinese food. I've got this book that says it can teach me how to make orange chicken. I want to try it, just to see if it works. I want to invite my friends over, and we can watch TV and make Chinese food and if we get it wrong we can eat the evidence, or if it's really bad bury it in the yard. If we bury it in the yard, we'll probably mark it with a rock, so no raccoons get after it, and we'll say a few words over it. That's what we'll do.

My house was so weird. I went to Europa's house to show her that I could speak bee.

Her mother was home, smoking marijuana in the living room on account of her glaucoma. Her mother was nearly blind. We weren't allowed in the house when she was smoking. We had to sit on the porch. It was a cattle ranch. It was spring. The bulls were charging the cattle, mounting them. I watched, a little bored, and thought I'd ask her about boys. Europa spoke first.

-I'm so embarrassed...

-What?

-My mom... Our cows... Jesus, Isabella. There's nowhere to go. Can we go to your house?

-My parents are acting weird. My dad especially. There's a funeral tomorrow.

-I heard about the guy on the line...

-Some guy. Not even from here. He was up on a cherry picker. He moved up too fast. He touched a wire, and it was still hot. Something had him grounded, too. He should have worn rubber gloves or something. Cooked him like a chicken.

-That's gross. Don't say that.

The cows were making strange noises. They seemed to be in such terrible pain, with the huge bulls on their backs, but it wasn't pain that did that.

-Do you think people make noises like that, Europa?

-Like a chicken when they die? How would I know, Isabella?

-No, I mean, when they...

I pointed at the cattle. They were making faces, too, and moaning.

-Oh, God... Izzie, let's go to your place. I don't care if your parents are acting weird. At least we could watch TV or something. Mom won't remember dinner. She's too stoned. Glaucoma. Right. An excuse. Dad says it's just an excuse.

The cows were huge, like whales on top of each other. It was horrible to watch, all that weight on each other. Amazing their legs didn't give out.

We walked past the power lines, where the clouds and the sky muted the ghosts flowing through them. I stopped and listened to the buzz of them. They sounded like a bee hive, kind of. I thought I might recognize the word if I concentrated. Bees didn't say much with their sounds, but that doesn't mean it had no meaning to them.

-Come on, Izzie. Don't tell me you want to stay and watch the cows do their thing.

I pointed up to the power lines.

-Do you hear that?

-Yeah.

-What do you think the power lines are saying?

-Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

-That's right. But what does it mean to us? Who are they saying it to?

-Isabella, you didn't eat any of my mom's brownies, did you? Come on, weirdo. Let's go watch TV at your house.

At my house, my mother was drinking a bottle of wine by herself at the kitchen table. She had half the wine down, and a little more. She turned and smiled for us. She held the bottle out.

-Do you want some?

-We're underage, Mom.

-Not for long, you ain't. Look at you, girl. When I was your age... When your father was... Oh, go on. Go play with your friend.

I took her into the back yard, where my mother had hollowed out logs which she used as a refuge for wayward bees. The logs were a little rotten looking, and soft, and if I lifted them up, there'd be all sorts of millipedes and worms and ants. I didn't lift it up, though. I wanted to see if there were any bees inside the log. I tapped at it, and stepped back. I waited, and nothing came out.

Europa pointed to the power lines. They ran up from the ground, to our house.

-I think we're being watched.

I looked up to the lines, and there was a man's ghost emanating from the flood of souls in the wires, drifting slowly, like floating downstream. I recognized him. It was the man that had died in the wires. He was drifting with his body angled like he was looking at us. He was reaching out to me.

-That's so weird...

I wondered how to talk to him in the wires. I wondered if the buzzing in the wires meant anything. I reached out a hand to him. He reached out a hand to me. Between us, there was this spark, like a word passing in between us. I felt it, a buzzing like with the bees.

-Do you know what sex is, Europa?

She giggled.

-My father, he works with electricity. He says that sex is the input and output. I/O.

-Hi-ho, Hi-Ho, Off to work we go?

-No. No. Input and output. Switches. I/O is input and output.

-I don't get it.

-It's the bees' talk. It's the way the wires talk, too. It's the language of nature and maybe the language of god in all men. I hear a bee word in these wires. I can hear something. Death, I think. I think that's the closest equivalent. Like the opposite of a bee word. Like the sound of bees when they are screaming and dying. Like the wordless scream of pain. It's an input. There's an output for that sound.

-My dad says electricity is the future. He says cattle are the past. He says I should stay away from cattle and bulls.

-There will always be cattle, Europa. There has always been cattle. Electricity is a newfangled miracle.

I stood up. I planted my hands at my sides and bent over a little.

-What are you doing, Izzie?

-Bees speak very plainly. There is an input of words. There is an output of action. It is a guileless language.

-You speak bee. Right. Show me.

-Do you speak anything?

-No.

-Watch me. I might be able to teach you a little. It's a language of bees.

I danced, then, shivering and moving. I tried to tell the bees about all of us, them and us together, and what we had in common, with the words they knew.

We will all become cattle.

We will go east and be cattle.

The hornets and spiders will look at us with a rancher's eyes, up and down the back of our legs like taking measurements for harvest.

Europa and I will be cattle. We will go east, to good places in the east, where we will be eyed like cattle by everyone – drones, queens, drag car racers – and the ripeness of the years will swell us up with their desire.

We will be cattle.

We will be an input for them and there will be an output.

We will ripen like queens, but we will not be queens. We will birth electricians and programmers and linesmen. The ends will come from the bowels of the earth.

Listen to the words of the electric wires...

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

-Izzie, look out. There's, like...

-I know there's bees, Europa. I know it.

-I think they're...

-Angry.

-A million of them. I think we should...

-Run. Run, Europa. Run for the house. Run for water. Just run.

She held still, curled over herself. She curled into a ball like fetal tissue.

I ran. I ran away from the house, and away from the wires, and away from everyone I knew. I wanted to lead the bees away, and after a while I wasn't being chased. I was leading them. They were simple things, with no memory of their anger. They flew because they were flying. They followed because they were following. To the east, I led them, always east, into a sunrise and a mountain and the old country, where maybe the trees would block out the view of the sky and the powerlines were wrapped in the clutch of trees older and more solid than any newfangled god.

There will always be trees.

There will always be cattle.

There will always be an input and an output.

Generally, this will involve a woman, or an insect, or a woman who is treated like an insect, sometimes. The output is always, eventually, death.

The name for the devil is death in our hearts, but we pretend like death is an act of god.

~~~

9: Cerynitis

The 12 Labors of Hercules include numerous instances of impossible animals. For instance, the Cerynean Hind was sacred to Artemis, and could outrun arrows and the spring of traps. Hercules had to present it, still alive, to his taskmaster.

Animals like me do not speak, but if we could, we would tell you about my brother, the legendary boar and how he plagued the king of the mountains. My brother the boar ravaged ground, tearing up crops and eating it, and spears bounced from his back and men died at his tusks and walls tumbled before his fury. A man was sent after him in the skin of a lion. The two, brother and man, wrestled until winter came, and snow fell and all the mountains of the world were red with both of their blood and struggling.

To him, the man in the skin of a lion, he was in a battle with a terrible monster, determined to drag it back to a menagerie of wild beasts and mysterious things from the deep places of the world.

To him, my brother, he was in a battle with a terrible beast that had come from the unfriendly places to claim the mountain for good, tear down the trees that fed my brother acorns, and replace it all with bitter wheat and fruit that tasted rotting-sweet on his tongue.

I had already escaped by the time they were fighting. The man with the skin of a lion had captured me. I had tripped upon a trap laid for me. I ran and ran, and was faster than the trap, but I was supposed to escape the trap and jump into the falling nets, when I leapt from the nets I was supposed to leap from I jumped into a hidden lake that caught me with a splash of water. I could not run so quickly underwater, and he sailed over in a swift canoe to pull me up between his legs. He pressed me down, placed a boot on my throat and held me still. I had never been captured all the long years of my life. I was so fast, death could not catch me, but here he was, looking into my face with his double eyes – at once a man and a lion, an in-between thing at the birth of what his people would call a grand, glorious civilization built by clearing trees and moving mountains and remaking the ground like industrious ants.

What is the difference between a deer and a caribou? What is the difference between a dog and a wolf? In this, I mean to suggest that a man with a lion's skin and a boar with tusks like giant teeth are one and the same to me, when they grapple with each other, because neither look like deer.

In their battle, the way for the man to win against my brother was not to pin the boar to the ground where the four mighty legs pushed hard against the dirt, but to lift the creature up, and let him dance and writhe against the mountainous clouds. This is also how the boar would win. He would lift the man in the skin of a lion up to the sky on his terrible tusks, and allow the man to sink down, flailing like a rag.

Who wins? I cannot say. I do not know. An animal leads an animal to the gate of the king. An animal leads an animal to the sea and throws him in.

To me, running past so fast they did not know I was watching, I looked into the face of a king, and it was horrible because it was so much like my own. Two eyes. Two nostrils flared, and four limbs sprouting from a body that stood wrong with a single line of back. The kings' eyes were almost deer-like, as if there was an emotion there, behind the eyes, that I could understand: fear and jealousy and guile. The mouth was almost deer-like, with teeth and lips and gums. There's a tongue in the head like mine. They eat plants with flat, broad teeth even as they wrap grape leaves over chunks of flesh for their canine front teeth.

Who is to say what he is? Could it be my brother the boar, that holds me down, and leads me to this gate and king?

I had another brother boar in the wild, far larger and wilier than this. It was the size of a mountain and its tusks would lift the roof of houses like leaves of grass. The hunters came for him, too, thousands of them at once. This boar lived on a different mountain. He walked down from the foothills, charging with all his weight behind him, racing in a straight line.

He was so powerful and proud.

He was not faster than an arrow.

He was not faster than a spear.

When he died, no one could eat of his flesh it was so old and hard and gamey. Even the maggots curled away from the open wounds in the ribs.

They were so proud to have slain this boar.

I was running away from them all, the noise and shouting.

What I wanted was to be free of this struggle of men to take the hills away from lions and boars.

Since the death of this boar, the creatures of the wild have gotten smaller, tamer. The lions fled south. The wolves were kept as pets. The great bulls chew cud in fields and wait patiently to be led to the knives that sacrifice them to holy things they do not see or smell or feel.

I run. Deer run. We always run. It is our way. We have never stopped running from these gated and closed places in the hills. This is why I am sacred to a hunting goddess: my children always run away as fast as we can. We are so fast.

I pass into the future when I run the fastest that I can. I fall into the past when I run faster than that. I run faster than time.

I see how the boars shriveled up into sows, guinea pigs, and hamsters, and then tinier things.

After this, as tiniest things, they escape into the hills my brother boars could not hold against the men that came for them. Only then, escaped, the tiniest things rise up.

People, too, will grow until they are too big. They will have bellies the size of mountains, and huge, meaty arms. They will tear trees up in their tantrums, and throw rocks into the water, crying and crying because they will never be gods, never be more than animals like my brothers and me, who feel pain and suffer and bleed and weep and die.

Call them beautiful, build mighty tombs and monuments to the dead, pray at every alter to every god and goddess while the bears will still walk the edge of the forest waiting for the weak and the slow and the easy and the lions will linger in the long grass wondering how easily they could pick off the young in the playground and the packs of wild dogs will get bigger and smarter and bigger and smarter...

I run so fast that I can go wherever I want to go, whenever I want to go.

There's a field where I've met myself a million times in a single summer. If I could talk to myself, I would have so much to say. But we do not speak to each other. We are deer with swiftest hooves and horns. We are sacred animals. What would it matter if I could speak to myself, a thousand years ago? What is there to say other than this: all the beasts will build up their best societies, and all societies will collapse.

All our brothers and sisters will walk away from all these futile devices, and return to agriculture.

They will tumble away from agriculture as crops fail and new insects learn to eat old plants. They will have to forage, again, like I do, wherever I run to find the sweetest grass.

They will all be foraging, with no businesses to run or toil beneath, and no books to teach them truths that must be rediscovered again in sweat and blood or else be lost, and no programs to bother reaching out a robot hand to ours and no power plants to send the bill collectors after anyone, or even men in lion skins to present their prize to the king of Thrace.

We will all be foraging.

There will be tribes.

The tribes will want to leave messages for each other that will look like heiroglyphics on stone walls.

This is what will happen to us, and to everything with us.

Also, the sun is a finite thing, and even if it is a slow burn, it is the only burn in the whole, wide world.

I run so fast that none may catch me except for only once. I run so fast I pass through the narrow places in time, and the thin walls of things.

I look for fields, always the fields with the sweetest grasses, ripe and green and no ticks hiding there to fatten on my flanks.

I run to spring. I run to summer.

I run.

That is what I would say if I could speak.

~~~

10: Siren

"Yet lost were I not won;   
For beauty hath created been   
T' undo, or be undone."

– from Ulysses and the Siren by Samuel Daniel

Don't let that lying creep, my first manager that we fired, suggest it was him. Odysseus was my first.

My Odysseus walked up the beach with his friends and a surfboard under his arm, an olive-skinned man with hair curled and dark. Muscular, and famous, I knew him on sight. I was posing with a book I didn't read for the camera men along the edge of the sand. I was alone, against the rules my parents had set for me. There I was. I believed I could sing, but it was a voice that came from deep inside of me, passed through microphones and soundboards and sound men. I had never heard my voice alone in an empty room. I never sang unless I had to, for joy. It was my job, and I was told to rest my voice outside the studio.

A singer who never sings, that's me. Odysseus, the King of Thrace, a royal prince among the cellulite queens, lounging among us like a lotus eater, smiled upon all debutantes. Was he married? Was he still married? I don't know. He loved to surf. I was at the ocean, and I saw him surfing, and smiled to myself. I fashioned myself a future queen. Everything else was mine. I had portrayed princesses before on screen.

I was born beneath the lights. My mother held me up to them so much that I knew nothing else. After school I ate cereal and smiled, take after take, or posed with school clothes for catalogs and magazines. I met directors, memorized meaningful family interactions, and went home after dark to sleep in a house three times as large as the set, waiting for my mother and father to stop shouting, throwing parties, or watching grown-up things that I could not for work. Naturally, I was convinced I could sing and sing, by a friend of my father.

I opened my mouth, and sound came out into a microphone and through it. From the speakers, the hay had been spun into gold. Platinum records of music written by men with daughters my age and my face on the cover like everything beautiful in the world. The men came to my door with signs and rummaged through the trash. I flushed everything I could. We mulched and composted. God forbid a hair-- or worse: a maxi pad. They'd take anything. The more blood and sweat, the better. Not snot, oddly enough.

Baby, I'm a star.

Except, until Odysseus asked me to sing.

Odysseus saw me because the cameras were not solely his. He walked to me upon the sand. We had never stood in each other's personal space before. He nodded. "Beautiful day," he said.

It was beautiful. The sun was halfway through the sky. The cresting waves drowned the road sounds. The perfect horizon was dotted with sailboats, surfers laughter, and the timeless haze of summer.

I nodded.

"I saw you at the Grammies," he said.

"I didn't win," I said. It was the first thing I ever said to him.

"You should have," he said. He waved and walked away. "Your voice is as if the sea itself pours from your tongue. I had to stuff my ears to survive, you know, all that sound. The speakers were so loud, I couldn't hear anything. Whenever I'm at concerts I wear earplugs. I didn't rush the stage like the others. I wanted to."

"Flattery," I said. I had heard so much flattery.

"Yes, but still, you didn't win. I'm sorry, I speak badly."

"No. You're fine."

"Forgive me," he said. He bowed like royalty and walked away from me, up the dunes to the café at the edge of the street.

I didn't turn to watch. The shadows turned like sundials. Thirsty, and to the boardwalk, ignoring shutter bugs, I was surprised that I saw him drinking alone. My father's lawyer would kill me for this. But I thought I shouldn't be out alone, anyway, and I wasn't alone if I could sit with him a while, and speak to him. (Of course, I was never alone with all the cameras. Gangly men with their cyclopean eye were always watching over me.)

"May I?" I said, to the King.

"My pleasure," he said.

I carried two sodas. I gave him one beside his beer.

"Do you always go out alone?" I asked.

"I left the crew at the hotel. I have a house here. I don't need a handler."

"I do. I'm underage, you know. I snuck out alone."

"We are never alone when we are on display. I love your voice. I heard you for the first time on a radio in Rome. I had to pull over to hear it, to stop the engine of the car and listen. You really shouldn't be out alone. There are the crazy one – the collectors of things.."

"Then take me home."

"Yours or mine?"

On screen, I never went to his. I was a chaste girl, with kisses on the cheek and hugs at proms. I sang of love that never passed second base.

He smiled. "Which would you like better?"

I looked up to his sunscreen-stained face, his naked eyes wrapped in white where the sunglasses protected him. "I don't know," I said.

We held still like that until the cars moved, and the camera-men shouted encouragement. I stood too long. It was awkward to stand here like this. I'm only a child. I don't know what I'm doing. He does.

"I want to see where you live," I said. "Where do kings live?"

"Castles in the sand," he said. "We can walk there, if you like. It's not a mile away up the beach. The surf carried me here, with my board."

He lived on the water, in a condo on stilts at the beach. Inside he had surf boards, open windows and hardwood floors. I had to leave my shoes at his foyer, and walked barefoot on my toes on that hardwood.

"Sing for me," he said. He had a piano, ivory white, a baby grand shorter than the surfboards along the walls.

He played a diminished chord, a major seventh, and resolved. I knew the song. My first hit. I laughed. I opened my mouth to sing.

Nothing came out.

He closed his eyes, playing the chords. I took a breath and tried to sing. Something came out, like the sound of a conch shell against the ear, as if my chest was a conch shell, and all the water sounds poured out from me. I was the sea. I had the song of the sea.

"What is the sound of joy? Is it truly this?" he said. He closed the keys of the piano. "You were too young to know the songs of the world. Too old to continue living so beguiled."

I doubled over. I coughed to make the noise of it. It sounded like choking. Is this my voice when I project? How many machines stood between my rusty textures and the tone of the layered strings and drums?

A life lived in the lights and the cameras, what did I know of song? I lived more in empty rooms and homes carved up into camera tracks and seats on the set, sound studios where I stood alone while my father watched and spoke, disembodied, from the other side of the glass.

My song is of the sea, and only of the sea. A wind like whispered waves from my lips, poured into a piano. This texture hurts my lungs, spills over me with gravel. Sand spilled from my guts. Rocks and stones and driftwood, turtle shells and dessicated seaweed.

Afraid I ran upstairs, trying to sing the songs I knew by heart, trailing beachheads.

"No song," said Odysseus, climbing after me. "None."

Why does he do this to me? What have I done to him?

Into the bed, and dead sand dollars, now, like frozen coins, tumbling onto pillows.

My father and his friends had led me by the hand from stage to stage, so sure of myself -- dancing on the stage with such applause, all lie and the machinery that contained the sound they threw upon the screaming fans who rushed the stage, trampling each other for a touch of my skin. All sand. All salty sea sand. I could not sing to stop the men from following me.

Odysseus climbed the stairs, the King of Thrace that threw me into the rocks I choked upon. My voice--my horrible voice--scattered onto silken waves.

My tears, my bleeding on the rocks.

Curse Odysseus, and all the men who would drown in my arms.

~~~

11: Tiresius

Everyone remembers how he was blind, but nobody remembers the why of it. He blinded himself, when he was made a woman for seven years by pitiless gods.

When he was young and he wasn't yet a prophet, the gods turned Tiresius into a woman. She found, after being a man among men, that she could not live among her people as a woman. She learned the truth about the men and women of her time and place in a flash of violence: men were drunk and laughing together all the time; women endured. Tiresius could not walk the streets alone without the risk of rape. She could not stand in a doorway and say hello to the men that used to be her friends. They looked at her differently now. They had a smile that should not have been there. They had a lingering touch that promised of unwanted advances, and soon.

To the hills, then, in the night, to the ocean, Tiresius dressed as a man and fled. After so many years spent as a man, Tiresius could pass as a sailor well enough. The storms came, blew the ship to rocks, and she was not as experienced a sailor as she had claimed.

She fell ashore, among stones. Thousands upon thousands of stones. The forest of stones had faces, and arms, and all sorts of pieces broken away from the statues that had eroded. The island was made entirely of crumbling statues.

Tiresius knew where she was. She knew how to survive, there. As a woman, she had learned how to endure, and she could bear it with no shame and no pride. She put out her own eyes with a stone finger.

This is how she became the blind seer: after she put out her eyes, she wandered from rock to rock, searching for the statue's lips. She let the stones whisper into her ear all the stories of their lives.

All the while, she heard the hissing of the gorgons all around her. They watched her, curiously, that strange woman who ate leaves off the tough vines and shipwrecked seeds that sprouted in the cracks of the marble. This strange woman did not seek the counsel of the gorgons of the island, which surprised the old goddesses, and instead this woman tried to listen to all the stories of the gorgons' garden of stones.

The gorgons, not truly monstrous, not truly cruel, pitied the blind Tiresius. They brought her sides of roasted goat to eat, sometimes, and fresh fruit from their own gardens.

When all the stones had been listened to, and all the thousands of lives had poured into the blind woman's ear, the gorgons made a raft for Tiresius. They touched the woman for the first time in seven years, while she was sleeping. The gorgons were strong and quick. The gorgons placed Tiresius upon a raft, stocked with food. The gorgons pushed her out to sea.

The goddesses called to their old lover, the sea, to heal the pathetic woman in the raft.

They had never spoken to Tiresius. They had never harmed her.

When the old sea god saw the woman in the raft, he assumed the woman had blinded herself and, ergo, did not want to be healed from that. Poseidon assumed that the woman wanted to return to her former life, as a man, because that was the wound she had that would harm her most of all at that time and place in the world.

And that is how Tiresius returned to his manhood after seven years spent as a woman.

That is how Tiresius became blind.

That is how Tiresius became wise.

~~~

12: Eurydice

"What shall I do without Eurydice?

Where shall I go without my love?

Eurydice! Eurydice!

O heavens! Answer!"

– Orfeo ed Euridice, Glück

On the farthest shore of the stillest lake, the boatman was only a child. I thought he would be older – skeletal, perhaps -in some kind of robe. He was just a little boy in dirty, mismatched basketball shoes, and a worn-out soccer uniform. He was covered in jewelry. His fingers were coiled in rings that sparkled even in the muted moonlight of this place. His neck was covered in necklaces. His wrists and ankles were lined with bracelets. His face was hollowed out, like the kids I had seen with me in the cancer wards.

His paddle boat was not what I expected, either. It was a plastic two-seater. Both people had to pump their legs on bicycle pedals to drive the little boat forward.

Of course, paddle boats are always rentals.

-Hey there, lady. You going across?

-I guess so.

-You can swim for it, but you'll drown.

-Or, we can take your paddle boat.

-Yeah, but you gotta pay me for it. They leave you anything good?

-You want jewelry?

I pointed to his hands and arms and ankles and neck.

-Yeah. Or money. No paper money. That stuff don't count. Only coins. One Euro's good, but not a hundred. I don't give change.

-I got you covered, kid. Why?

He grunted at me, and shrugged.

-Got anything good for me?

I slipped one of my earrings out. I handed it to the boy.

-Do you take pearls?

-That ain't real pearl. The gold is real. I like gold.

He plucked it from my hand and ripped off the fake pearl, leaving only the gold stud. He turned around, and I saw his back, at last. He had earrings lined up on his back like fish scales. He felt around with his hands for an empty place among the pearls and bangles and loops.

Feo hadn't even left me wearing my grandmother's pearl earrings. He had left me with the fake ones I wore when I was hanging around our apartment. I hope Feo gave my grandmother's pearl earrings to my sister. He would.

The boy struggled to find a place for the gold stud on his back.

-Just a minute. Can you help me find an empty spot?

I looked closely into the dense jewelry pinned to his shirt.

I saw a place where my little stud could fit in the center of a hanging hoop. I touched it with my finger.

-There's a spot.

-I like coins, better. You can make wishes with coins.

-What do you wish for?

-If I tell you, they won't come true. Don't you know anything, lady?

After I placed my golden stud without a pearl on his back, he adjusted his clothes after all his contortions. Then, he helped me into the little plastic paddle boat.

-You have to paddle, too, or we'll just spin around. It's not funny.

I sat down gently on the plastic seat. The boat rocked. The dark surface of the lake rippled gently, like heavy ink.

He flopped into the seat next to me. I startled and grabbed the edges of the paddleboat. He laughed at me, and it sounded like coughing. He smiled at me, with a kid's goofy, gap-toothed smile. I started paddling and he didn't do anything to help. He sat there, smiling. The boat spun in circles

-I thought you said it wasn't funny to do that?

-It's only funny when I do it.

I stopped peddling.

-If you're going to be this way, I'll want my earring back.

-You can't have it. It's mine, now.

-I'll swim if I have to. Give me my earring back and I'll swim.

-It's mine!

-I'll want it exactly as I gave it to you, too. You'll have to fix it. You'll have to find some glue and find the fake pearl where you threw it.

-No fair!

-Yes, fair. If you're going to be a brat, I'll take my earring back, and you'll have to fix it or I won't go anywhere until you do.

He conceded with a grunt. The little grump set his jaw like a tiny boxer. He stared straight ahead at the far shore across the lake. We paddled together. We still drifted towards my side, but we didn't drift too far.

(I heard Feo's voice in the distance, far behind me, calling out my name. I thought of turning back to look, but what was the point of looking backwards, now? The past was never farther from me than it was at this moment in time.)

The boy looked back.

-He ought to wait his turn.

-He should.

At the farthest shore of the stillest lake the boy guided our paddleboat to a giant abandoned amusement park, all lights off. I stepped off onto a wooden dock among the paddle boats. I was careful not to get my feet wet on the rock beach. I had heard about these waters. The amusement park's fence was cut up, and rusty. It wouldn't keep a soul out of the park. From the fence, I looked in at all the rides, and they looked no better than the fence. All the doodads and whirligigs had snapped limbs, and everything was loose in a swamp rot. Bits of thread hung like cut shoelaces from the parachute drop. The rollercoaster in the distance wouldn't survive someone walking along the tracks, much less the running of rusted cars.

I went straight to the funhouse, in the center. I wanted to see if I could walk on the ceiling, now, where all the furniture was pinned up. I wanted to walk through the surprises that jumped out to scare people. More than anything in the world, I wanted to lose myself in the mirror maze.

I walked through the giant clown's mouth, past the ticket booth and the turnstile that counted off visitors. The number on the turnstile was very high.

Just past the turnstile, the employee's-only door hung open. I peered inside, at a small dressing room. A yellow dog slept on a pile of torn clown costumes, in the center of a three-way dressing mirror. Three reflections from three angles slept there, with the dog.

I walked inside with my quietest steps, careful not to wake the animal or the reflections of it.

I looked at myself in the dressing room mirror. I was a dark shape, there, so far back from the mirror, and draped in black. I searched around the room for better clothes.

Garish clown clothes hung on a rack beside a dressing table that had no mirror, anymore. Wigs in heaps across the table. Empty drawers open, everything dusty with bits of hair.

I took a vest that appeared to be my size. I selected the cleanest-feeling wig from the dresser. I carried them back outside. I walked five steps away, softly, from the sleeping dog. I shook out the dust from my new things. I stripped my black suit jacket off, and replaced it with the clown's vest. Out in the moonlight, I saw it had yellow stars, all shaped at odd angles, in a field of bright, joyful red. I removed the respectable wig Feo had gotten me for Christmas, and scratched at my bristly scalp. My new wig was a bright, purple ball of whimsy.

I stepped past the entryway, into the funhouse.

The first little room of the funhouse was full of optical illusions. A black and white picture on the wall could be spun in its round frame. Viewed one way up, it was an old crone with a hideous nose. Viewed the other, it was a beautiful woman in a wedding gown. Other pictures were of either elegant vases or mirrored silhouettes of famous presidents, all cracked with mold and damp.

I climbed down a set of stairs, looking for the mirror maze.Dogs barked in the distance. They barked and barked. I heard shouting, too, and maybe music, but it was muted too much by the funhouse walls to make it all out. It didn't really matter to me.

I quickened my steps down into the depths of the funhouse.

Kerosene lamplight spilled out from a doorless doorway up ahead. I walked towards the flickering kerosene, quickly.

A strongman sat on a bent lawnchair. His oak tree face squinted at me from atop his giant's body. He wore a leopard-skin unitard that only reached a strap over one shoulder, the sagging muscles of his ancient chest exposed.

-Nothin' to say. All are welcome here, no matter what.

I looked past the old, resting strongman, to the room he had chosen.

A long chain of metal chimes, like a giant's xylophone, accumulated cobwebs along the wall. I imagine children were encouraged, once, to pound the chimes with hammers and make the cacophonic music of the very young to rattle through the funhouse walls like ghostly chains. The chimes were silent now, and not even the kerosene lamp light seemed beautiful reflecting off the scratches and scuffs.

A magician's assistant slept on a cot in the corner beside the chimes. She had a rough, military-surplus blanket, but beneath it she wore a spangled leotard and black fishnets down her arms and legs. Stiletto heels waited like red cats at the foot of the musty cot. She did not wake up for me.

Adjacent to the xylophone, two clown statues gestured at passageways into the mirror maze. One clown was an entrance, and one clown was an exit. This was the place I had wanted most.

The strongman picked up a can of beans from the floor behind his boot. He ate his beans cold with a rusty fork.

-Go on, then.

I did. Into the mirror maze, alone. I gazed into my own eyes, and looked my body over from every angle in the world. I stared ahead at the bottom of my feet, and above at my own side. I found my right face to my left, sideways from my own self.

My funereal make-up was layered on so thick, and so plain. I hated it. I smeared my eyeliner around the thick layers of foundation with my thumb. I used the back of my white sleeve to pull the heavy, purple lipstick wider. I wanted to be smiling, not serene.

-Look me in the eye and do you see how happy I am, everyone?

Everyone was smiling at me. We were all so happy here, and everywhere we looked there was someone lost, and found again. Every corner in the mirror maze is the shadow of the lost and found, attempted embraces with glass, and laughter. We were all friends here, in the mirror maze, and all of us were smiling and dressed like happy clowns.

Then, I heard a man wailing. I heard the strongman laughing at the wailing man. Was it another one like me? No, I recognized the wailing man.

-Feo has come for me.

-Well, the strongman won't have any of that. I can't hear what they're saying, but I can hear the tone of the shouting. I hope they don't wake the strongman's wife.

-There, it's quiet now, friends.

The chimes shuffled off their dust and cobwebs. Mallets struck the cobwebs loose. A tune echoed through the funhouse walls.

I recognized that tune, like I recognized the voice.

-He's come to win you back, everyone is saying.

-Well, I don't want to go back. Dying was so much work. I was glad to be rid of the old bones that let me down so badly in the end.

-His song is so beautiful. It might work.

-Have husbands ever come here looking for their wives?

-Of course. Dozens. Hundreds, even. A giant came once that grabbed the strongman by the throat and shook him like a leaf to rescue another man's wife that the giant had accidentally killed. Men come here, and win back their women.

-Any wives ever come for husbands?

-Of course not. Don't be absurd. Why would we?

-Exactly. Women understand. Birth and death are our domains. They are too worldly.

-Still, such a famous husband...

-Have you ever lived with a composer? You think his song is beautiful on the chimes. And it was beautiful on a piano, too. Then, after the week had passed, and he was still hammering out that same tune (My famous husband! The composer! The genius!) I couldn't escape the song. I wandered the city, humming it. I rummaged for apples that were just right (He would only eat Roma apples, but I've managed to fool him with some Braeburns once or twice when I changed the sticker.) and I had that horrible tune stuck in my head, chasing me everywhere I went, and making me forget which apple is which. And the musical pacing! At night, he woke up and paced, humming to himself, that same tune and variations and counter medleys while I was just trying to get some sleep. God forbid I missed a note on the piano. I used to love playing the piano, but not anymore. No, not anymore.

-Did he ever beat you?

-No, he never beat me.

-Then, be grateful. Many of the others were beaten, and their husbands came here looking to beat their wives for dying when we weren't supposed to. The husbands were so angry at their wives, they'd do anything to hurt them again, even follow them here.

-That's awful. No, he didn't beat me. He never beat me. I almost wish he had sometimes.

-Don't say that! That's awful!

-I said 'almost'. It would ease the tension in the air and give him guilt to carry so he'd treat me better. Look, have you ever been married to a creative genius? Do you know what it's like? All the mood swings, and constant grumbling and moaning and whining about this critic or that critic, this review or that review. Sometimes, he'd throw things around and act like an ogre and he was just trying to get himself in the right mood to write an angry part of the music.

-That's not so bad.

-You didn't have to live with it. I was always walking on pins with him.

-You sound like you didn't love him at all.

-I did love him. I married him, didn't I? Wait... I know this part of the song. He's going to add a counterpoint. It will be lovely, even on those musty old chimes. He really ought to find an organ. This song sounds lovely on a big, grand pipe organ. It does. Look, I admit it. I'm glad I heard his best song one last time.

-You're still in love with him. You love his music, too.

-Of course I love his music. Look, just because I loved him and his music, doesn't mean I want him here chasing after me.

-What about him? Who will take care of him?

-That is an excellent question. He can't take care of himself. I kept the bills paid on time. I put him on a strict allowance. He collected butterflies, you know. He'd spend a fortune if I let him, spending everything on dead butterflies in jars and bins. And him in the kitchen? He could start a fire trying to boil water. I've seen it happen. The towel he used to lift the pot's lid was too long and caught fire. He didn't know what to do about it. He held up the flaming towel, utterly confused, with no idea what to do about it. Someone has to take care of him or he's just lost. He's completely lost.

-Listen, the song is so beautiful. Don't you want to go back to him?

-But I had to be quiet all the time, living with him. I had to walk quietly, with muffled steps. If I made too much noise, he'd shout at me to be quiet. I watched television with headphones. I listened to records with headphones. If they got too loud, even in the headphones, he'd come up behind me and thump my head. He'd shout, I need it quiet! I'm trying to work! God, I had to be so quiet all the time. Here is the part where he starts singing. He's got a lovely voice. He could have been in musicals. He had wanted to be an opera singer, once, but he didn't have the voice for that. Musicals, though, he'd have done well in musicals. Ready, two, three, and sing, my love!

-To live with his beautiful music... Maybe it will be different this time.

-For a time, perhaps it will. Listen, don't let the music fool you. He's not a beautiful man, inside. He's clingy, and sweaty in summer nights, sweating all over you. He loves spicy food and farts constantly. Burping, too. Here's where he will let the chimes echo, and he will just sing alone. Really, it's lovely, the absence of the chimes. Listen to him. Doesn't it make you want to weep, how much he loves me?

-Of course it does!

-But it's a sham! He has talent, that's all. It is only talent. His love for me is no greater or smaller than any man's. He just has more talent to express it, that's all. His grief is nothing special. Look, the song's almost over. One more muffled chord... And... There.

-Oh, it's over. Oh, it was so beautiful. How could the strongman refuse such a song?

-Easily. He's no softie, that strongman. I saw him myself, eating cold beans with a nasty fork.

Songs don't sway men like the strongman. A good fight, that'd work. Not music. Listen, do you hear the strongman, now? He's laughing. Good for him. No song will work on the strongman. Look, let's leave this subject alone. I'm sick of it.

-Listen to the chimes, now. It's the oldest song in a child's mind, as nostalgic as it's enemy, the lullabye: the chime song of a grandfather clock, and waking up. He starts his song again.

-The strongman won't listen to him, don't worry.

-Not the strongman now. Do you see in the corner of the corner of the shadow by the dustmite and the cobweb? There is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of your husband. There he plays on, a beautiful song of love and grieving, but he plays for the strongman's wife. She's woken up from her dream. She's rolled over in her cot to see the melancholy composer at the chimes.

-Well, that's pretty smart of him. I could get Feo eating out of my palm if I wanted to. I could really get him going. I could get his attention no matter what. I had my ways with him, more powerful than his songs.

-Now the strongman's wife is crying. Weeping, even.

-My husband... He could find another caretaker for himself easily enough. There are plenty of wealthy divorcees lingering in the opera halls, waiting for a song to burn them back to life. It was hard work, dying. It took months of work. Doctors and nurses and all sorts of technicians were involved. They were all very smart, hard-working people, and it's so rude of my husband – so typically rude – to throw their constant effort back in their faces. Not to mention the undertaker... The people at my funeral...

-Look, I can see the strongman standing up.

-His wife is crying. Looks like I'll have to go, soon. I don't know when I'll be back, my friends. If I ever cried, Feo would do anything – anything. That's what husbands do. It was great meeting all of you. I'm sorry I have to go so soon.

-The strongman is here, in the mirror maze, and he's coming for you.

And, like magic, he appeared.

-Hey.

-I'm leaving, aren't I?

He wasn't the strongman, anymore. He had been wearing a strongman costume that was all an illusion of lamplight and mirrors and latex over foam muscles. The old oaken face of the man was the same, but beneath the thick strongman costume, he was dressed like a stage illusionist in a black, velvet suit. It was a very dirty suit. It had holes in strange places, and smelled terrible.

-Hey, you've got to come with me, now.

-He made your wife cry, didn't he?

-I told him you'd go with him. The bastard. I don't like people coming here and messing with my wife.

-I'm sorry he made your wife cry. I didn't want him to do that.

-Bastard thinks he won, too. I'm supposed to let him take you. He has to watch the far shore, and never look back. If he looks back, I'll kick his ass and you stay here forever. I don't want to see his ugly face, looking back where he made my wife cry.

-I'm sorry he made her cry.

I'll walk so softly, just like when he was working, and I had to be so quiet. I couldn't imagine children in the apartment, making noise, making him yell and fume and stomp. I couldn't imagine piano lessons, with him leaning over their shoulders and correcting them all the time, every missed note and every wrong inflection of the palm above the keys. Look, I love him. I married him, didn't I? I put up with all his ways for years. But then, I got sick, and it was so much work to die, and it was the most work I'd ever done about anything, and it was a lot of work for a lot of very smart people to keep me hanging on as long as I did in pain so I could be with him a little longer, because I love him. I sacrificed enough for him.

I'm flattered he came. I'm very flattered. Don't think that I'm not. I'm grateful, too. It's just that here I am, where I'm supposed to be, with all my happy new friends, and he's come here to take me away and he never asked me what I wanted. It was what he needed. It was for himself that he came here, not for me.

I'll be quiet as a mouse.

He won't trust the silence. He'll hold his breath and listen. Composers have excellent ears. Better than cats' are composer's ears. All they asked of me in life will curse them now. I won't whisper. I won't breathe. I won't let my arms swing and brush against the cloth of my fabulous new vest.

He'll turn and look. I know my husband. That is what he does. He is impulsive. He will walk without hearing me with his brilliant ears. He will call my name. I will not answer him. He'll turn.

He'll turn and look at me.

I'll smile for him, a madcap smile with my new wig and my new vest and my improved make-up. He'll barely recognize me because I'll be so happy to see him one last time. I'll smile and tell him I love him, and I'll wave. Then, I'll run away as fast as I can.

When he's gone at last, I will scrub the funeral off my face at the night lake of forgetting. I'll look up at the moon. I'll howl so loud you'll think I'm a banshee.

I'll howl for a thousand years.

~~~

13: Arachne

Penelope wove her husband back to life in nineteen years. Arachne wove greater than this, until the gods in their jealousy left her with nothing but the application of her art.

1

If it bends, it can be woven. Hair braids, rivers braid, and fingers fold together in prayer. Cars crash into each other; the metals bend around the engines. With a strong enough machine, cars could be woven into each other – crumple zone to crumple zone, gas lines snaking like Hermes' staff between two twisted engine blocks. I'm too disciplined to stop what I'm doing to doodle the weaving of cars on the naked particleboard walls of this café. In a few weeks, I don't know if I will still have that discipline. I may lose my mind if I keep this up.

I sit in a corner of an abandoned café, and weave endlessly, endlessly, with all the threads and yarns and found things from the empty café. The weave of my own life bent me here. My back is hunched over. My fingers are long and nimble. I never abandon my weave.

Dr. Paris, Karen if we're being friendly, brings me food. She used to be my professor. I haven't been to class in a long time. She brings me new threads, new yarns. She lingers long enough to ask if I've heard Nicole's ghostly voice falling into my weave, yet. I don't answer her. Nicole is gone, and I'm trying to save her. I'm trying to catch her in my weave. Until I'm done, I have nothing to say.

We were art students - Nicole and me – who studied with Dr. Karen Paris. Every Tuesday she encouraged us to go to a café for a public act of art. The café was run by an alumni and friend of the art program. She allowed students to take the stage on Tuesdays and try to perform their art. Anything made on stage that night would be left there for auction. People wrote in their bids on a little ticket beside the art. The highest bidder got the art and the student artist got paid for it. Unless no one wanted the art, and then the artist had to come pick it up in three days or it would be thrown out with the trash. Most of the pieces didn't sell.

That's the café where I'm weaving and weaving, and it's all empty now, and if you saw it you wouldn't even know it was a beautiful place to fall in love, because it's so ugly now and all anyone can see is my work spiraling out from my corner, all over the floor, and along the walls, and into the restroom. Karen has to be so careful where she steps when she comes to see me. My weave consumes the space.

I performed once, when it was still bustling , before Nicole transcended . I knitted skeletons out of white yarn. I managed to chain five together before my time ran out on stage. I hung them up, all deformed and strange and chained together. They sold for ten dollars at auction. It was the most I had ever made for a piece.

Dr. Paris, I think, was the one who bought the piece. She had listed herself under her first name, though, so it was just Karen on the little sheet. When I came by to collect the money, I saw the ticket and thought it might be her handwriting. Maybe she had someone else write it in to hide that she had just bought her own student's art. Maybe it wasn't her. I don't know.

This was the café where Nicole would transubstantiate, or transcend, or become a ghost on her night of making art, but it hadn't happened yet. There were a few dozen tables, a fireplace that was never lit, and art all over the walls. Dr. Paris was here all the time, flirting with the staff. When she saw me there, she bought me an espresso and chatted with me about how I was doing.

-Fine.

-How is your work going?

-Fine. Yours?

-Do try to act excited about your work. Smile, or something, Arachne.

-I don't even know what I'm doing.

-You're missing the point, Arachne. Relax. Enjoy your life when you aren't working. Work is hard enough.

-I guess so. Makes sense.

A long pause, and she stood over me and neither one of us said anything to each other. It was long enough that it was awkward. She looked down at me, and I up at her, and neither one of us had anything to say. We each sipped our drinks, waiting for the silence to stop.

Karen spoke, and it stopped.

-What are you working on, anyway?

-A series of photographs.

-Exciting! What's it called?

-Remember Your Grandmother.

-I love generational pieces. I hope you get your family involved.

2

Everyone would be better off if we always remembered our grandmothers. That's what I was thinking when I made the piece. I crocheted a rainbow of threads into a sweater – remember the myth of Grandma's infamous sweaters – but that's not all I wove into the yarn. I included cinnamon sticks, and whole nutmeg and dried apples because autumnal smells remind us all of home for the holidays, and I wrapped ancient spatulas and pages of cookbooks and bits of silvery wig hair doused in Ben-Gay, and nylons and the costume jewelry of brooches and broaches and bangles and fake pearls and earrings like Christmas ornaments, and sleeves that are too long, a neck that's too small, and bits of dried-up, sugar-free candy woven in like artificial jewels and doesn't everyone just think of their grandmother? Don't we just smell her in the air, and remember her? I think the world would be a better place if we all just remembered our grandmothers.

Nicole thought it was a mess, like a mink coat attacked by vegans.

-You seriously want me to wear this?

-Yes!

-Seriously?

-Please?

-In public?

In a bank, I took her picture as she leaned over the counter and made a withdrawal from her checking account – five dollars, because she only had ten dollars in her account total. Then, to the L-train, where we rode all over the city. She stood holding the ropes while I photographed her. She sat down in a crowd while I photographed her.

-Look like you're remembering your grandmother.

-Did you have to include Ben-Gay if this is for a photograph series?

-Doesn't it smell like her?

-Maybe yours. Mine always smelled like lemon cleaner, and cigars. My grandfather was heavy into cigars.

-I could spray you down with lemon cleaner.

-No

Nicole was a painter, and like all painters, she believed in the purity of her form. She traced the strokes of her brush all the way back to Caravaggio, and had little real respect for the madcap, rogue art of people like me, with my weavings and my photographs, made and found things.

The photos were all taken with a crazy old camera I had gotten off e-Bay. The photos came out distressed, over-lit, and full of character. I watched Nicole emerging from chemistry beneath the red light. I considered telling her that I was in love with her, but I thought better of it, because maybe she was straight. It's hard to know these things when you want something to be true. She wasn't around when I came out of the dark room, so I didn't say anything.

I guess the pictures came out all right. I got a B on the assignment. The sweater is still in my closet. I hung it up next to a sweater my own grandmother made for me when she was still alive. She was a master of knitting needles. She had sewn me a black sweater with a human skull on the chest, big as a giant's head. I wore that sweater all the time. I learned how to weave and sew and knit because I needed to learn how to repair my grandmother's sweater. I wore it every chance I had.

She had given it to me to keep me warm when I was out late at night with my friends. I was a stoner, and I listened to death metal because the people around me listened to death metal. That sweater was like a calling card, and every complement I got for it from all the strange people I met late at night, or in someone's basement, or at a club that ignored my fake ID, was like a complement for my grandmother. They reminded me of her, even when I was out late.

My grandmother was a single mom, in Ohio. She worked at a library and lived with her unmarried sister. My mother told stories of what it was like to have two Jewish mothers. When I knew my grandmother, she was an imp in an electric wheel chair. She joked about chasing down her philandering boyfriends. She knitted strange and obscure relics of yarn – golden teddy bears with menorahs on their chest, mittens with eyes and teeth she called closet monsters, and a sweater my mother wore with an actual, honest-to-god, optical illusion on the chest made out of circles and squares all mixed up. My grandmother had been a librarian. She was funny and sweet and kind. She let me drink coffee with cream and sugar when my mother wasn't looking. When I came out of the closet she patted my hands and said, Oh? Are you sure? I know a nice boy at Temple with very small hands. Feminine hands. Put him in a dress, you might never know. Nice legs, too. What else could I say about my grandmother except this: I want to remember her. I want to remember her forever.

And, I want to remember Nicole, remembering her grandmother in my art.

I kept the pictures in my purse. I wandered around the campus, carrying the photographs. I imagined running into Nicole and gracefully showing her the photographs and she'd be so impressed. She'd say something like Wow, that's me? Heh, looks good. All right. Or maybe she'd say, Fuckin' A! I bet you're going to rub them in BenGay and pumpkin pie spice, right?

Anyway, I walked around and imagined what she'd say. I didn't run into her that day. I guess she was in the studio. I ran into her when I didn't have anything in my purse to show her. I had to turn in the assignment. She was in a flowing skirt, with a tight tank top and she looked so fucking hot I could have jumped her bones right there, on the sidewalk. Was it love? Was it lust?

-Hey! Where are you going right now?

-Class. Hey, you know those pictures we took?

-What? Oh, show me later. Where are you going right now?

-Class.

-Well, skip it. Come on, I want to show you something fucking eternal.

She took me by the arm, and took me to this office building, downtown. In the lobby, the company had made art purchases of Jacques de Gheyn II. These were all still lives: flower paintings with tiny, detailed lizards running over the table, with butterflies and fresh fruit and a Portuguese pomegranate cracked in half, red as pulp and so wet you'd think you could reach out and pluck the little, juicy seeds from the canvas. It smelled like fruit and flowers. The artist had captured the veins of the pomegranate and flowers so well that they gave off the beautiful scent.

Businessmen walked past us on their way to work. I think a security guard was eyeing us idly. But, they put it out in their lobby, supposedly for people to see.

It took four bus transfers to get there. We weren't going to leave so soon after only seeing a moment's glance of the paintings. Outside we ridiculed the corporate-art sculpture of cold, disposable modernism that graced the grounds outside the beautiful Renaissance flower paintings frozen in time for a thousand years. We walked around to a lunch cart and blew our budget on hot dogs the size of our heads that would make us sick later.

I considered how I could weave such hot dogs in fatty braids of meat, and wrap them in even larger braids of meat, until I could shape a pregnant woman out of them, lay the form out flat on an abattoir floor in meat, to take its picture.

-Don't just stare at it; eat it.

-I don't really like hot dogs.

-Well, it's not like it's going to get any better with age.

I bit into the meat. It tasted like early death, and stomach pains, and every summer I had ever known in my life where I was at a friend's birthday party and I could eat pork, free from parental supervision, imagining what I'd say to my grandmother if she ever knew. Somewhere up there, she's plotting a Tabasco-powered punishment for her granddaughter's treyf afternoon.

-How does it taste?

-You know I'm Jewish, right?

-Are you?

-Yeah.

-Shit, really?

-This is the best fucking hot dog I've ever had.

-Want mine? It's disgusting.

-No. No, I think I've had enough.

Sick for days and nights together. Crashing in her dorm room, on the couch she smuggled against a wall where there was supposed to be a desk, but she liked the couch better than desks and did more work there. Her roommate had dropped out at the beginning of the semester, and we could spend the night in peace, me in her roommates' bed staring at the way moonlight falls over her face, and then sunlight. I don't know what happened to the desk she was supposed to have, but she never had it and it seemed so natural to lounge with her on a couch, watching sitcoms in between the hours of our real lives of school and part-time work.

I modeled, sometimes, for quick cash. It was easy work, and I usually didn't mind the nudity. I sat around, posing naked for classrooms full of artists, and I wondered what Nicole was doing right that second. She was a cocktail waitress, so she was usually asleep when I was working.

I could imagine us drifting off together, falling into each other's beds until one of us decided it was time to bear a child, and raising that child, and living a long, wasted life of normal, unexciting bliss and love and happiness. Maybe she'd dump me and break my heart, or I'd do it to her, and then we'd get that same substantial state of heavy, pregnant living – debted up, bound to a household, a budget, a child or two, a mild civic activism, and all the boring shit that is what happens when people are happy -- really, really fucking amazingly indescribably happy. Normal shit. Boring shit. Life. The stuff you get when you remember your grandmother. I was naked on a stage, posed classically as if for Donatello. I imagined the normal life that had been so wonderful since the dawn of civilization.

Alas, this is not our love story. We never fell in love. She slept naked and shameless, but we never made love. I don't know if she knew I was gay, or if she was gay, herself. It's not like I carried a fucking sign, you know?

We talked about sex, but both of us had been with men before, and we had better things to talk about than sex, which was pornography to us, not art. We were interested in immortality, she and me, and transcending life.

I told you she was a painter, and her work traced a straight, beautiful brush stroke all the way from Caravaggio.

3

I was modeling in Karen's office, in my grandmother's sweater and a skirt I had made myself from strips of old leather skirts. She was Dr. Paris, to me, right then, and a tenured instructor of undergraduate artists. She had her pad out and carefully angled the blinds to favor me with just the right amount of sunlight. I was on her couch, lounging back gracefully and staring up at the ceiling.

-Hold still.

-I am.

-You're moving your foot. Are you uncomfortable?

-Sorry. I'm fine.

And the charcoal swooped across the page in loops and whorls and lines. I couldn't see it. I didn't know what I looked like.

-I've had a lot of my students pose for me. I have ten years of sketch books. It's a long term project of mine. Students drawn by their teacher.

-Do you remember their names?

-Only faces. Some of the names, maybe. I remember faces, Arachne. Tell me about your sweater. Did you make it?

I smiled. I shook my head no. I didn't tell her anything else about my grandmother's sweater.

When she was done with the finishing touches, she sprayed the paper with hairspray, and covered it with wax paper.

-Can I see it, Dr. Paris?

-Oh... Maybe later. I'm not done.

I unlocked the door.

-That's it, right?

-Yes, thank you for doing this. I'll be sure to show you the final painting.

I turned to leave, then paused at the door. I looked back at her. She was watching me. She would not stop watching me.

-What is it, Dr. Paris?

-When an artist sees another person, she only sees the surfaces of the other – lines, shapes, colors of the skin. When an artist sees another artist, the energy in the air is electric, and invisible.

-You're imagining things, Dr. Paris.

I closed the door and went to the studio to work a while until I had to go to work. I was trying to condense everything Nicole ever said about being a cocktail waitress into a single canvas. She was working at a strip club every Saturday, now. She was surrounded by men who thought they had the right to touch her a little, and it was all right to everyone who worked there because it made for great tips and it was better than being a stripper. She moved glasses among the crowd, a hand brushed her leg, or her arm, or pressed against the small of her back, and sometimes other places. I couldn't think of anything meaningful because I loved her too much, and wanted something better for her.

All sketches abandoned.

All imagery lost.

I ran out of time. Tonight was Nicole's night at the café, where she was going to be performance painting.

Nicole had set up a shower curtain in a circle around herself and her canvas, with sultry tango music from an antique record player. She was, supposedly, stripping naked and painting her self-portrait naked from behind the curtain. Every few minutes she'd ring a bell and shove the damp canvas out from behind the curtain to show everyone what she had done so far, along with an article of clothing. We clapped for her emerging artifacts, but we did not know if she was wearing clothes or not.

I assumed she was naked before she started. That was her style. I had woven her long hair into the mesh of a wicker basket while she was asleep, once, and she woke up instantly, angry because I had forced her to wear something when she preferred to be sleeping naked. We had never made love, but did she even know what it did to me when she was nude before me, unmoved and unmoving like a statue? God, she was so beautiful, and so free.

This was her performance. Nicole was painting herself unclothed, standing behind a curtain, sending out clothes that covered whatever region she was painting. Shirt for torso, and pants for legs. Hat for head, and hairband for long, long hair. A bra, and panties. Socks, last of all. Each artifact was joined by the canvas for a moment, with the new paint from the prior piece of clothing gone. The canvas was wet and glistening, as if fresh from a shower. At the end of the painting, she stuck her naked arm out, with the canvas in her hand. She put the canvas on a stand there, and left her arm out. She spun her hand seductively, like a tango dancer. She reached her other hand out, as if she was about to rip the curtain away in a revealing flash.

People clapped and cheered and egged her on.

The curtain opened, and she wasn't there at all. She was gone. Her painting remained, beside the empty bath tub and the clothes.

Nicole never returned. She had permanently transformed into an emptiness. We could hear her voice, gasping at first, then screaming. Crying without tears and babbling for help, and terrified. People cried out, terrified by this miraculous event of paint and form. It was a spectacular painting.

I don't think she knows what happened to herself, even now. Did she want to transcend so young? I think she would have preferred to fall into her own eyebrow like Frida had done, deep into old age by then.

5

So, the next thing was figuring out what happened to Nicole. We could hear her voice wandering the café, rushing in and out of the bathroom, muttering into the mirrors and reflective chrome surfaces of the equipment, but we couldn't see her or touch her. She didn't seem to talk back to us, either. Her voice lingered on after the flesh had faded out.

The café owner called Karen immediately after the police. The police thought it was just a trick, took a report and left us to our own devices.

Karen came to the café right away. Everyone thought she might help us figure out what had happened. She might recognize some sign in the painting that had remained in the cafe, or some snippet of historical artists that provided some clue. She told us all about the explosion that had killed Rembrandt's greatest student – how the art was so intoxicating it had a fume to it, and could not remain in this world without an explosion. She knew all about the way the dwarf had poured his height out of his body into these amazing canvasses and posters all larger than life – huge! How the master Impressionsists had painted with their very eyesight, until they wore it away completely. The Muslims and Protestants had discontinued such things as realism to protect their painters from that which defiled the way God created skins and bones.

In the cafe, Karen circled the bathtub, searching for a trap door. She ran the curtain around, looking for any sign of a trick mirror, or lighting gimmick. She stood in the center, closed the curtain and opened the curtain again. There seemed no sign of what had happened inside the tub.

Karen said there was nothing to be done for Nicole. She had poured so much of her pure form into the canvas that she was doomed to haunt the painting, disembodied. She talked for a while, sometimes, but that faded as she forgot how to speak. Then, she babbled a bit, like an infant. In time, even that would fade. It's hard to talk when you have no lungs. Not every ghost can manage it. As long as we treated the painting with respect, we wouldn't have to fear a poltergeist, or anything like that.

We all thought it was awful, except Karen.

-As long as this painting lives, so does she. She has made herself immortal. Look at this fabulous canvas! To make even one masterpiece worthy of the old masters! And, what a story for docents to tell!

I didn't know what to think. It was awful, but it was also the greatest painting I had ever seen. Nicole's final painting was genuinely, unequivocally amazing, like a nude Mona Lisa, or a Guernica with a woman's smooth lines and curves instead of protoplasmic war. The saints must have been artists, communicating their message to the illiterate masses with beautiful art.

Karen carefully framed the painting, free-of-charge, and hung it in a place of honor over the cafe's fireplace, where the auction commenced. She said we should treat it kindly.

I leaned in close to the canvas, where the individual brush strokes smeared the paint into form. Beneath the paint, holding it and shaping each stroke like the tightened sheet of Nicole's deathbed was woven thread.

Canvas is a cloth. Paint is lines of stain upon a weave.

With Nicole gone, my obsession with woven things did not diminish.

6

Alone, in the night, I listened to Nicole's neighbors having sex and wondered if any sex was really worth all that noise. None of mine had ever been worth it. But, with Nicole, it might have been.

In the morning, I had class. After class, I went to the studio to work on assignments for class. I had done all these portraits of women with thin, narrow faces, and conservative clothes. Their faces were too small for their bodies. The portraits were drawn flat, like German Expressionism. Dignified women, with dignified, cold demeanors. Under the hands of the women, I jabbed sewing needles into the canvas, with malformed knitting projects – crooked scarves in ecstatic colors, pirate skull and bones, and little sweaters too small for anything but dolls, or too large for anything human.

They were awful. I couldn't stand them. They were jagged. The ideas didn't meld together, and there was nothing I could do about them. I cleared a space in my studio. I started over.

I sketched protoplasmic shapes, like sea creatures being born in loamy water. I painted precise, whimsical shapes. I didn't just throw them onto canvasses. I shaped them into classic iconagraphic poses. Madonna and child. Mona Lisa. The Last Supper. Christ Blessing. Francis Assissi with the Animals. All of these bestial, animal, water shapes, but sharp at the edges, and no colors at all – just charcoal and pencil weaving together into form upon a blank canvas.

I liked that fine for the moment I had class again; then I could crawl into bed and sleep until the sounds of other students' bella nocturnes – drinking and shouting and fucking and snoring.

I got up in the dark, turned my computer on. I angled the light to keep it off Nicole's couch as if she were sleeping there. I looked over at her empty furniture. She was gone. I had stolen the key to her dorm room from her clothes at the café, and I had been staying there, because it smelled like my lost friend's body. Her roommate had dropped out at the beginning of the term, and when she transcended, I had quietly, unofficially moved in until her parents could come to claim her things. I wanted to be near her things. They smelled like her.

I pulled the computer up all the way. I turned on the lights. I e-mailed Karen, and asked her if we could get together again, for anything.

I was lonely.

Karen e-mailed me back three days later saying she was not supposed to date students, but she was willing to be my friend.

I went over to her house for a dinner party she was throwing. Other professors were there, and some graduate students, along with their requisite significant others.

The first thing she showed me was a real, honest-to-goodness Van Gogh painting of sunflowers that her grandmother had bought back when the Paris family were wealthy industrialists. The painting was hanging on the wall, in the living room. People crowded around it. I looked at it once, then toured the rest of the house, because she had her portraits of students up all over the walls – some dressed, some half-dressed, some undressed. They were technically proficient, but they did not transcend.

She came up behind me and asked me if I was looking for myself on the walls.

-No. I was just... curious.

-I'm almost done with yours, you know. It's drying right now. Would you like to see it?

-If you want me to see it. Will the party miss us?

-Them? Of course not.

So, we went to her studio on the top floor of her house, where she had the most natural light. She had the canvas facing away from the door. We walked over to it. It was covered with a tarp.

-Be honest with me, Rachel. I don't want you to tell me you like it if you hate it. I want you to tell me the truth.

I shrugged. I saw her hands were shaking.

-You're nervous?

-Of course.

-Why?

-I'm always nervous about this sort of thing. Why wouldn't I be nervous? Aren't you nervous when you show your work to others?

-I guess I am. But, you're a professor. You do this all the time. Haven't you done this a hundred-million-billion times?

She smiled, sadly. She looked down at my neck, and the curve where my neck met my collarbone. She spoke softly.

-This is a bad idea...

-Look at you. You're trembling.

Her knees were shaking, too.

-It's just... I don't think it's good enough. It's not good enough to show you. I'm not good enough. Not like Nicole. I'm nothing like her. I'm terrible.

She touched my hair. She pushed my hair away from my shoulders. Her lip was trembling. She leaned over to me, to kiss my forehead. Then, we hugged a while.

-I'm so sorry you lost Nicole. Can't we just be friends and not have to be artists or professors or students or anything?

-No. I'm sorry, Dr. Paris.

-Karen. Please, just call me Karen.

-I'm sorry, Karen. I miss Nicole so much that I can feel it in the bottom of my feet and the top of my head. I'm empty I miss her so much.

-I'll never transcend the form. I'll never be immortal.

-Why would you want such a terrible thing?

We held each other close a while, and we both wept a little.

Karen was terrified of my gaze upon my own portrait. If she was scared of me, I was good enough.

I remembered my grandmother. I knew what she would do.

Downstairs, I asked anyone if they had been to the café where Nicole had transubstantiated. They looked at me like I was crazy, because now that Nicole's ghost was there – her voice, I guess – screaming in people's ears, and whispering crazy things in the restroom mirror where she had no image looking back at her – well, let's just say the place wasn't as popular as it was before.

-Karen, we should do something for Nicole.

-I should buy her painting. It's fabulous.

-Don't you care that she's suffering?

-She's luckier than all of us. She's immortal now, a pure being.

I left. Looking back on it, I wish I had broken something priceless, like spilling wine on the Van Gogh. I had this image in my mind of Karen sitting in a chair before her Van Gogh, mentally distraught that nothing she would ever paint or draw or sculpt would ever amount to a single petal of a single sunflower on Van Gogh's immortal canvas. I wanted to destroy it, for her sake. And, to hurt her, too.

I went to the café. It was mostly empty, now. They were down to just one staff member: the owner covering all shifts. She sat reading, alone, waiting for anyone to come in to the store. She saw me, and stood up. She straightened her clothes.

-Where is Nicole?

The owner slumped against the counter again, and waved towards the restroom. I walked back to where I could hear something murmuring, wordlessly. I wondered if Nicole had lost her mind, yet.

-Nicole?

The wordless sounds meant nothing. I don't think she recognized her own name anymore.

-Nicole, listen, I'm going to try to help you, okay? But, you just have to stay here, and hold still. I'm going to get something to help you. I have an idea, okay? Just try to hold your head together. Think of your mother... Mommy... Mama...

Her wordless noise picked up the mantra...

MamaMamaMamaMamaMama

-Remember your mother, Nicole. Remember your grandmother, too, okay? I'll be right back.

I ran to my dorm room. The sweater was in the closet.

To weave her back to life, I jammed hairpins and take-out chopsticks into the matted, stinking yarn. They reminded me of my grandmother. Maybe they'd work for hers. I poured lemon cleaner all over the yarn until it smelled like dirty, wet dishes left to soak too long. The sweater was like a hideous yeti pelt. I held it up for her.

-Nicole, come here. I made you a sweater! It's your grandmother's sweater. You have to wear it. She made it special. Don't you remember?

I heard her voice in the air, fading and fading...

-Nicole!

Did she fade into the air? Did she run away? Did she fall into the smells of grandmothers and memories of masterpieces?

7

The café's closed down for good. There's only a little furniture left that didn't sell in the classifieds. The landlord hasn't been by in ages. No one wants the place, with Nicole here.

I haven't been to school in months. I haven't even been back to the dorm to help Nicole's parents arrange the memorial service. I won't attend any memorial for someone still alive. I'm living here, on the couch that used to be the place to watch young artists perform, to sip lattes from cups as big as pasta bowls.

I'm in the corner, in my grandmother's sweater. I'm sewing all the yarn bunched up into my sweater and reweaving it and resewing it and unraveling and unraveling to reweave it again. I will capture Nicole. Anything that can bend can be woven and sewn. Voices bend up and down. Screams are like loose threads blowing wildly from the face of a fan. I weave bells into the thread, and lost guitar strings. I weave anything Karen brings me, and I ask her for things to bring me.

Karen comes by, with food, and large water bottles. She places them at my feet, and picks up the trash from her last visit, if it hasn't been added to the weave. Foil is added most of the time, and plastic silverware. I never add paper plates or styrofoam because they are greasy and ugly.

-Look at this amazing creation! Can I have it when you're done?

I wish she would shut up. I'm trying so hard to listen for Nicole. I know she's here, somewhere, fading away.

I remember my grandmother. This is exactly the sort of thing she'd do for me. My amazing creation is an act of love.

We always end up like this, we women in love. We always do. We weave our threads for our lost loves, story after story in the weave – all of the ancient transformations woven into talismen.

Karen said, in class, that Penelope wove her husband back to life in nineteen years. She caught him up in the sewing and unsewing until his lies and misdirections and evasions were no match for her masterful weaving.

I can do this. I will trade my life if I have to. I will transcend if I have to.

I miss Nicole. I still love her.

~~~

14: Iphigenia at Aulis

You know her story, don't you? The great king Agamemnon offended Artemis, by murdering her sacred deer. He spoke arrogantly of this goddess.

1

Later on, a prophet had to be called to the council of kings. No storms had come to wash the battleships to war. Zeus' commanded siege of Troy depended upon the famous storms of Aulis that never seemed to come. The gods had to be consulted.

The blind prophet, Calcas, announced that the great king had to sacrifice his daughter. This was subsequently, immediately, done by that terrible tyrant.

But, there are as many versions of a myth as there are grandmothers in Greece. In what most people know, the daughter was fooled into believing she was going to a wedding. Then, she was thrown upon the altar and killed by her own father before she even really understood what was happening.

There exist other versions of this myth, some of them with more historical and cultural credibility.

For instance, was there really not enough wind at Aulis, or was this merely a declaration of other kings that were angered at the power of Agamemnon? Thus, these noble kings declared that their war ships could not sail without an unthinkable sacrifice. Directors of stage and screen often enjoy this version, while all this talk of not enough wind is framed with lots and lots of wind. Also, sometimes a mighty wind comes moments before the sacrifice. Men in the crowd gesture at the king to stay his hand. The great king, all worldly glory at stake, strikes down upon his daughter's naked breast. The great king must sacrifice the daughter to maintain power.

In another version of this myth, the great king filled the air with a heavy fog, to mask what he was about to do. He dressed a deer in wedding white. He dragged the deer to the altar, and sacrificed it. The daughter was smuggled away to a temple of that very goddess lest the goddess be angered for long at such trickery.

In another version, the goddess, herself, chose to be merciful. She descended in a mysterious fog, and claimed the girl for her temples and holy rites in an apotheosis.

Here is the version I like, that I shall call my own.

The kings of Aulis schemed to hold back the power of Agamemnon, because the world had never seen this kind of power before and the kings had grown so accustomed to their own power. They declared that the wind was not strong enough to set sail. Agamemnon, a shrewd man, knew that these great kings were lying. But, to call out their lie would only destroy his power on the throne. Instead, he called the prophet, Calcas. Agamemnon confessed to the sin of slaughtering a holy deer and speaking disrespectfully of a goddess. Agamemnon was lying, of course.

The great king was confident the blind man - who could not know the intricacies of sailing - would announce that this was the cause of all the bad winds. The seer would speak of what could be done to change the winds.

No king, not even Agamemnon, could speak heretically against a goddess' will.

Calcas, a true believer, hated what the entrails told him. He announced it with a whisper. The kings that heard Calcas shouted to the top of the sails. "Iphigenia must be killed! Agamemnon must sacrifice his beloved daughter, his beautiful jewel, on the altar. Her flesh must be burned, and spread to the other kings like a slaughtered deer's venison to be devoured!"

(The poor girl was nowhere near these things. She was at home, with her mother, dreaming of the days when her husband would ride home from the hunt and her sons and daughters would bow to the great man, whomever he may be. She toyed with different names, and different faces for her husband, from among the gathered heroes of the siege of Troy. She wondered if she could best Helen for beauty someday.)

Agamemnon, the great king, was not through with his machinations. He called his daughter to a wedding feast that would become her own death. He used the name of the arrogant warrior that was the great king's loudest opponent among the gathered kings - Achilles, the proud.

When Iphigenia arrived in smiles and wedding finery, Agamemnon led her to the pyre, and she did not understand what was happening. She asked her father what was happening.

"Quiet, girl," he said.

Everyone looked so sadly at the girl, but this was supposed to be a wedding. This was supposed to be joyous.

"Why is everyone so sad?" she said.

"Hush, child," said Agamemnon.

Achilles boiled in a stew of anger that his name had been used for such trickery. He tried to rally the kings against Agamemnon. He shouted to his allies. He reached for his sword.

Ulysses touched Achilles' arm. Menelaus closed his eyes and shook his head. Ajax refused to look. Ajax stared at his sandals, choking down a secret love he harbored for the girl that would soon be dead.

No one joined Achilles' fury. Achilles was too young and too brash to realize that this fury was futile in the face of the will of a Goddess. This failure would be his true shame that day. The humiliation of Achilles quieted all of them that believed Achilles should have been the great king, as their greatest warrior.

Iphigenia screamed openly, terrified because she didn't know what was happening. Agamemnon led his weeping daughter to the pyre. He took her in his arms like a babe. He laid her on top of the pyre like placing an infant in a large cradle, to be burned alive.

Agamemnon tied her down with sturdy ship's ropes. He covered her face with black cloth. He told her to hold still.

He struck the flint himself, at the base of the pyre. It caught quickly. A heavy smoke exploded from the pyre, like something holy. Iphigenia screamed with all her soul. Agamemnon poured wine down her throat through the black cloth to shush her. The wine was drugged. No one objected to that little mercy for the girl who would be burned alive.

But it was all a shrewd king's tricks. He and Calcas had arranged an alternative to save the girl. Calcas had been horrified at what he had had to declare. He told the king of herbs and smokes and a plan to save the girl if the goddess could only be blinded for a while. Agamemnon put this plan in place.

Inside the mysteriously thick smoke that made all eyes present water with more than their share of tears, the blind prophet did not need to see to save the girl. Calcas untied and undressed the drugged girl on that smoking pyre. He did not need to see to undress her. He did not need to see to pull the drugged fawn from his shoulder pouch. He threw the faun onto the funeral pyre. He smothered it in the girl's wedding clothes. He slipped away and away and away and away from the scene of this miracle. He smuggled the girl into the forests and the hills.

When the smoke died, the body on the pyre was revealed to all. The girl had become a holy fawn of Artemis, like the one Agamemnon had supposedly destroyed. The army, seeing the magical transformation, glorified Agamemnon as their great king. They felt the weight of Olympus behind their shields and swords. They were prepared for war, now. They would all willingly die for this great siege.

Elsewhere, Iphigenia was transformed in the woods to a fawn of a different sort. Calcas, the true believer, did not take the girl to her mother as had been planned. He was terrified of the swift retribution of the goddess of hunting dogs and poisonous air, and sickness and death. He took the girl over hill and dale, over mountains, over seas, to a temple of the very goddess that had been cheated of her sacrifice.

(This goddess' temples were famous for their holy prostitution.)

By the time Calcas returned to the king to tell him the news of the daughter's holy service, the army was gone to glorious war at Troy. The iron will of battle fed by the sacrifice had to be struck at once. The great king, Agamemnon, had not remained at Aulis long enough to discover if his daughter had made it all the way home.

Discovering this, Calcas then traveled to Clytemnestra in her palace, and told her the story of her lost daughter.

The queen had been horrified to learn her daughter had been murdered by her own father. She did not wish to speak with the prophet that had doomed her. Still, Calcas was insistent, and snuck into the palace in the night, when all the lights were gone. He knew the halls like he knew his own home. He knew Clytamnestra's chamber in the dark, as well. He sat beside her bed. He woke her with these words, "Your daughter Iphigenia is still alive, my queen."

Awakening to this, the queen clutched her blanket in fear and hope. "If my daughter is alive, where is she? Bring her to me, demon."

Calcas told the queen of his fear of holy retribution. He told her what he did after he had saved the girl's life.

The hope in Clytamnestra died. She was crushed when she found out her daughter's true fate, on her back among the fishermen of an island far from home. This girl that had dreamed of marrying kings – and had a right to dream of such things – had been swallowed up by her father's war, body and soul.

Clytamnestra hushed Calcas, then. She told him never to speak of these things again. She turned her back to the blind prophet. He could not see that she had turned away from him, but he heard the distance in her voice when it bounced back from the stone walls.

"Let my daughter remain dead," said the queen, "Better she be dead a martyr than alive a temple whore." An afterthought came to her lips. "Thank you for telling me," she said. "Thank your for saving her life."

Calcas bowed. He said nothing else. He left her there, alone in the dark with the terrible price of war like a bronze veil.

Calcas traveled on to Troy, to witness the glory of Greece with his empty eyes. He told Agamemnon, privately, that she had died of an illness from the heavy smoke before she could be smuggled home safely. Her delicate lungs could not manage such thick blackness.

Agamemnon wept all night long, bemoaning his hubris at trying to use and fool a goddess. A priestess of Artemis, another prophet, knew the truth in Calcas' words, though she knew the king would not believe her. She held these words inside of herself. She pitied the great king. She loved him, even, though she knew it would be her own death.

All of these things were told to men that came to the temple by a girl prettier than the others, but mostly dirtier. She told men this story if they stayed long enough.

The men told the story to other men, and to sons and daughters.

Once, someone came to the girl just to ask her this: would you rather have been killed on that pyre instead of working here for the goddess?

I said to the man - the princess naked on a dirty pallet, with an opium pipe in my palm - "I'd rather have died on that pyre."

Pity washed over the man. He strangled me. I did not fight him or call for help. He set fire to my body in that straw bed. He bowed to the flame, and decided that I must have been a goddess.

Herodotus reported that in his day, Taurians still offered human sacrifices to a virgin goddess who they said was Agamemnon's daughter.

Most scholars of Herodotus' age believed that Iphigenia was actually Artemis, herself.

2

There is a space between the truth and the picture. "The Anger of Achilles" by Jacques Louis David was supposed to rile patriotic blood in Paris.

Clytemnestra gazes down upon the boy warrior, Achilles' face – her tearful eyes. Achilles doesn't see the matron, or his bride he reaches for his sword, his sharp pupils killing the king. Agamemnon, on the right of them all, gives Achilles one proud look. Agamemnon knows that boy won't swing.

Someday, the proud stallion will buck. Today, the boy will half-unsheathe his sword; then, he'll back away, angered.

Clytemnestra knows this, too. Her eyes carry that sad accusation: Iphigenia is just a deer to those men.

Iphigenia looks away pale and grief-stricken.

Also, relieved.

~~~

15: Deianira

"Poor woman, ill-fated, what a plan she devised! Widely powerful envy destroyed her..."

-Bacchylides, Odes 16.35

I haven't seen my husband, Alcaeous, in three weeks. Al calls almost every day from the hotels, but it isn't the same as having him home. We only moved into this house a few months ago. It was a huge house. It was too much space to be alone with all the time. I had to get out, and walk around. I had to meet new people.

The house was at the edge of the city. There was a park near here with a long, paved trail extending out into the forest like the concrete spine of the river beside it, but the river was far older than these gray squares. When the hosue was too big for me, I often went for walks along the trail.

From off the side of the concrete trail, just once, and down a ways against the river, there was a strange concrete marker. It was as narrow as a pipe, but square. It wasn't shaped like a tombstone, but it's the first thing that comes to mind when seeing it. It looked like a strange, thin tombstone. Written top to bottom, in plain block letters, was TESCOROW. I didn't know what it meant, or what it was marking. My husband said it was something to do with some old oil or gas line, warning about their pipes underground. Al was an oil man, and he knew about these things.

I wasn't sure, though. I'd seen the plates his company put on roads and access ports. There was nothing familiar about the TESCOROW marker. It was too far from the side of the road, and near a river that would be trouble for pipelines. How workmen would ever reach this place, before the trail was cut through the scrub grass and trees, and the before even the suburban sprawl came to push against these woods was a mystery. The marker was older than the trail. The concrete of it was worn and molded with moss in the cracks.

I'd seen bobcats on this trail, and coiled copperheads the size of bike tires. The snakes loved the heat on the concrete. They crawled up from the river to rest upon the artificial stones. I'd seen dogs off leashes running ahead, gregarious and wild. This wasn't a place for the oil and gas men and their machines. This was a place the animals held down against the press of the city, and maybe the trail would keep the developers from cutting down all the trees along the river.

That we did not know the meaning of the marker in the woods along the river, I loved. Let there be mystery in the world. Let there be shadows in the trees, and shambling mounds of fallen leaves that might be shamble men.

Of all the mysteries of the world, the one I liked the least was where my husband went when he flew around the world to tour his pipelines and wells. He called me from hotel lobbies, never hotel rooms. He called me from airports. He rarely called me when he was alone in a room, lonely in the dark. He said he just read reports, watched TV, or slept once he went upstairs. If he got really bored he'd go to the gym, or the bar to watch sports. He never mentioned the possibility of a woman in his room. Alcaeous was the son of oil barons, shipping magnates, and the topless fashion models that clung to the decks of their beautiful ships. Of course he was cheating on me. Why wouldn't he be cheating on me? I had a house in the suburbs big enough to fit three or four large houses inside of it. I could call the company to send a car to take me in to the city whenever I liked to shop at expensive stores. Our children had trust funds to make grandmothers weep. I could drink fine wine alone on the large balcony overlooking the woods at sunset while my husband traveled the world, touring his pipelines and refineries for weeks and weeks. This was the way things worked, even if we never talked about it. Marriage was a contract, like a business arrangement. And, at least when he was home, he was only with me.

I saw children on the trail, with paper sailboats leaning out over the water, placing their vessels into the gentle current, and then running along the sides to watch them go. The winner was the one whose ship went the farthest. I raced behind them a while, jogging to keep up with their boats. I wanted to see whose ship would sail the farthest. A fallen tree caught one of them in its branches. The boy whose ship it was, for a moment, thought of crawling out along the log, and releasing his boat. He came to his senses when the log shifted. It was a monster in the shape of a log. I saw it, and he did, too. Its branches were the heads of a small hydra. It opened one of its eyes and looked back at the boy, and at me.

The boy screamed and ran away to his friend, and the other ship.

I didn't run. I stopped and stared. It had an ancient eye, and some of its branches were tentacles with tiny mouths on the end. It was camouflaged as a fallen tree, but it was something older than a tree.

"Hello," I said.

It blinked at me.

"Are you the Tescorow? Is that your marker?"

It looked away from me, closed its single eye, and pulled all its branches together into a single trunk, like an alligator's tail. It slipped under the water. The black moss along its back made it look like a chunk of river stones.

On the phone, Al said that I saw an alligator, nothing more. It must have swum upstream with the warm weather. Farther down the river, hundreds of miles away, the alligators are natives to the water. Perhaps someone had released an alligator there, hoping the creature would swim downstream to its brothers and sisters. I tried to explain about the branching tentacle eyes, heads, and the transformation into stones below the water. My husband surrendered to me. He said, "Maybe you're right, dear." I knew he didn't believe me, and he wasn't going to fight me about it from a hotel lobby in the middle of Brazil when he had a woman waiting upstairs.

There is still a mystery in the world, but my husband is no longer supposed to be one of them. When we were young, he was a young widower with soulful eyes, and I thought he was fascinating and mysterious - a vast interior country to be discovered and tended to like a garden. Now, I'm nearly fifty. My children are grown. I wonder what happened to the sense of mystery in my husband, who is distant to me even as he is unknown. I wonder what happened to the sense of mystery I held over him like an Oracle's incense.

When he comes home, I would take him for a walk along this trail, and we would see if we could find the mysterious creature again. I wanted bring paper sailboats of my own. I wanted to make him place one in the water next to mine, where the boys placed theirs. We could search for the transforming creature again with paper ships like children.

I felt it in the house when he was home. There was a low television hum, somewhere, or the sound of the weight machines clanking against each other. He was older than me, and he still went to the weight room every day. He still ran three miles before he had coffee in the morning. When he went hunting with younger men from his company, they were often surprised at his vigor. I was, too. I leaned into him at night, and it was like leaning into a tree trunk. I wondered at the roots of him, digging into me, and how gentle he was that I should come out unbruised beneath such strength.

When he was a young man, his first family died in a car accident. It was his fault. He was drunk. He did twelve months of probation for it, and spent a lot of time in alcoholics anonymous, but it didn't stick. He didn't keep any pictures of his first family out in the house. There's a box of them somewhere in the attic. I've never walked in on him up there, with the pictures spread out before him of his lost wife. It's like her pictures might as well be her ashes in a mausoleum. He should at least talk about it more, even if it's the past. It should come up in conversation with him, sometimes, if he feels anything.

Another day along the river, I see horse riders in the woods on the other side of the river from the trail. They're riding slowly through the thick underbrush. They are dressed like cowboys, with chaps and spurs. They don't have pistols, but they seem to be carrying bottles of Gatorade in the holsters. One of the men was whistling something, but he was gone and out of earshot before I could pick out the tune. I should ask my husband for horses. His mother kept horses when he was young. I didn't see the monster in the water that day, but I did see someone had pushed a rotten tree over to cross the river on foot, along the rotten wood. It didn't look safe. I thought about doing it, just to see what was on the other side of the river, but whatever I expected I'd find was not enough of a temptation to lead me over the blackened bark and branches. I could see the kids with their sailboats running over, laughing at each other.

Then, I had a thought: what else would the monster eat. I studied the bridge carefully. I threw a rock at it, and watched it for signs of motion. There were no squirrels, here, and no sounds of people playing. Bicyclists flew past, paying me no attention at all.

The stones did nothing. I touched the log bridge with my hand. If it was the monster, it did not move. I looked up and down the river. One of the cowboys was visible, through the packed trees. He was drinking Gatorade and resting a moment. The way he sat on the saddle, and the way the horse stood, and the angle of it, I realized it could be a trick. The horse's head could be stuffed and lifeless. The cowboy, riding in a saddle just a little too high on the animal's back, could be a centaur in disguise, with false legs hanging off the sides of his own back.

He saw me looking at him. He smiled. He took the brim of his hat and bowed a little, like a gentleman. When the horse took up again, I looked closely at the animal's face. It seemed stiff, like the neck was moving a little wrong. The neck wasn't in balance with the rest of the animal.

So, there are still centaurs in the world, out past the trees, where there are neither roads nor travelers to bother them, anymore. With the invention of the automobile, I imagine it became easy to be a wild creature. People didn't really go into the trees except at state parks anymore. These must be outriders, disguising themselves to watch for intrusions into their secret territories.

I didn't tell my husband about it, because he would call it a silly whim, and then, when pressed, he would agree with me. He is a very agreeable man, my husband. He does not want to fight with anyone.

The next day, I stopped someone on the trail, a runner who was stretching his legs against the trunk of a tree. "Hello," I said.

"Hello," he said.

"It's a nice day."

"Sure is. Good day for a run."

"Yes. Do you come here much?"

"Oh, when I can."

"Have you ever seen anything strange on the trail?"

"What?"

"I thought I saw an alligator the other day, but I'm not sure what I saw. Maybe it was an alligator."

"Haven't seen anything but snakes."

"Well, keep an eye out. It was something big."

"Yeah, I will," he said. "Thanks for the heads up." He took off then, waving at me, indifferent. The farther away he got, the more I wondered if I was going crazy, or if he thought I was going crazy. I spent too much time alone, with my husband away. I should join a book club, or a church, or a church book club. I should take classes. Rich wives were supposed to take classes.

I walked along the path, searching for signs and portents and strange things. The only weird thing was, I was there for over an hour, walking along the path, and I never saw the jogging man, again. He had either kept on into the woods, down to the end of the trail deep in the woods, or he had been intercepted along the way.

Going home, I noticed too many signs for lost pets.

I'm making myself crazy, thinking about it.

I think I wanted to find the centaurs, and talk to them, and to find out what is happening here, at the edge of the city. I wanted to see the mysteries of this world with my own eyes.

My husband flew in late at night. I heard his key on the lock downstairs. I heard him entering his security code. I felt his weight in the bed, beside me, and his huge hands on my arm. I leaned into him, wide awake but afraid to speak. What should I say to the man whom I was feigning to sleep against while sniffing for old perfume. I wondered if there was ever a way to keep him here, forever: my husband, in my bed.

In the morning, we made slow love, and ate a long breakfast. His phone kept ringing, but he turned it off. He looked tired.

"How were the pipes?" I asked.

He smiled. He took a long sip of his coffee. "It is as if the oil will never end. There is so much of it. As soon as it starts to run down, it becomes cost effective to burn sand to melt the oil out of it. Soon, I imagine we'll be recycling oil from polluted lakes, curing them even as we continue our pillaging. The pipes are fine. Better than fine. I should retire."

"You would get bored."

"I would," he said. He put his coffee down. "But not because of you."

"Do you want to go for a walk today?"

"Your mythical alligator? Yes. Let me get my gun."

It wasn't unusual for him to carry a gun. It isn't a shocking thing to say between us. We were wealthy beyond many people's wildest dreams, in an industry that attracted trouble in dangerous parts of the world, and there were always risks associated with that. Kidnappers. Thieves. Protestors and activists that go too far. I do not carry a gun, but he does. He carries it everywhere it's legal. It's a normal thing for us, and without it he would feel like he had no wallet or watch. He'd feel a little naked without it concealed in his belt.

We walked to the trail. It was a nice day. The sun was bright. The wind was gentle and cool. We walked to the trail, and I peered over the edge constantly, holding my husband's hand, searching for signs of the unknown things of the world. I showed my husband the strange marker, TESCOROW.

"Is oil or gas line. Electric company. I'm sure of it."

"Weird, though. Right along the river, by this trail. It's not old, either."

"Perhaps a dog, and he liked this trail. The owner loved the dog, and buried her here. A dog named Tescorow."

"Maybe you're right," I said. It was my turn to dismissively agree.

"It is a dog," he said.

Nothing else was on the trail but grass and breeze and joggers and dogs. We didn't even see a snake or a bobcat. Perhaps the trail dogs had chased them all back deeper into the woods.

And home again in the sort of comfortable silence that comes from thirty years of marriage. We did not need to tell each other what we were doing in the house. He wandered into the kitchen to make paella. I wandered into the bedroom to shower and put on a house dress and water plants.

While he was cooking, his cellphone rang more. He wandered into the backyard to answer it, because he still believed his signal was stronger in the yard, even though it wasn't any stronger anywhere. He had a good cellphone. It had a good connection anywhere in the world. Our house was made for a man with a cellphone.

A late lunch on the balcony, I lit candles. I smiled and sipped white wine. The paella was like eating a tidepool. All the lost sea creatures trapped in the drawn away tide, boiled in the sun with rice the color of sand.

"Tell me about your first wife. Tell me anything about her."

He choked on his rice. "What is this? What?"

"Tell me about her. I want to know about her."

"Why?"

"Because I'm your wife, and I want to know about her."

"It was many years ago. Do not concern yourself with the past. It hurts too much. Please."

"You can cry in front of me. I'm your wife, Al. You're supposed to cry with me sometimes."

"I cry all the time."

"It doesn't bother you to cry a little about the television and the news and all the people that died in that Tsunami you didn't know. You never cry about someone close to your heart. Tell me about your wife. You never cry about her. You never even visit her tombstone, or the kids' tombstones. You never cry about them. You never choke up in conversation to hide it. You never even seem to hurt."

He threw his fork over the balcony. He stormed inside the house.

I waited. Nothing happened. I stood up gingerly, and walked into the house.

"Tears are nothing." he said. He was holding a bottle of whiskey like he was shooting himself in the mouth with it. I'm his wife. I'm supposed to know his moods. I don't. Did he lose workers he knew? Accidents happen on oil lines. Did people die and I didn't hear about it? Did I time my question badly.

"I don't want to see you drunk," I said.

"I've paid for my sins. I held their broken bodies in my hands. How dare you talk to me like this."

"I'm going for a walk," I said. "I don't want to be here if you're just going to get drunk."

"I paid for this house. I worked hard for it. For you." He sat down in a chair. He wasn't shouting. He was talking to himself, falling softer. If it was his house, why wasn't he ever here for any length of time? His house was just another hotel, with another woman inside of it to comfort him.

I put on tennis shoes. I took keys with me so he couldn't lock me out of the house.

When I closed the door, I locked it. I whispered into the door. I want a divorce.

It was his house. It was in his name. I didn't want it. I never wanted big houses, fancy cars, a business spread out all over the world like a hydra. I just didn't want to be alone all the time. I wanted to grow closer together, not stagnate like this.

I walked down to the trail, then. TESCOROW was still there, a marker without meaning, in the woods beside a river. The log bridge was there, now, beside the marker. It had migrated to the marker.

"Hello?" I said. "Are you the creature I saw, or a log bridge?"

The leaves on the branches fluttered into life. Flower buds like hundreds of tiny heads yawned open, curled into glorious red, and curled back into the blackened stem as if never there.

"Do you want me to cross you?"

It did nothing. I heard the sound of horseman riding at a gentle clip along the trail across the river. One of them slowed and smiled at me. His saddle was so high up the horse's back, I knew.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Hey, what's wrong with your horse?"

"What?"

"It's head looks funny!"

He smacked the side of it. "So it does. That log looks pretty flimsy if you're thinking of crossing."

"I don't trust it, either," I said. "But, how else do I cross over to your side?"

"I might be able to help you with that. If you're up for it."

He turned his stiff-faced animal towards the water. He feigned kicking the sides of the beast with his flimsy boots hanging from the chaps on mannequin legs.

He was a centaur, I knew. He was going to carry me over the river, and away from the house and the oil company and the whole, boring mess I had made with my husband. I'd live in the woods with him, eating wild roots and hunted game. He would have a penis so large it would make me scream like being destroyed. It would be more brutal than anything my husband had ever done to me. I'd be tied to a tree, and hung there, with my arms braced with ropes, and some bench or bar to take the huge weight of the beast. I'd be unable to walk. I'd be broken like a horse. When he was done with me, he'd feed me to the river. My husband would find my body, and maybe then he'd cry for my sake. Maybe he'd feel something about someone he says that he loves.

The centaur smiled, and picked his way across the rocky water. The river was deeper than I expected, going all the way up to the knees on the fake body that draped below the saddle. He looked so friendly, with such a broad, wide smile. Maybe we'd only be good friends. Maybe he'd let me ride him like a horse, and he could take me to the top of the mountains where the eagles still flew wild. He didn't leave the water to hold his hand out to me, next to the log bridge.

"Hop on," he said. He winked at me.

I was doomed, and I knew it. But, this was the only way to know anything more about the mysteries of the world. I took his hand. I took my place upon the false saddle, in front of him, where his strong arms held me like a damsel in distress. Across, then, to the other side of the water, and his powerful animal body below me, stronger than a ship.

At the other side, I heard my name shouted out, and a man so angry he could kill me. A man, not crying in pain. A man afraid and angry.

The gun, my husband's gun.

Was he aiming for me? Was he aiming for the centaur?

We fell, the beast and I, on the rocky shore on the far side of the river.

The monstrous bridge, now with a hundred heads, all ravenous, tried to stop my husband from running to us.

There's blood. Someone is screaming. It's me. I feel no pain. Someone is not screaming. He is trembling. The horse's back leg is lamed and bloody.

The thrashing waves, and the monster of the water, and I saw my husband grappling all the heads at once in a powerful squeeze, with both his arms. He rode upon its back like riding the hydra.

The horse won't move. I think the body is dead. The man on the horse is dying, too. He's crushed under the weight of the false head. I was deposited just above him, but my leg is twisted underneath the weight of the horse's body. He's bleeding all over me.

Was the bullet for me, or for him?

The hydra screamed in death, like a thousand songbirds flying away in fear. It was thrown dead into the water, and used like the log it had feigned in life.

My husband grabbing at me, muttering some in Greek and some in English.

He pulled me from the beast. The blood was not mine. The horse and rider, a bullet passed through the leg, and into the beast. It had bled out. It was still bleeding. The man's arm was moving weakly, but he was not going to survive with all that blood.

My husband fired a bullet through the horse's brain. Sawdust shot out from it. He fired again, this time through the rider. The whole centaur stilled.

I had never seen so much blood.

He struck me with the gun so hard the world spun away from me, and I could barely think. I don't know if he meant to strike me, or if he was trying to grab at me with the gun in his hands. It hurt so much. His hands were trembling. Blood and sweat had flooded his skin. He was flush. More alive than I'd seen him in years.

My husband, killer of the hydra and the Nemean Lion, the man who wrestled death and won, and did so many great and glorious things I could not count them all, tossed me over his shoulder and hauled me over the body of the on the other side of the river.

"Mine," he shouted, at no one. "My wife!"

All this time, I thought I was his wife, and I see that I was his possession. He never asked me if I was all right. He never checked if the blood on my clothes was mine.

When we got home, we were both bloody. He couldn't look at me. He stood in the room, looking down at his hands, the gun still in them. I said I was going to take a shower. Before I did, I opened all the liquor cabinets. I placed all the locked up or hidden alcohol that we had in the house on the kitchen table. He stared at all the bottle accumulating where we ate breakfast together when he was in town. The way his face looked, I couldn't tell if he was ashamed of what he had done or furious with me. He didn't move. He just trembled, holding his gun.

Drink up," I said. "You might as well. Drink like you would at any of your hotels. Drink like when you are having fun with your friends and your women. Drink like I'm not even home."

He put the gun down next to the alcohol. He sat in front of all those bottles. "I'm not an alcoholic," he said. "I went through all of it, and none of those people were like me. It was a car accident. It was all an accident. It was fate. This was an accident, too. He was trying to kidnap you for ransom. I was protecting you. I want to keep you safe."

I kissed his cheek and left him there.

In the bathroom, I locked the door, and took a shower to get the blood off me. I thought about leaving, but then I didn't want to leave. Not until I was sure he was passed out, drunk. He would look for me in the bathroom. I went to the balcony instead, where I could hide under the tablecloth we had left out there.

I heard him screaming. I heard him tearing up the house trying to find me, but he couldn't make it all the way up the stairs as drunk as he was. I waited for it to get quiet in the house. I wanted him to pass out, drunk.

When I came down to find him, he was on the couch. The television was on. He was cradling a bottle of ouzo like an infant. There was vomit all over the carpet. I had some sleeping pills with me from the bathroom. I placed them into a full, open bottle of wine. I plugged my thumb over the lip and shook and shook until I thought all the pills might be disintegrated. I poured it onto his open mouth. It spilled all over his face. He gargled and choked and tried to grab for the bottle with his hands, but he couldn't stand up. He couldn't roll over. He swallowed some, and choked on it, choking it down.

It was red wine, and it got all over his shirt. He was still wearing the bloody clothes from the woods. I guess that's where everyone got the idea of the centaur blood, and a shirt. I smashed the bottle into the sink, with the other broken bottles. I turned the faucet and left it running, to wash everything away.

I wasn't arrested for it. I wasn't even a suspect. I said that I had no idea he was planning anything. I said he must have been terrified of going to prison after shooting someone. My children came, and his company men, and they filled my house up for a time, surrounding the couch where Alcaeous had died without ever sitting on it.

I lived a long time, then, by myself.

I was really lonely for a while, but then I got used to it, and my children came to visit sometimes, but they didn't like coming to the house and nobody wanted to go on the walking trail. I sold the house. I live in a small house by my daughter to be close to my grandchildren.

I tell them stories about a happy dragon named Tescorow, who helps the children of the world play games and trick their parents.

My sons and daughters don't understand what happened to their father.

Nobody really talks to me anymore except my grandchildren.

When I moved, I had to pull Megara's pictures down from the attic, with her children, I arranged them all around me and looked at them. She had bruises on her arms in most of them. Her children always seemed to have marks on their skin, too. There's one where the boy has a black eye and he's standing in his father's shadow, staring at the camera as if it will reach out and bite him. My husband looks red-faced in them all, like he'd just been drinking.

The obituaries for my husband ran all over the world. He was a glorious man. He was well-respected among the leaders of men.

The glory of Hera. Sure. Anything you say.

What do I know? I was just his wife.

~~~

16: Gorgon

"A long way away on a rock at the edge of the world, lived a woman with terrible claws, wings of bronze and breath as foul as corpses. Her hair was a nest of poisonous snakes. Hissing, alive. Catch her stare, and she could turn you to stone." – The Storyteller from Perseus & the Gorgon, an episode of Jim Henson's Storyteller.

I like to sit alone in large movie theaters by myself. I do not like when the second, third, or fourth person arrives to spoil my solitude.

Even when people arrive, in the most crowded of theaters, the lights go dim, and everyone ignores everyone else and we stare at the screen like we're alone with our lovers and children next to us - but individually alone and locked up in our own eyes and ears - alone and all alone in a crowded room. Still, I prefer to be literally alone in theaters, not just metaphorically so. I like to make the metaphors real, because they spiral beyond the easy metaphor into new realms of meaning.

Alone in the place where I should be alone in a crowd is what I prefer. All the empty seats become the illusionary crowd of ghosts and quantum possibilities. I am sitting in this chair that's shaped like a plush tombstone. In other planes of sensation, all of those chairs are full with just one person alone in a theater. We're all ghosts for each other, in our silver-screened cemetery. The movie rolls - and all these plots are the same if you see enough of their loves and quarrels - pulling a narrative out of the memories in my head. The memories replay and replay until I forget the details and the film falls further into the stylized techniques of idiosyncratic directors. Finally, even these narratives fade to mythic languages, gibberish child-speak towards a rushed conclusion. Then, the music plays and it's just a list of words, mostly names and what they did in their life, like an obituary.

And then, we're all alone staring at the empty screen of our own forgotten life. Mysterious sounds at the edge of language, like audio hallucinations, are all that's left of our mind, from the people in the hall outside our theater. We strain to listen, but we can't make anything out. Somewhere people are laughing, running, talking to each other.

And we're all alone in our theaters.

I imagine statuary in my garden, blind and mute. Something inside of them retains the vibrations of weather and the slow pain of erosion. What it was like in our stone gardens? Like sitting in a theater, all alone.

In my empty theater, people arrive a little later and talk too loud about where they should sit. They rattle popcorn and icy beverages and contraband flasks of tinkling metal and glass. Their clothes make annoying swishing sounds while they walk down the aisles, still talking. That's not the worst, though. When it's quiet enough you can hear their clothing brushing against itself, then their intrusion is terrible – just terrible.

More people come. Then a few more shout for their families over the previews and opening credits.

We are then, all of us, metaphorically alone in the crowded theater.

At the end of the show, I stand up and exit the theater, eyes pressed to the ground. I drive home in the dark to a stone garden. There's a fountain in the center, carved into nymphs and ancient gods.

The sound of water drowns out the city beyond my walls. Here I can rest in peace from all the noise and confusion.

Inside my home, I turn off the lights and watch the ceiling fan spin in the moonlight and the street lamp glow like the way the milky way is spinning in the dark in the great, big cosmic eye of space and prophecy.

I know everyone's future. I don't need to hold the eye to see it all. Matter spins off into the long night, growing farther and farther away from each other and all the walls of our shared creation narrows down in the expansion. Galaxies and burning nebulae; lost souls of time fading out from the end credits.

I'm getting patient in my centuries. There's no need to look upon anything with my old camera lens like a cyclops' eye, like I used to do. I rarely bother making photographs, anymore, to hold reflections still. It's stone gardens soon enough.

~~~

17: Medea

"O hapless mother, surely thou hast a heart of stone or steel to slay the offspring of thy womb by such a murderous doom." – Euripides, Medea

They say that when Theseus was a young child, his mother had told him that he would only know his father when he could lift the heaviest rock of the villa, and see what the boy's mysterious father had hidden beneath the stone. They say, the boy, when he came of age, found a sword beneath the rock.

But there was no sword there. In fact, there was nothing there at all that was tangible.

Something far more dangerous was under that rock, and it had no form and no shape: a broken promise, honed to a hateful edge after so many years of aging, and carried in the palm like the tattoo of a knife.

Later on, a city's sacrificial vow broken, a god's promised curse destroyed, Ariadne abandoned, white sails forgotten, and the father, Aegeus, broken in grief.

All of these things came not from Theseus, but from Aegeus and Medea. The curse of a broken promise he had found poisoned him like a black anchor. Medea was a powerful woman, and her curse began as a vow of love.

A curse is a simple thing. "Make a promise to me," said Medea, to her beloved king of Athens, "and break that promise if you dare. Break your promises to me, and you will ruin yourself." And even this was not her curse, just a warning. The way of goddesses are storms that roll in, and all anyone can do is ride them out honestly, or fall under them.

The king betrayed his goddess' love. He gave a child to a shepherd girl, some coins, and lied about his identity to protect himself from the storm. When the shepherd girl touched his arm, and asked him to at least tell her who he really was so her son could find him someday, there was a rock on a hill. The king pointed to it. He said he would place something below that rock that his son could find when he was old and strong enough.

Beneath that rock, he yanked Medea's love from his flesh. He placed it there like an insect. It hissed. He dropped the rock upon it, hoping it would die there, and he thought no one would remember, and no shepherd boy would bother with this rock.

Medea knew; Medea was in love with her king, and stayed with him as long as she could when she felt the pain of dying love. By now, she had already fled the Argonauts, and she had no more will to run from her own nature.

Theseus lifted the rock one day, and what great things he did with a broken promise: cities conquered, god's monsters ruined, women's hearts laid bare upon the sand, immortality in fame.

Medea, with broken promises in her own hands, killed her father, killed her children, and caused all her husbands to fall into the sea.

Women and men, for forty-thousand years.

~~~

18: Helen of Troy

"What were all the world's alarms

To mighty Paris when he found

Sleep upon a golden bed

That first dawn in Helen's arms?"

– William Butler Yeats

We fell into the sea.

Did they tell you that? No? Well, after the headlines wind down, people move on. So much time spent at war, we forgot how to live together, and we fell into the sea. When it comes right down to it, we forgot how to wake up next to each other, go to work, pay bills. So, we lost the house. We lost everything. We live underwater, now. This town's so gone the only school in town that isn't in debilitating debt is fish. We moved into this track house two blocks from the diner where I work. The place is infested with octopus, but there isn't an exterminator in town. Even if there was, who could get rid of them? Worse than spiders. Bigger. Hungrier. Smarter.

That's our life, now. Has been this way for a while. It's not so bad, underwater. I actually like it, a little. I work at a diner where we mostly serve oysters. He stays home and watches TV, and drinks. When I get back, he's usually too drowned to do anything to me, even if he wanted to.

We're still married. Technically, we never divorced. I could never get him to sign the papers.

I'm never as pretty as people think I'm supposed to be.

I never was more than just a little pretty.

I had to be pretty to make it all worthwhile, though, so that's how I'm remembered. That's how people's minds think. Only beautiful women deserve a sacrifice. Women who are just wives, just mothers, like I am now? They forgot me completely after I was past my prime.

Anyway, it had nothing to do with beauty. It never did. It wasn't my face that launched all those ships. It was him. Just him. Honestly, his brother helped him just to make sure the drunken fool survived coming after me. He would have gone after me by himself, beating on the walls and screaming my name, drunk in a blind rage.

The foreign boy wasn't the first to see the bruises. Everyone saw them. My husband liked to make me walk around with short-sleeves, all my bruises showing along my arm. Back then, there was nothing a woman could do about it. This before even the rule of thumb. What was I supposed to do? I couldn't go home, be a spinster, or stand up to the huge, hulking mass of flesh that came upon me in the dark, looking for ways to trip me up, make me shiver and shudder and quake, and afterwards, hold me so tenderly, and swear it was all a mistake, all an accident, all because he loves me so much he can't think straight.

Have you ever seen a man like that in a rage? They just stop thinking. They'll chase after in their car, slam into you again and again, and run out of the car in heavy traffic just to drag you from the window and put you in your place.

It's hard to find a shelter because nobody can tell you where they are, because if anyone posts the information anywhere, men like my husband come with bats or guns. They'd walk over hot coals and spikes to hurt you, and blame you for the blood they bleed from hurting themselves on the chase.

The foreign boy wasn't the first to want to help me.

"There's an army," I said.

"My city is older than his. It has walls from many armies."

"He would do anything to hunt me down."

"My brother, he is a great warrior. If anyone treated his wife like this, that man would be a dead man."

"My husband's brother is worse than a great warrior. He is a rich man, and he can hire great warriors. And he knows his brother, and what's been going on, and he doesn't even try to protect our children from it."

"You could change your name. You could run away and change your name and never tell anyone where you are. Never even tell your mother or father."

"Leave my children?"

"Does he hurt them?"

"Not yet. Not with his brother watching."

"They'd understand, someday."

"They'd never understand. They'd blame me. Everyone would blame me. We are always children, all our lives, petty like children, and no one understands it."

I can see my husband as a child on the schoolyard. I can see him throwing rocks at the girls that would not talk to him. I could see him defending his brother from bullies to the death, cutting off heads in the fourth grade over matters of honor. That's how it was when they are such important, little men. My husband says the first woman he ever kissed laughed at him for trying to use his tongue, and he showed her by yanking hers hard enough that she never laughed again. It isn't right to laugh at a man who is trying to express his love.

Which is why, I laugh at him. And, he hates it. I am supposed to be loyal to him, and I laugh at him. I'm coughing up blood and laughing at him.

The foreign boy slipped into my room when I was unable to go downstairs to the party. I was so clumsy, and so sickly, and I had to retire early.

The boy came in quietly, saw me lying in the middle of the floor, weeping and bloody. I couldn't move my right arm. I think it was broken. The foreign boy picked me up, and helped me to my bed. He covered me with a cloth.

"If my brother were here, he would kill your husband. Do you want me to try to kill him?"

I said nothing.

"Because I don't know if I can."

"Don't look at me," I said. I started to cry again. "Just don't look at me."

But he kept looking at me. He just looked at me. It was the most horrible thing that anyone ever did to me, that look. It was like he was pitying me. I don't want anyone's pity.

"Come with me," he said.

"I can't."

"No one has to know."

"They'd know. He'd know."

"We could tell him something else. We could tell him that you died."

"He'd never believe I was dead unless he killed me himself. He'd go to the gates of hell to bring me back just to beat me again."

"All the more reason. We are all children, all of us, so let us be children. If this were a playground, would you keep playing with him, after all he's done to you?"

I am the sandbox that he moves around into an imaginary kingdom with his hands.

The foreign boy leaned over to kiss all of my wounds gently, one-at-a-time. He was ten years younger than me if he was a day, and so handsome, and so innocent. He couldn't imagine raising his fist at my husband. How could he imagine hurting a woman he loves?

I was too sore to speak. My silence was interpreted as consent. Maybe it was.

So, I left with him. And my husband would have come by himself if he had to, would have thrown himself against the walls in his car, punching and kicking at the stones for all the days of his life in a blind, drunk rage.

My face launched no ships. Possession launched ships. Men launched ships. Men turned their blades upon daughters to feed the winds to rule over the wives.

My beautiful foreign boy would never hurt me. He couldn't hurt anyone. How could he have known the depths of love?

We live underwater, now, in a drowned city. It's better here, even if it's cold and damp. One of my husband's old war buddies comes by sometimes. He's living with a woman in town, and who knows what his wife knows about him. He comes to the lunch counter and shucks oysters for us. He doesn't talk much. Talking used to get him in so much trouble.

My husband still gets jealous, but it's hard to punch anyone underwater. The tides pull against the knuckles, hold them back. The blow comes, but it's deadened like being pushed a little with no bruise, no blood.

There's an octopus in the living room. It lives behind the couch, I think. It looks at me with a sad wisdom. It's the most horrible thing, to see the octopus in the bedroom, with those eyes looking at me. Unblinking, and sad. Pitying eyes in such a hideous face, like when the foreign boy was looking at me. My husband can't do anything about it. They're too smart for him, those octopi. They slip into the kitchen and rummage through our pantry while we're sleeping. We hear them. By the time he runs into the kitchen with a broom in his hand, they're already gone. Sometimes, I wake up, and they're pushed into the walls like errant spiders. They're bigger, though, and their eyes are bigger. They really look at me. They really look at us. I hate that about them.

I see all the old faces come through the diner, from the war. I ask them how things have been. If my husband's around they talk about the old battles, and all the armor they stole, and the women they took from the temples and the fields.

What are they supposed to say to me?

Nobody says anything to me, really.

Even now, it's all my fault.

I can't escape him. I know that, now.

Please, stop looking at me like that.

~~~

19: Circe

Circe told Odysseus he had to go to the gates of the Underworld, and beyond them, to consult with Tiresius' shadow. Only then, could Odysseus return home to his wife and kingdom. She seduced Odysseus, and nearly claimed him forever. She turned his crew into pigs, too.

Men.

He wasn't famous by the time he got to me. He was a washed up boozehound, fat and surrounded by an entourage of lazy enablers. He showed up at the first read-through looking like he had just rolled out of bed, and it was 2:00 in the afternoon, and we were supposed to start at 9:00 in the morning, and I knew it was going to be a long, difficult shooting, but I knew I could make magic out of this man.

I remember when I was just a girl, innocent to this world, and my father would take me to the movies. I saw these amazing things happening – like miracles – on screens larger than I could even imagine. I remember years spent in the elements, holding lighting and booms, watching great men crumble for the camera lens. The beautiful, plastic world was my home and my air and my bread. I took the director's chair when no one thought I could do it, and I made magic. I've made so much magic. I was famous for it. I bought my own goddamned island in the Mediterranean Sea, and nobody helped me pay for it. When my friends came by we drank, and worked on experimental films. It was supposed to be my high art phase, after all that fucking money. It was supposed to storm the art houses of the world. And, it did. I won awards. My films were meaningful, beautiful, and more real than reality itself.

He came to me, on my island, with all his fat yes-men. He was out of rehab, and thinner, but still heavyset, and no longer the muscle-bound leading man of his youth. He was stiff. He yelled at my crew. He mumbled through his lines like he was falling asleep.

I had seen this man, when I was young. He had boomed to topple kings and gods. He had raised his fist against the darkest nights of black and white, where daylight itself is a kind of darkness on the screen. I thought that I could reinvent him. I thought that if I didn't, no one would.

I gorged his entourage on all the fruits of my kingdom. I fed them to separate them from the great man they had infested.

Alone, before my camera's eye, he was naked and weak. I made a film with him about swimming to make him swim every day. I made a film about the old, great kings, to remind him of what he had lost. We made a war movie, so he could remember what it meant to be a man. Then we made a movie about falling in love, because I loved him. I had always loved him. When I was a little girl, and looking up at his huge, silvery, jagged face, I thought that I would never step into my own dreams enough to make this great man love me.

At night, in my bed, he wept for his Penelope. I rubbed his back. I had heard about the men she had had all the time in her house, and their son raised by these men. I cooed in his ear, and I told him it wasn't his fault.

He thinned out, and narrowed. The men that came there with him had all gained thirty pounds, been on long, hard drunks.

The last day he was there, we filmed a scene from the romance set among these pigs of men, and the women that came to them from the villages and clubs. I thought that he would see the pathways of his life diverging between my cool bed, and these sweaty men.

The men fell silent. The women, recognizing who walked among them, gasped and held still like fawns in headlights.

He walked among his men.

One of them held up a mirror to him. There was a white powder there, in a line, to be breathed in deep.

I watched from the dark past the treeline.

He smacked the mirror. He punched the man in the face. He shouted and fumed. The women ran. The tables upended almost of their own accord in his fury.

The next day, he went swimming alone.

Lord Byron drowned in these waters, not far from my shore.

I made miracles. I made magic so great I could own an island by myself, my own private world.

These days, nobody remembers me except for when I was with him, right there in the end. It's as if I am a shadow of my own true self. It's as if it's all my fault, what had become of the man that came to my island.

Anyway, I made magic. Remember me for that. Saving him from his lifestyle was only one small thing in a long summer.

~~~

20: Hestia

Would you give up your throne to sit by the fire? Would you hold a baby over it? Would you empty the chamber pots of heaven when you hold rightful claim over the highest throne in the room, as the eldest child? There's prideful power in that: in claiming to be too righteous to sit among kings.

Big city's growing. Chomping up them small towns like hungry, hungry hippos. Used to be this was one small town. Now it's three the way we've grown into our neighbors, entwining with them, and it isn't hardly separated at all from Atlanta. City folks pushing out from the center like they're crawling out of the ground below Five Points, pushing everything up, out, and away, and everyone in the city is rolling over like the little bear said, until the crowd of us presses into the ocean and then everyone is tumbling into boats, and the waves will catch us, then catch the mole men climbing up out of the ground, and everything spreads all over everywhere. The towers rising up and up and up and the city climbing up alongside like a forest canopy clambering after the most light.

I'm getting my oil changed in the suburbs and a homeless guy with the shakes asked me if I have spare change. Can't buy nothing with change anymore. Everything costs a dollar or more. Anyway if I give him the money, he'll keep begging instead of tumbling into the Salvation Army after clean clothes and hot food and counseling services to get off the street, employed somewhere, renting a place in town, and joining society. He looks like a mole man. I wonder where he came from. I'd ask him, but all he would do is lie about it, if he even spoke enough English to respond through all those crooked, missing teeth.

He comes up to me like I owe him something. I don't owe him anything, personally, but I guess society has let this man down. He's surrounded by advertisements, and he finds them in the trash dirty and broken where the advert is beautiful and new. He's talking to me. What's he saying? It doesn't matter.

"I'm sorry, but I don't have anything for you," I say, with a very firm voice. I'm upper management. I can talk to scare dogs away.

He nods, never looking at me in the face. He is still proud enough to feel shame for begging.

Prostitution is supposed to be the oldest profession, but I think begging came first. Dogs beg. They do not prostitute themselves. Monkeys beg, too, without trading anything. Begging was first. Also, it seems less honorable, somehow. At the very least a prostitute is working for a living, sacrificing her dignity in a very real way.

He's still talking. I'm not listening to him, but I should. It's hard to hear anyone who looks like he does.

I'm getting my oil changed in my car. I'm standing in front of the place to get the oil changed, waiting for the mechanics to finish checking things. One of them, a tall Hispanic man that looks so straight-edge, so clean-shaven, it's almost hard to look at his face. His hands are even clean. How does a mechanic keep his hands clean? He's holding my air filter.

"Hey, why don't you move on, dude?" says the mechanic.

The mole man hunches into his own shadow, and stumbles off. I'm almost sad to see him go.

"He bothering you?"

"Oh, no... I wasn't really listening to him. I don't think he spoke English. If he did, I didn't recognize his accent."

The mechanic nodded at me like I had said something rude. I guess I was being rude. The least thing to do for someone is to listen to them, not to ignore them like I had done. I watched the mechanic working, and wondered if he had come from the underground, too. Was he Hispanic, or was his skin just darkened by the shadows and the mud of the underground world below the old parts of the city.

When my car was done, I paid and drove away.

I had a Lexus.

I wore designer clothes.

I smelled better than food.

I had showered twice in the last twenty-four hours at two different locations: my health club, and my hotel room.

I was overseeing construction of a restaurant downtown for my brother's company, even though I knew nothing about restaurants or construction.

I passed a bus and slowed down to crane my neck and see inside. The back of the bus was full of them: the mole men and women, each looking like they crawled out of the underground, too. Dockworkers chased them off if they got too close to the animal shipments. I think the mole men were the sort of men we should have been hiring for the slaughterhouses, too. They needed to go through the social workers, first, and get cleaned up. They need to learn the basics of life, like showing up for work on time and wearing clean clothes. Only then could they work the docks, and the meat yards, where my brother's employees unload tigers to shoot them in the back of the head, skin them, and slice up their meat.

Breeding endangered species for food seems to be the only way to save them. My brother, when he's drunk, says he's saving the animals by making them poo, and if only Greenpeace could have figured that one out. It's a tragedy to believe the only way to make a creature valued among humans is to turn them into a commodity, a product, a marketing campaign, a meal after meal, and finally poop, but it seems to be working so there it is.

Tiger's been the most successful business model to date. The tiger meat, though quite gamey in my opinion, is popular among hip-hop stars who seem to really like the idea of eating tigers, and get paid to write lyrics about the meat to convince all their fans to eat tiger, too. Fried strips of tiger meat wrapped in bacon have practically replaced shrimp in the decadent side of African-American culture. Frogs were a harder sell to the general public, but have struck a chord with a niche in fine-dining circles in Europe and Japan. Poison Arrow Frogs aren't really the sort of thing one eats casually. Too much poison. But, when properly prepared by master chefs, the effect is hallucinogenic. Fried poison arrow frog is making inroads in the Hamptons and Los Angeles. We have managed to keep the drug-like frogs legal by sending half the profits directly to the FDA director's house in shoe boxes with a tax donation form. It's only bribery if he hides the money in his freezer instead of reporting it into his office as a donation. If he takes it as a bribe, instead, we still have our frogs. The endangered insects aren't as popular in the Western nations, but the various fried sampler packs of rainforest beetles are more popular than potato chips on trains in Asia. The Dalai Lama himself supports the product line because he can see it might be the only thing keeping the rainforest intact.

(This is a trade secret, but we only ever eat the male beetles. At harvest time, we place traps laced with female pheromones to lure just the males. They're intoxicated by the scent. Maybe even completely overwhelmed. They throw themselves into our traps with such reckless abandon that many injure themselves to get in. We don't need to worry about any escaping as long as we keep that odor around. Men. The tigers are more respectable by far. We keep them in cages, feed them soy and elephant meat until they grow fat like kings. The sleek, murderous tigers in the commercial isn't true. The tigers look like fat kittens, reclining in the sun as royalty, purring and engorged.)

I'm supposed to be overseeing construction of our first independent restaurant. Our company is trying them out in major, upscale urban centers. I'm supposed to be promoting the restaurant in the local media, which means I'm getting my oil changed while my assistant e-mails local media in my name. I've never opened a restaurant before, and I don't know what I'm doing. When I tell that to my brother, he says that I'm doing great and my numbers are great.

At the construction site of the restaurant, I wasn't really overseeing anything. I'm not really made for this sort of thing. I'm a pastry chef, by training. After school, I worked at Starbucks, asking people if they wanted a scone with their latte. When my brother's business took off, I was invited into the business with a cushy salary and a promise that I'd be in charge of distribution to cafes. I don't really run anything. I receive e-mails from my brother telling me exactly what to tell people to do. I arrange his e-mails into memos. I pass them to a secretary. When I hear anything from them, I re-arrange it into an e-mail for my brother. I'm buying and reading all these business books, but it all seems so silly to me that I can't make sense of it, yet. Maybe I should get an MBA.

At the new restaurant, the interior has already been built out, mostly. The walls are solid mahogany, and will be covered with tiger pelts, and heads. Wildebeests, African crocodiles, cloned panda bears, and tiger pelts all arranged on the floor below where they were supposed to be mounted this afternoon. The ones that still had eyes, fake ones made of glass, looked stiff and forlorn. The skins were mounted under glass like paintings. None of these taxidermied animal parts were fake. That was part of our restaurant's credo: None of this stuff is faked.

When the workers come, I slip into the back area to stay out of the way. The interior designer has matters fully in hand. I'm only going to be in the way. When the workers move to the back to start painting the kitchen, I go behind the building.

I wasn't alone, there. One of the beggars was squatting on the curb behind the building eating fast food. He was obviously one of the mole people, maybe even a leader among them, as filthy as he was. Perhaps he was an alien.

"Hey," I said.

He looked up nervously, then back down at his burger.

"It's all right," I said. "I'm not trying to run you off, okay? You're just trying to eat. I get that. Look, I just had a question for you."

He tried to ignore me.

"Do you speak English? Hello?"

He stood up to leave. He was trying to leave. He gathered up his dirty grocery bags to leave.

I decided to follow him. Where was he going to go? The bus stop? Where would the bus take him? I took a few steps towards him. He sped up, and took off.

A few steps towards him, and I slowed down. Wherever he was going, I wasn't part of his world. I would never get the answer to the question I wanted to ask him.

Not like I was, clean and refined in designer clothes.

Behind me, my brother's restaurant was full of the sound of drills. They were hanging the heads and pelts on the walls, now. Soon, they'd be asking for my opinion on things, whether the people would like it or not, in my opinion, for I was exactly the sort of person that should be coming to the restaurant: affluent, clean, polite, and stylish.

The only way to save the world from successful people like me is to cycle the things we want to save through our large intestines. Make it into poop, or the living things have no place in our world's future. It makes me feel like poop to believe it. I don't know how my brother does it.

I throw my wallet and my keys in the dumpster and walk away. I don't even have enough change in my pocket for the bus, much less food. I walked for four miles, at least, until I reached a park with some wooded areas. I hid among the trees that night. It was so cold at night, so dark.

The question in my heart for the homeless man: If someone wanted to keep you in a cage for two years in doped-up bliss and luxury before they killed you and ate you, would you let them do it?

The second day, I was dirty enough to beg, and hungry enough. I raided a trash bin behind a grocery store for discarded cabbage, and used the box top as a sign with the help of a gas station attendant that let me use his marker.

By nightfall, I had found a shelter. I slept in a cot in a large room full of cots. Women and children slept here, the men in another room. There were more children than I could ever imagine. They ran like monsters among us, undisciplined, uncaring, uneducated. They had climbed up from the ground and found themselves here, blinking in the light, and they had no experience in nuclear families to pull from to keep their children from acting like animals. I wanted to adopt all of them, loners and mothers and children.

People think I am an abused spouse, running from my husband. I wasn't running from anyone. These were the transitioning ones, speaking in English, not in tongues, turning themselves slowly into suburbanites. They had already forgotten where they came from, trying to escape the drugs, the booze, the dirty ground, find work, a house in the suburbs, a refrigerator packed with tiger meat and bacon, and clean children on their way to school in the morning, coming home to big, empty houses while their parents work, becoming more than this, always pushing out deeper into the suburbs until we all fall into the sea.

I was looking for the king of all mole men, the biggest vulture, the mouse among rats who would seep into the corners of landscaping to feed off the scraps of the pooping kings and queens of the suburbs, who recycle the world through our large intestines to reflect our own desires, and these scavengers emulating us from the dumpsters behind the grocery stores.

Who rules the mole men, if they have a king? Who speaks for all of them? Who can tell me where I might find the one who drives them up from the ground below Five Points like springing a leak?

The next day, I begged for bus fare from the people in the shelter. Battered women can beg among the beggars and receive coins and dollar bills. I rode the buses into downtown Atlanta. The city drew these lost men and lost women, and cast them out into the world. I rode the buses from stop to stop, asking the drivers where the worst of the homeless people were.

The bus drivers said the druggies are the worst.

That's where I went, then.

I got off the bus south of downtown, near an overpass. I said one thing to everyone I met: Take me to your leader.

Everyone I met, with trembling hands, dazed eyes, more dirt than skin, all skin and bone, trembling and ruined men, angry men and crazy men, all of them, tried to answer my polite demand with misdirections.

Take me to your leader.

The government, the c-beams, the banks own everything, the drug gangs and foreigners and black people and white people and mafias and Christian mafias and and Jewish mafias and presidents and dead presidents.

Take me to your leader.

All that talk from the lost men and I notice their words mean nothing. They're too new to the daylight world. Their pointing, though, might be something.

I followed their hands and eyes. Through parks and empty buildings and past drug dealers that told me in no uncertain terms to fuck off.

I slept that night with two women who both asked me if I had any money for food. I gave them what I had left, which was only about a dollar in change. They complemented my teeth.

Of course I was an outsider: I still had straight, white teeth.

Take me to your leader.

All the next day, again, following their hands and eyes as they point, not listening to them say anything with their mouths.

There's a park south of downtown and I don't think anyone goes there anymore but the beggars. Not even drug dealers go there. Too many beggars, on every bench and table. Too many shopping carts. They don't do anything, either. They just sit. Some of them are high; some of them aren't. They sit and watch the sun like seals on a beach, but filthy. The smell of the place is enough to drive anyone underground.

I see them climbing into the playground's architecture, beneath the fake plastic trains, where the ground gives way like a tunnel, hidden from the street by the crowd and the trees and the angles of things. I look down into the gap and wonder if it's safe. It's all needles and crack vials down into the black, with broken bottles in paper bags and fallen leaves, insects, and a smell worse than shit: like vomit and shit and piss and all of it mixed up into a soup to be cooked and left to rot in the sun.

Yeah, I'm going down there. This is what I came to find.

In Atlanta, there was a railroad underground leading to freedom before the war came. There's still an underground, where tourists wander in the dark and blink into the flashing lights of history, and even when Sherman came so long ago, he burned the city into the underground. After Sherman, real trains came and carried the city up from the ruins of the war. This park I'm in has a tunnel that leads into a small hill. People had been pointing me here for days. Their leader must be here.

Underground, then, where the people line the cave drinking from paper bags and leaning against the walls, smoking joints and cigarettes and menthols.

Take me to your leader.

I keep on going underground. I know I look like a mole man now, except maybe my teeth so I keep my mouth closed. My eyes are watering because of the smell. It's so dark. I have to hold my hands out and keep my feet gliding low over the shattered glass and needles and leaves, walking real careful not to put weight on anything that might stab me. I brush people's legs with my feet. They pull up their feet and mumble a little. They're sleeping here, lined up against the shit walls. I think it's an open pipe, now. I think it's one big, open pipe into the sewers, or an abandoned part of it. The ground beneath my feet curves like a cracked open pipeline. I keep climbing down into the darkness there, blinded by the stench.

Someone grabs my hand by the wrist, hard as hard as hard.

Take me to your leader.

Someone drags me behind him.

I am placed in a chair. A match is lit. A candle is lit.

I have found him, I think.

"What you want, lady?" he says. He is beautiful, and so black he could have been the Cheshire cat with yellow corn teeth. He isn't smiling. "Lady, what you doing down here? This ain't your place."

It is a pipe. I'm in a sewer pipe. Where else would they have gone underground for the train? How else could they walk through the city without being killed? Where else would they hide from Sherman's fire? Where else would they be when it comes time to re-emerge, all sense of daylight lost, all sense of time and self forgotten? Whole generations were buried in the ground, shat upon when the pipes came. Tiger meat's flowing into the sewers. Everybody must poop. It's the only way to save the world: recycling.

"It should be," I say. "I have a couple questions to ask you. Just one, really, but it has a lead in."

"Shoot."

"All these people, these drug addicts and beggars and all of them, they need to be saved, right?"

"Shit, lady, you here to save us?"

"That's exactly right: Shit. The only way to save anyone in this world is to turn them into shit. They eat tigers and pandas and elephants and tree frogs and..."

"Lady, you crazy. You best head home. You ain't from around here. You don't talk like you from around here. Go home. Go find your people. Look at you. This ain't your world."

"Think about it, though. Think about how much money you could make selling them. Think about how they'd live like kings before they died, gorged on tiger meat and bacon, given the best medical care in the world and encouraged to breed and be happy and die blissfully unaware of the face of the devil. Think about it."

He pounded his fist on the table. "Look at my skin when you talk to me like that. Your kind was eating us once. Called it cotton gins. Called it rice and cane sugar. Eating our sweat and blood and fingernails. Wearing it in your fancy clothes."

"I know that," I said. "I'm sorry about that, but that was a long time ago, and it wasn't me. This isn't really about race. It never was. We don't care what color the tigers are. We don't measure their stripes. We don't care what kind of bugs crawl into our pheromone traps, as long as they're edible."

"You crazy. Always about race. Always about some people having and some people not having. Someone's gotta hold the mudsill."

"Shit. It's the mudsill, all right. It's all about shit. The only way to save the poor people is to eat them. Turn them into a product to sell. Volunteers only. Sign waivers and maybe your family gets paid something for it. Doesn't matter what skin color you are if you're poor. Shit only comes in one color: blood color. Dead red blood cells color."

He snorted at that. "You lucky I don't keep a gun around," he said, thoughtfully. "Yeah, maybe. Not in this country, though. Might get back to me."

"We have global operations. Think of the opportunities in Mauritania, New Zealand, Zimbabwe..."

"I'll think about it," he said. "I'll ask around and see if anyone wants in on your shitty deal. Now you go on home. I'll find you. We good at finding folk around here. We good at finding our opportunities."

Cities growing up from the ground, I bet he is. Buses running and men on the busses wandering the city before the shelter wraps them up in towels, scrubs them clean, explains the way of the daylight world. I should go home. The opportunity is there, whenever he wants it.

Home.

Where was that? Some suburban townhouse with an environmental footprint the size of a whole village in rural Mexico? My brother's company with all that blood and meat? My office? My restaurant? My hotel room?

No. You know what I did, next? I went back to the homeless shelter. One of the mothers had a baby that was crying, there. I offered to hold the child a while, see if I could calm it down or at least let her rest her arms a while. The mother gave it to me like she was ceding it to me, like I had just adopted this little child.

I held the boy in my arms.

I held him, and thought of holding him over a fire until his skin bubbled and peeled. I thought it might be good for us both to try it a while and see what happens.

Thoughts like these are enough to keep anyone away a long time. Even when I came back to the corporate office, I asked my brother if I could just be an office manager somewhere, keep the lights on, and distribute checks. It was enough.

There's plenty of shit. So much shit.

~~~

21: Aphrodite and Athena

Of Cypress born Kytherea we shall sing who brings gentle gifts to mortals. With you I begin, and having begun with you, I turn to another song.

-Homeric Ode to Aphrodite

I devoured my sister, when she surrendered to me.

Children are my domain, for they are only born with me. They are only raised with me. They stand tall while their creators sleep into the ground. You can know how to make children, but just knowing isn't enough. There is a spirit to it, and a flow of love that passes down through children. People are not fish who leave their eggs in the shallows and swim away. Children must be loved.

Everything fades but love. Love builds new generations up like tall towers while old bones grind to dust.

I am also the goddess of my own destruction, for it will happen because of love.

The first gods and goddesses claimed no territory, only being or not being. Then came wars about what places would be held, what dominions would be taken. No one bothered grasping for the intangibles, where the domain could not be held in the palm and transformed easily with the force of will. Even music and hunting were tangible actions in the old times, when it meant something to sing at a fire and run through the night with a spear. They stumbled into their domains, taking what they could, and fighting for what they wanted. I didn't bother with any of that. I fell out of the ocean onto the shore like a nymph, and I was so beautiful that I couldn't help anything. Everything was laid at my feet. Love is like gravity or bait. I didn't do anything to make myself so. I stepped onto the shore, and I was born the goddess of love, and that is all I've ever known.

Everything that was is old and gone, now. My father's mountain fell. These things happen. It was probably an argument, or something. Maybe a war. Who cares except Athena? She hasn't told me anything about it, and I never bothered to ask. It was bound to happen. The mountain fell and that was that.

There's a channel on cable dedicated to natural forces of the earth that happen all around us. Maybe it was because of the weather, or the geologic rumblings of time.

Maybe it was love. Maybe it was me, and how everyone's love drifted towards our dominions and away from each other.

All of us dwindled off to obscurity when the mountain fell.

Well, almost everyone dwindled. Lightning and storms collapsed down inside of circuits and coils of ingenuity, this divided electricity up so small and so small that there was no place in the world of men for all the micromachinery and closed grids beneath plastic shells. There is no place for such raw, naked power among the people, now. Lightning was never really that interested in being among people, anyway. He struck hard and quite quickly. He loved women that way, and threw his sons and daughters at the world like brush fires. Then, he moved on from men, for the mathematical mysteries of static and electronics and sub-molecular fission.

I care for him, for I love my father dearly, but I will not disintegrate with him into the sub-atomic level, his rage billowing up with an occasional mushroom cloud instead of thunderbolts. If he's still with anyone these days, it's the bill collectors and military men that would push a button instead of looking a rival in the face, and I don't begrudge him these bitter fruit as his lingering human supplicants.

Oh, but that was just one of us. There were so many of us. We were all there when the mountain fell. I fell, though I wasn't really paying attention to what was happening, and it was all so fast. Athena struck me with a mighty blow and after that I was just flowers for a while, with no plan what to do with myself. I smelled sweet. I drew men up the mountain with my scent, who had all come to spit in the face of the old gods' absence.

Later on, for instance, these days, when I think to write to someone - for what am I if not devoted to love letters - I send my letters into the world, and everyone who touches the envelope is haunted by the memory of the perfume. My words are never as important as the aroma of them.

I am the goddess of letters, because every letter is a love letter that is not a bill.

I am also the goddess of false idols, for that is an unrequited love.

I am the goddess of automobiles. Not the making of them, but the being of them in the world, and the way it feels to sit behind one alone in the car for the first time, and all the roads of the world open like a vast, territory of adventures and freedoms and futures as branching as the highways and byways of two-hundred years of men building roads.

I am also the goddess of clothing for pets - even those simple collars that come in different colors, occasionally rhinestoned, but often not. This is often an unrequited love, but sometimes it is a love as pure as mothers and children.

I have always been the goddess of lipstick. Flavored lipstick. Rouge. Chapstick if it comes in colors, and the promise to soothe and soften for a kiss, not skiing. I am the goddess of advertising, and agency men who create advertising. I am queen of all enticement. After all: Sex sells.

I am the goddess of lines drawn in charcoal on rough paper. The muses are my shadows. I wear them like the night when dreamers sleep in my arms.

Everything changes but desire and despair.

And, of course, like I said before, the mountain fell. These things happen, and we had all changed enough by then to accept it when it did.

My brilliant sister and I were all that was left, standing in the ruins of our grand halls of stone and cloud, and at the time she believed we were at odds, like reason struggling with passion, as if there was conflict between us. She struck me down with her shield before I could cloud her eyes with love, and I fell deep into the ground, becoming only flowers and dreaming of the time I visited my cruel uncle for the sake of a mortal man. I dreamed that all was in darkness, and that the love I had for the man was like a lure to me in the dark, drawing us together where not even the jewels of the underworld glistened to show the way.

I am the goddess of funerals, and mourning the dead.

I was his flowers, then, the Narcissus flowers.

Always, I fall into his flowers, for I am the goddess of flowers and bees and pollinating insects, and all the matchmakers of the world who are the bees for their clients and their friends. I would invite every lonely heart to a party, if I could, and lock them all in the world's largest closet with others who are lonely, too. Despair is my domain, but I do not want that for you. I want someone to help you. Everyone should help everyone, always. When will everyone find love?

I was talking about the mountain. Many men came to the top of it. I will call him one.

A man came to the top to prove his worth to a rich man with a beautiful daughter. He looked around. He wondered where the palace was. He had always believed there should be a palace there. There was barely an altar there, to mark what had been changed. It was just rocks in piles as if piled upon a fallen body. My body. A flat stone was on top, where one could, if one were so inclined, place a sacrifice on the altar of the old ways.

Had we moved, he wondered. Had we wandered down the mountain, lost ourselves for centuries among the world of mortals?

I was just a field of flowers, at the time, spilling out from the rocks of the mountain's peak, and I let him carry pieces of me down the mountain. I let myself spread in this way, returning my flower to the world.

He carried me because I was the sweetest flowers he had ever smelled.

Amaryllis Aphrodite. Narcissus. Paper Bush. Rose.

Down the mountain, I went.

I fell in love with the man that plucked me. I loved that he had climbed a mountain only to bring back a handful of flowers to prove his love. I was his goddess and he was mine.

Return, then, my lover, to see what my sister hath wrought in my absence.

I am also the goddess of the first day of college, when a young woman stands in front of the mirror and looks herself in the face and feels exhilarated and terrified, like she's been preparing for this day her whole life, and like she has to check her make-up again one more time because she might meet her future husband today, on this campus, and pick her college major and create a whole world of her life, right there. She stands in the mirror at the moment she will run to grab the nebulous threads of new fate from the very air itself.

I am also the goddess of first dates before they happen, in a moment's fleeting eye contact on a train, and clammy hands shaking afterwards, a phone call, an exhilarating message on a machine. No matter what happens, pay homage to me, for I alone with passion can bend the three grey sisters against the nature of their own thread and needle. I am the grey sisters, weaving and hoping and loving all of you, and I am the trickster that creates on a whim from what is possible.

All is fair in love and war. All is possible in love and war. With desire and despair... Did you know I am a war goddess?

Patriots die for their beloved country. People write letters home to their mothers and wives, and beg for absolution from the terrible things. Pray to my brother for a glorious battle, but pray to me to return home to your wife which is a greater urge than glory. My shield is greater than Athena's, for it carries you home, always home, on its back.

Leave no man behind.

Reason and strategy create no heroes. No medals come without honor or valor, which are prismatic aspects of love. I forgive you all for your sins, weary soldiers. I'd forgive you anything you did in the war. Just come home, all my sons and daughters far of the bloody fields and mortar shells. A mother wants her children to marry, not die to the cry of a bugle. Ride the train to a decent, quiet job, and see your life's love on the train. See your true love for the first time, and I will help you smile a little and be brave, soldier, for the first thing to do is speak and it takes such courage to say something that first time, like charging out of the trenches of your known, know-able life across the no man's land to a new country.

War is the servant of love.

The man who came down from the mountain was called a liar, because he said there was no palace on the peak. This was no lie. To prove himself, he led a group of men up the mountain. A thunderstorm came that scared many of these men, but they stayed together and stayed low and it passed. Farmers knew the storms, how the tallest trees were struck down and staying low would be enough until the clouds passed. Do not stand up to my father, or raise your head. Stay low; stay bowed. Pray or not, but look humbled. Everyone knew.

When the storm passed some went home. They had families, wives and sons, and would not tempt gods. The rest climbed up, their desire for a world without such fickle guardians pouring confusion onto the heads of men, such misery, leading them on – my scent of love leading them on. Their desire to end despair driving them on.

I am the goddess of mountain climbers. I am also the goddess of abandoning the mountain for the sake of fear, which is a form of narcissism, or maybe the concern of a family. Either way, I am the goddess of that, too.

When Narcissus leaned over his own reflection, I touched the water to hold it still. The water itself, imbued with my fingertip gazed upon the boy as if upon it's opposite: sharply-defined and closely-contained and chiseled like a statue that heals where stone erodes. Opposites attract. They fell into each other. Echo's despair was my doing, too. There is narcissism in so much drama. There is a selfishness to it, in her impracticality she never spoke to him except to feed him back himself.

Love is what they say, but always longing. I am the goddess of an empty bed, and the feeling of it in the night, empty. When it means something. I am the goddess of staring at a ringing phone, terrified of it. Staring at a silent phone and wanting to scream at it.

People take care of each other. Storms roll in and wash away the cities of the shore. People there climb higher and higher from the flood, screaming prayers and trying to help each other. I'm in the space between their fingers, holding them together even as the waves pull them down.

Uncle is so quiet, these days, and only raises his tides to remind people he is still there, but there is no sacrificial maidenhead or altar raised upon the rocky shores that will appease him. He has closed his ears to pleas. He has become enamored of all that is inside of his aqueous form and the frantic, ecstatic lives and deaths of the teeming hordes within him. He has abandoned his interest in the immutable men upon his shores.

There are more fish than men. There is more sea than land. Why should he bother listening to the people on the shore? Because they build ships? Because they build submarines? Have you heard the song of the whales? It is more beautiful than submarines, and more pleasing to the ears of my old uncle.

Fish are nearly nothing to me. Most of them mate in selfless abandon and die in it, immune to everything but their own instinctual urge. It is still holy, but it is little concern to me. They that form families are mine. Not even my uncle begrudges me that among his kin.

The old ways dwindled, closing up the palaces and altars and ears of us upon the world of men, except for two of us, sisters and both of us young. We were both born by accident from the body of our father. From the head, my sister carved her way out of his skull alone, furious and pure. From the loins, I came, when his essence was cast into the sea, and swirled in the ancient salt loam that had once birthed bacteria from minerals and heat.

Like a beached whale, naked and raw and ripe for cutting, I crawled onto the shore. To my naked corpse they came, and cut into me. I was devoured. They made an alter from my bones to bring my spirit peace. They burned oil of my flesh with Narcissus flowers, and it smelled so sweet.

The kingdom of our fathers ended not with a war, but with a sigh. All of the older ones and most of the younger ones having tired of all the noise and motion of dealing with each other, and people didn't surprise anyone anymore. There were no more affairs among mortals, for what was the point? What new thing could be discovered among these people that never seemed truly grateful for all that was done for their sake. We all just stopped talking to each other and to them. Finally, they all slipped away into the domains they deemed more interesting. Not my sister and me. We were patient. She did so because she knew this strategy was more effective than destruction, as her father had once wrought to claim the sky. I did so because I could never stop loving these brilliant, needy, wounded, courageous beasts that walked on two legs and wept at the grave of their mothers though years had passed since her death. In her brilliance, my sister knew she could not wait for my ennui. When I was all that remained, between her and the world, she struck me down with her shield. I loved her so much, that I allowed her to take everything she wanted. That is what you do for someone you love.

When my sister struck me down, she did not kill me, but I allowed her to act as though she had. She walked down into the world, at first, to choose her portion of everything before I could. But, that was the old way, and everything had changed now that we had claimed domains that could not be held in your hand.

No one else would have recognized this, but she was brilliant and logical.

She saw her defeat, then.

For without me, the world was a herd of squid shimmering into a chaos, grappling any tentacles at all in the rush of the crowd, and dying without a thought in moments. What was the point of building factories if there was no home to return to in the night, with children to hold and the eternal blessing of a kiss?

She, from the head, and I, from the body, and in the end the body always, always wins, between us.

When I stretched my legs, and walked back into the world behind my beautiful mountain-climbers, my sister was there, kneeling before me. She said she had tried but could never defeat me in this world.

I took off her helmet. I pushed her hair back from her clean, ivory brow. Love.

She was trembling in fear, weeping. Despair.

I devoured her, then, like a god of old. My virginal sister's flesh was sweet as nectar. Her blood was ambrosia and fresh goat's milk. I ate all of her, in entirety, and she did not raise a hand to stop me. She did not scream or writhe in pain. She could not bear it. The stoic goddess of warfare and tactics knew when she was beaten, and accepted it all.

It wasn't her death. Perhaps it is her strategy. I cannot kill her any more than when Cronus swallowed all his immortal children like heavy stones.

I think something is growing in side my heart, between the two of us, and I hope, when the girl is born at last, she will let me hold her a while to my breast, before the world changes all around her shadow, and even I must bow low.

Prometheus, when I awoke again to the world, I first found where you had been kept while my father was still paying attention to your sin. You were bones picked clean without the rage of a god to imbue your regeneration.

Everything in the universe begins with a great passionate fire that slowly cools down and down unto dead stars, and my father could be no different than the universal powers that obeyed him. Matter cannot be created, and cannot be destroyed.

It can only be changed.

Reason uses things for what they are.

Passion uses things for what they could be.

In time, all change is entropy that is reasonable. Love makes change more than what is lost.

Prometheus, I placed a kiss upon your bones and a kiss upon the bones of the vulture that starved without your liver growing back each morning like a purple blossom.

I love you all so much.

I am the goddess of the great city at the mouth of the Hudson. They placed my greatest idol there, with the flame of desire in my hand. I watch them in their tiny rooms, hurtling like rockets upon the streets, slamming into each other and making a mess of everything, trying to make something beautiful from the mess of everything. All of this is what I say to the men and women on their ships: be free here, be more than what you were. Make a better life for your children. Send money home to your family so they can come be with you. Be free. Be free.

I am also the goddess of credit card debt, and retirement planning, and weekly paychecks wasted on whiskey and dancing.

I am the beating heart.

I am holding your breath.

I love you all so much, I can't even speak.

~~~

22: Nausicaa

The last temptation of Odysseus. The last hope she had of complacency with her father and king came and went when the man who would be her husband fell back into the sea.

1

Peter,

I guess I can't tell you anything too specific, in case you get caught.

Today, I sat in a cathedral until nightfall because people will leave me alone and it's quiet so I can think. Cathedrals remind me of my family's priest, and his little church on my father's island, where I was confirmed the day that I ran away from that life.

I can't wrap my head around this world, or the people in it. I float among trains and hostels. I am at sea. That is where I am, and where I was when I was on father's island. I wondered if I shouldn't kill myself, because it's hard out here. It's so hard. I see why my father didn't want this for me. I guess I'm glad I'm out here, though. I'll stay out here until the end of the world.  
I dreamed about this last night, and I was thinking about this in the cathedral. On this city block, where I am right now, I live with all these strangers in a hazy window of five or ten minutes where stores open and close and clocks aren't all synchronized. That's kind of how the end of the world will be, I think. When the end of the world comes, two eyes will bend shut. Ten fingers will curl closed. One tongue will wilt like a dead flower, and two ears will hear nothing. When someone dies, it's the end of the world for them. It might as well be.

Dark dreams of death and ruin, my father's island, and the man that washed ashore, and when I woke up from my dream, I was in a hostel room with forty other beds. People were snoring. I was alone in the dark until morning, listening to so many others' dreams – hearing nothing.

Then, I went to the cathedral to think and try to wrap my head around this world.

By nightfall, I was in a bar in Little Istanbul, in Munich - a cluster of buildings packed with Turks – Turkish food, Ouzo, Grappa, corner stores, doeners, and cheap neon signs. I was right across the street from the Hauptbahnhof. I had everything I owned between my pockets and a single backpack, including about four-hundred thousand Euro left from your parting gift, hidden in a moneybelt under my clothes. In this bar, I met a young woman from Montana who was traveling alone across Europe. She was sleeping in a hostel room with forty other people. When she was drunk, she told me that she had a taser in her purse, and when she slept, she kept it under her pillow. She was afraid, every night, that she'd set it off and electrocute herself in the face, but she was afraid to sleep without it.

When she went to the restroom, she left her jacket in her seat, to tell all the people of the bar that she would return. By the time her body heat had worn off the wood, she'd be back. I never did that, with my jacket, even if it was the way things were done in Germany. I kept your .38 in my jacket, hand sewn into the seam. I may not be good for much in the real world, but I know how to sew. My mother made sure I learned how to sew, like a proper lady.

I stole Ms. Montana's jacket. I bolted from the bar, tab unpaid. I didn't need the jacket, but I also needed the jacket. I didn't have enough clothes, and I needed my money to last for decades. I hopped onto the first train at the station, going anywhere.

My name's still Nausicaa. That's my real name. My ID, for now, says I'm someone else.

2

You weren't there, Peter, so I guess I should tell you about my first communion. I think it started all of this, for me. You were out with father, doing whatever you did to make money and surround us with men with guns on an island.

When I was twelve, I had gone to the mainland with my mother because I needed a new dress – a nice dress – for my first communion. The island's priest was with us in the limo, and he was the only man I had ever known until then that did not carry a gun.

The men on the street did not. I touched my mother's arm and pointed this out to her and she told me that maybe more of them did than I thought. She held my hand and looked out at them. She was bored and her hand was cold. The men out there had no rifles over a shoulder like a woman carried a purse. They didn't casually place guns on tables at their sidewalk restaurants.

And, the people didn't look at us, nervously. They didn't try not to speak. My mother sneered at them and remained quiet until the people rolled their eyes, threw up their hands and walked away.

Father Pietro said this was the way things were for most people in the world, and someday I would learn of it. My mother said I would never learn of it, and I was better than them because I was a princess on an island, like all of those women had dreamed of becoming.

Father Pietro smirked at that.

"What?" said my mother.

"It's not important, and it has nothing to do with you."

"Tell me, Father."

"Only... My dream was to be a priest on an island, not a princess. I wanted my own perfect world, there, among friends and Christians."

"We own the island. It is our perfect world."

"I know. I have long ago grown beyond fantasies that were never truly mine. Like I said, it was not relevant, and not important."

My mother took a long drink of vodka. She was bored. Her hands were shaking. She probably hadn't had her medicine. At home, our father kept her medicine in a safe in the wall, and only he knew the combination. Only when he was around was she allowed to use the medicine.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then, she put on a smile for me.

"Your father is supposed to meet us for lunch with Peter. I don't know where they are. We won't wait for them if they're late. I hate bringing you here. This world is a pit of snakes, and they all want to do terrible things to you if only we weren't here to stop them, with me and your father's protection. You need to stay with us on the island, not be out here."

Father Pietro looked out the window. He said, "Nausicaa, did you study the letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians?"

"I think so, Father."

"What was your favorite part?"

"I didn't like any of it," I said.

My mother laughed hard at that. She poured herself another vodka from the limousine bar.

I spoke English, and a little German because my mother was American and my father was German and they both taught me their languages. They demanded it of everyone in the house, too. Spanish was the language of dirty, brown animals- the help, the people of the island who were not us, and these brown people on the mainland. Father Pietro did not speak any German. When we wanted to talk just to each other, my mother and me, we spoke German.

"Are you ready to buy a dress"

"Yes, very much. Mother, please don't get angry if father doesn't come. His work is very important."

"Is it? Do you know what your father does?"

"He is a very important man."

"Yes... And?"

"He tells people what to do."

"Yes. People are very stupid. Without your father those mongrel monkeys would all get led around by the nose by a bunch of dirty American corporations."

My mother drank her martini, and didn't want to speak anymore. If I tried to say something, she shushed me. She had a headache. She needed her medicine.

We bought a dress from a woman who touched my mother's shoulder like a friend. She let it happen, too. She even feigned a smile. Then, when the lady turned her back, my mother scowled at her. We went to a restaurant. I had never been in a restaurant before. I got in trouble for staring at all the other people in the room, all of us eating different things. My mother explained the check, to me, and said we had to leave a tip, even if service was terrible, which she said it was. I had never been in a restaurant before, and I didn't know about these things. She said that father is running late at an important meeting or he'd be joining us.

Then, my mother, Father Pietro, and I brought back our dress to the island for my first communion in the village church. I stood at the altar in my dress and ate the bread, drank the wine. I marveled at the world I had seen. I wore my communion dress for the rest of the day.

It was my last day on the island.

We lived, surrounded on all sides by water like a blue jewel. My father came and went on a boat with Peter, his oldest friend and pilot. I had only ridden in your boat twice. Once when I had gone to shore to buy a communion dress, and again when I left the island in the night.

We were surrounded by reefs – coral trees and tropical fish, blurs of color in the warm blue water. I had never known winter or autumn. I knew only summer, every single day.

I walked along the beach, and held my sandals in my hand and the men that worked there, with AK-47s slung over their backs, mostly ignored me. I was still wearing my communion dress. I had just gotten out of the church, and eaten the communion lunch. My mother was angry because my father hadn't been there. She had a cellphone that she could call him on. She kept dialing his number, but he wouldn't answer. He sent her a text, and she threw the phone across the room.

I ate watermelon. I was not thinking about death or dead men. I was thinking about the world beyond the horizon, and all the marvels that must be out there, on the mainland.

After lunch, I walked along the beach, in my new dress, feeling beautiful.

Not far from shore in the surf, I saw a thing floating, clumped in kelp and rags and floating plastics. I squinted. Then, I knew I wasn't seeing just trash and kelp. I knew exactly what that shape was: a man's body, floating among trash.

None of the men who watched the beach worried that there was a man in the water, and who could blame them? The man in the water was not one of us, on the island, and he had no business here in death. I looked at that bloated body, floating upon trash, and I did not know him.

I walked closer to him. The waves pushed his floating heap of empty milk jugs and vines to the edge of the water. I walked out into the waves. I hiked my hem to keep the edges dry, and picked my path carefully around the small jagged red and purple trees of coral. I bent over. I reached out my hand, and could not get the man in from the water. I dropped my skirt into the waves and jumped out and in. I swam out into the waves. I grabbed at the man. I snagged the tip of a milk bottle with my finger. I pulled the vine. Trash slid free, spilling away into the water. The body tried to sink. I caught at him. His skin was so cold. I pulled him up towards the shore. I pulled hard on it. I got the body up to the shore by myself.

The men there – my bodyguards, I guess – did nothing to either stop me or help me.

Once upon the beach I got a good look at the dead body. The man – though dead – had a vise grip on the vines. He must have been trying to pull himself out of the water by pulling on vines. He must have come from the mainland. He must have been in one of those jungle villages my mother ranted about, that are all pushed up against the water because the people are ignorant monkeys and don't know any better, and the new maids had better not come from one of those villages because they couldn't even keep their hands clean.

Rigor mortis had settled in. His arms were out to his side like a crucifix. His head leaned always back and to the right a little. His eyes were bloodshot. I imagine they'd turn yellow in another few hours, or shrivel into raisins as the sun and sea salt dried him out. I could see his tongue because it had wedged open his mouth. His skin was bruised and discolored. His tongue had stiffened into a pale pink tree root.

I thought of how handsome he must have been. This poor man had drowned, clutching at vines wrapped in trash. He hadn't wanted to drown. He had wanted to climb back onto the shore – wherever he was – and return to his life as if nothing had happened.

Also, he was naked. Bits of cloth had fallen away from the vines with the trash when I pulled the viney keystone loose that could have been his clothes, or could have just been trash.

I had never seen a naked man before – never. I had seen a few of the young toddlers in the village running naked and screaming until their mothers caught them – but I had never seen this. Never this, bruised all over the body, discolored and every joint swollen from the seawater.

I looked up at the men with guns. They were shuffling from foot to foot, nervously. I told one of the men that I needed his shirt. He looked at me uncomfortably.

I told him again. "Give it to me, now."

He nodded. He took the rifle off his shoulder. He pulled his shirt off and gave it to me. I made the shirtless man help me lift the dead body so I could wrap the man's waist like a towel. "Help me," I said. I picked up one of the dead man's arms. "Let's get him back to the house." The mustached man balked. His buddy, did, too. I was insistent. They obeyed.

Into my bedroom, we carried him. I made them put the drowned man in my bed. I told the men to leave. They did not hesitate to flee from the drowned man and me. The vines had dragged along the ground and accumulated beach sand on my carpet. They were stuck in his hands, and I knew I'd never be able to pull them out. I had a pair of paper scissors among my arts and craft supplies and I clipped away at everything I could to neaten his appearance. I started by clipping away the vines. The vines fell about the floor. Then, I tentatively gave him a haircut. At first, I was unconcerned about messing up, but then I realized that this man wasn't like the little boys of the village. Any mistake I made would not grow back.

My mother turned up, eventually. She had a white sheet over an arm. She touched my back. "Why did you bring it to the house?"

I took the sheet from my mother and I tucked in the man on my bed as if he were a patient. "I don't think he's dead," I said. "Not completely. He will come back to life."

"No," She took my hand. She pulled me away from the man in my bed. "Come," she said. "Come away from this, baby."

I pulled my mother's hand from me. I touched the dead body's naked leg.

The body's arms descended gently from their rigor mortis. The palms relaxed.

"Look!"

"He's dead. He's not breathing."

I pulled my hand away. "Get out of my room!" I said. "If you aren't going to help me, get out!"

She sat down in a chair by the window. She crossed her arms, and folded her legs in the big chair. She looked out the window.

My father would come, with you Peter, hungry and tired and bearing gifts. Before you both came home, I wanted the dead man to come back to life. I wanted him to stand up and dance and wrestle with you and father and carry me away. I wanted him to teach me all about the rest of the world, that I had only seen once from a limousine window, a restaurant, and a dress shop.

The priest came next. He must be nearly ninety, by now. A maid helped him enter the room. He smelled like he hadn't washed his clothes in soap. He had hands like wilted fruit, molded mangoes left too long to ripen. His skin reeked of sugarcane. I think his teeth were rotted out. A maid held the priest's hand, and guided him to a chair in the room. She helped him ease down into a seat. She crossed herself and fled my room.

I folded my arms.

"No, child," he said, though I had asked him no question.

"Bring this man back to life," I said. "Pray for a miracle like the Acts of the Apostles."

"Why would you do such a terrible thing to a man? Let him rest. Look at him! He's exhausted!"

"I want him to live," I said. "I want to talk to him."

"Men are not dolls, Nausicaa," said the priest. "Do not be so averse to death. We all die. It's perfectly natural. When I die, I will enter the light of Christ's love, and all my worldly concerns will be washed away, left behind in a husk that contorts in a pain I do not feel. Is there tea? Have someone bring me tea. The walk here was strenuous." He looked up at the servant. "Tea? These old bones need something." The servant left the room for his comfort.

My found man was clinging to vines. He was fighting. He didn't want to die.

"I want to keep this man," I said. "Do you have holy water?"

"No."

"Do you have the Eucharist?"

"No. It wouldn't work."

"Go get it, Father Pietro."

"It wouldn't work. Nausicaa, you are being stubborn. Your own personal Lazarus? You remember the story of Lazarus, don't you? Do you know what happened to him after he was risen from the grave?"

"He lived. He was happy and he lived."

"Yes, for a time. Then, his death came again, and he passed on. There is no permanence in miracles. All the blind who were granted sight, died in darkness, eyes closed forever. All the lame that danced the mazurka, returned to sickbeds and passed away, weeping in agony. The lepers fell prey to cancer, accidents, old age, though their leprosy was healed. You want a miracle. How long would it be until death returned to take this man? The true miracle is heavenly glory and the light of Christ, which we only truly join in death."

"You talk too much." I pulled dolls down from the shelf – a teddy bear, a monkey. I held them close to my heart. "You only say it because you're powerless."

"Child, it is a beatitude to bury the dead. It is a holy act. You'll get sick, with this filthy thing in your bedroom. It already stinks of the rot and seawater. Best put him in the ground. Let the men take him away, and bury him deep enough to contain the stench."

This was my father's house – my house - not Pietro's church. My father wanted me to have anything I wanted, always. He had never denied me, and never would. Even my mother knew that. I put my dolls with the man on the bed. I took a book from the shelf and sat in the window. I pretended to read.

Tea came, though I didn't want any. I thought of making the servant pour it into the mouth of the drowned man, but he had had plenty of liquid already. What he needed was electricity, and heat to boil away the water.

We three sat alone together, in silence, a long time – the body, the priest, and me. The servant came to tell us it was time for my communion day's special dinner. I thought of bringing the drowned man with me, but I could not imagine asking the old priest to help me carry the body, and there were no staff around. I'd have to abandon the body to go to dinner.

3

Peter,

I'm running out of time at this internet cafe, I'll tell you more later. I slept in the woods the last two nights because I was in between cities. I slept under a tree and I was wet and cold. There wasn't a hotel, even if I wanted one. There wasn't a car or a hostel or a motel or a bar or a store of any kind. There was just a long, empty road, and a sidewalk beside it, leading to some distant city. Tonight, I need a hostel, decent food, and a shower. I can probably steal the food.

4

Sometimes people die; other times, they are killed.

The staff at the house changed from time-to-time, Peter, and I noticed it. How could I not notice it, even if I was young? I was urged not to ask about such things. On an island, one would think that anyone who left the house would go to the village and remain in the village and I would see them again and again, all the days of my life. Instead, people were brought in from the shore, and placed in an empty house.

This is the land of the living, not of the dead. Men who are afraid to speak to the boss' daughter drink hard at night, shoot their guns off into the stars. There is music and dancing and laughter. Sunday morning, they are in church or they are not, and the reverend father says his mass for the family of the man who rules this island, and all the other children here whom I am advised to avoid as much as possible, because I am better than them, but I did help out with the littlest ones, with my mother, cutting their hair – no lice, she had said – and scrubbing the dirtiest ones down before they can go away to the mainland.

I walk along the beach and witness the remains of the living. Condoms and spent oystershells, broken bottles and bonfire ash. Empty bullet casings. Bits of bone and blood. Never bodies. Never the dead.

Sometimes, people go away and they never come back.

All these years later, I am alone in Europe. Peter, I barely remember you, at all

I have no home, but I have money. It's freezing cold. It's February and I'm so cold. I stole warmer jackets, and a hat and mittens. I looked on the ground for anything I could use as a scarf. Dry newspaper. Dry anything.

I walked from Erbenheim to the Wiesbaden marketplace, where I could buy a scarf, because I could see the cities were close enough to walk, and I didn't want to spend money on a bus if I could avoid it. German buses are expensive, and if you try to ride without a ticket, they demand to see your ID to write you a ticket. I stopped in this webcafe to warm up for a minute before traveling on.

I saw things on the ground, adrift, as if blown upon a shore.

Bloated worms, a rusty bicycle chain, paper, paper, paper, fallen berries from a strange bush that grows clusters of blue berries in bleak February, living worms struggling on the tar for the soft ground that had recently vomited them up in a rainstorm – I was cold and damp from the rain \- paper, paper, little pink berries from a barren bush that still seemed to grow tiny pink berries on leafless stems, bottle caps, bottles - more bottle caps than bottles - dogshit that had not been stepped on, dogshit that had been stepped on, dogshit with the straight boundary through it from a bicycle wheel, abandoned bits of soggy pastries, a broken umbrella, lost parking tickets, a thousand cigarette butts, a thousand cigarette butts, a million soaked-through cigarette butts, my shoes (only one shoe at a time on the ground. I picked one up and put the other down and picked one up).

Also my eyes were on the ground because the rain picked up again, freezing cold, and I didn't want to look up into the little flecks of ice.

I'm glad I stole that jacket.

I wish I wasn't alone all the time.

I miss you, Peter. You were always a good friend to me.

5

Communion dinner was served after my first Communion on my father's island. It was the last dinner I'd eat there. We ate duck a'l'orange. I didn't know it was a luxury. I had grown up with it. I couldn't imagine eating it now.

The reverend father joined us for dinner. He led us in grace. We ate in silence. I listened for the sounds of anyone in my room, moving the body. I heard none. I chewed. I looked at my mother. She hid her gaze in her food. She was furious, I could tell. Father wasn't here for my communion. I had dragged a body on shore. The good, reverend father ate slowly, savoring every bite. He often dined with us.

My mother picked up her plate, halfway through her meal. She threw it at the wall. She picked up her glass and threw that, too. She stormed off, into her bedroom, for the timed safe. She had to wait for the timer to open, and I was never to bother her when it did. She kept her needles in the bedroom safe, with her special medicines.

The reverend father didn't stop eating when mother left the table. He leaned forward and smiled. "You are growing up to be such a strange girl," he said, to me. He didn't say anything about mother's absence.

"Do you think he might want some food?" I said.

The priest looked down at his meal. "Perhaps," he said. "It might be worth a try."

I returned to my room, and my bed was empty. There were new sheets on the bed, and a new blanket. The mess on the carpet of sand and vines hadn't been cleared away, yet. There was still a beach on my floor, even if my bed had been wiped clean of all signs of what washed ashore. A vacuum makes too much noise. They'd have to run the generator, too, which makes too much noise. I'd have run screaming to stop them before it was too late.

They had tricked me.

I walked out of the house. I looked around for signs in the grass or the sand where a body might have been carried.

I saw my father, then. He wore a black suit, and carried a cane with a sword inside of it, that he likes to show off when he's drunk. He used to be a fencer. He had just come in from your boat, Peter.

"Father," I said.

"What is it?"

"Can I have a gun?"

"Don't be absurd, Nausicaa," he said. "What would you use a gun for?"

"I want to shoot someone."

"Who?"

"I don't know who, yet."

"Go to your room," he said. "I need to give your mother her medicine. She's probably a devil from hell as long as she's had to wait."

"Please, dad?"

"No. How was your first communion?"

"Okay, I guess. Were you on the mainland? Were you shopping and eating at restaurants?"

"No, Nausicaa," he said. He stopped to pluck a flower from the garden near the house.

"I want to go back to the mainland," I said. "Can I go tomorrow?"

"Anything for you, baby," he said. He wasn't listening to me. He placed the flower on his lapel. "I will look around for a gun for you. They make pellet guns you could use to shoot seagulls, if you like. Go play. Be home before dark."

I walked down to the ship. Peter, that's where you were, dressed like my father, but you have that big, shaggy white beard that makes me think of Santa Claus. You had a small radio playing Spanish music. You ate hamburgers one at a time from a brown paper bag. You looked up.

"Oh, hey," you said. "Your dad was just talking about you."

"Yeah?"

"Best stay out of the house a bit. Your mom was pissed."

"What did dad say?"

"First Communion."

"Yeah. Father says I'm all grown up now. I'm ready for the world."

"I had it younger. Back in America, we have it when we're seven or eight."

"I'm twelve."

"You are. I remember when you were a baby. You get bigger every day. When I was your age, I was on a street corner in. I was trouble. Big world out there, you've never seen. Glad you made it to shore."

"Can I have your gun for a minute?" I said.

You smiled. You pulled it out of your shoulder holster. You had this small revolver – a .38, with your name engraved in the bone handle which is how I can remember your name so good after all this time wandering. You flipped it open and spilled the bullets out onto the bottom of the boat. They sounded like marbles. You sighted down the empty barrel.

"Don't tell your dad," he said. He held it out to me.

I took it. I flipped the chambers back in. It was heavy.

I sat down with you, Peter. I told you about the dead body I found. I remember what you said. "Crazy, girl. You think the world is just a game? You've never been so close to death as him, and your dad doesn't want that for you. Nobody does."

Then, we played some cards for a while – go fish, and a litle blackjack. I kept the gun in my hand the whole time. Then, you looked up. You were quick to snatch the gun from me. You slipped it back into your holster.

My father walked over, into the boat.

He grabbed me by my wrist. He squeezed it hard. He dragged me, and walked fast. I fell on the ground, but he didn't stop dragging me. I cut my knee, and there was blood, and it didn't matter. He kept pulling me. I crawled up to my knees.

"There you are, misbehaving child, home after dark. To your room," he said. "You have been very bad, today."

And then, I was in my room. I heard the lock click from the outside. I punched the door. I turned, and leaned against it and slid down to the clean, vacuumed floor. I pressed my hand against my knee.

He spoke through the door. "Do not frighten your mother again. It is disgusting, this thing you did, today."

Then, he was gone.

My bed was cold and empty and clean. My communion dress was ruined, smeared with sand and mud and blood where my father had made me bleed.

I didn't bother to change. I climbed out the window.

6

Things left on the floor of a hostel dorm.

Old orange peel, grocery bags with dirty clothes, shoes piled onto each other like sleeping puppies, an empty bottle of juice, flecks of scrap paper torn away from notebooks by artists and poets and journalists of all times and ages, bread crumbs, large plastic bins that slid under the beds like giant flotation devices under giant airplane seats, the light that spills from the open bathroom door, the dust of a hundred nations slipping into the corners like the shoe pollen.

Also, cigarette butts, dozens of them, on the landing out a window. Smokers snuck out to smoke alone, each broken cigarette was a moment alone left behind on the ground.

I tried my first cigarette there, from a Turkish man. He didn't speak German or English, and I didn't speak Turkish or French. We sat together on the balcony. He handed me a cigarette. I looked him in the face.

"Where are you from?" I said. "Wo von?"

He shook his head. He said something in French. He pointed at his ears. He offered me a light from an expensive looking Zippo and I took the flame, and coughed and coughed and we laughed together. He taught me how to smoke so I wouldn't cough, to just pull the smoke into my mouth, and taste it, then let it go. Then, I had to go.

Berlin was next. I took the train.

There wasn't a reason, or a place, or anything that I was looking for. I went because the people in the hostels told each other all these stories about the place. I had only the vaguest grasp of history, picked up in conversations with tourists and bus drivers. Everyone had to go there. Maybe I was looking for the man that washed ashore, came back to life, and walked out when I wasn't looking. He changed the sheets in silence. He raided my father's closet for clothes. He looked sadly at the floor, because he knew it would be too loud, and he didn't know where the generator was. He climbed out the window, like I did, and escaped in a hidden boat like the ones the men use to bring supplies to the island. He had decided to go somewhere without violence, without boats and oceans. Berlin was an entire city that had become a monument to peace, and the way love defeats all the evil in the world. Where else would he go?

Maybe I was looking for you, Peter.

The name of a train station between Munich and Berlin on the ICE line: "Jena Paradies". Everyone pronounced it like it was "Henna Paradise", and I knew there'd be spray paint all over the walls and roofs like Henna tattoos.

Before we got to the station, I saw bombed-out, crumbling farm houses overgrown with moss and damp ferns, mist-covered mountains laced with late snow huddle around the city like voyeurs leering over a bathtub.

Vivid graffiti - a rainbow of messy teenage love - smothered every inch of industry building. Clean, small cars curved through the clean streets and disappeared into the mist around the bend.

There was a world outside the island. There were people and places and things.

Leaving town, a long, low wooden fence by the train tracks repeats the same block letters like prayer beads in black spray paint: "stowstowstowstowstowstowstowstowstowstowstow..."

In Berlin - in East Berlin - I bought a bicycle.

I was alone all the time. I didn't know what to say to people. I looked out at a marvelous world, and I was locked inside my head, like a ship in a sea.

7

Peter,

I think about the past a lot. I think that's why I still write to you, after these years traveling.

I think about Father Pietro, and First Communion, and how patient Father Pietro must have been to finally get revenge on my father for coming to the island, taking over, and killing people, having people killed, replacing anyone my father wanted to replace. Father Pietro took me to shore one time, for a communion dress. A willful girl, spoiled all my life, I had seen a world of wonder and mystery and I never thought it wouldn't be safe. I fell into it like a fool.

The church was in the middle of the village. The village was full of houses with tin roofs, and wooden walls where magazine pages are used to cover over the holes and cracks. People slept in hammocks, there. Children slept in piles of clothes on the floor.

The church was painted white, with stained-glass windows that told a story of Noah's ark. The church was smaller than a living room. The cross was embossed with real gold, and covered in jewels. The altar was made from stone. There was a relic of a saint in the altar. I had heard it was a fingerbone. My mother said it was just a rumor, but I had heard it from my father, who never needed to lock himself up in the bedroom for medicine like my mother.

We sat in folding chairs, at my first communion. I wore a white dress, like a wedding. Then, after the luncheon in the churchyard, I walked across the beach in my communion dress, and found a body.

Then, I climbed out a window and fled to you, Peter, and your boat.

You looked at me with a scared face.

"Your father won't allow it. Sorry, Nausicaa. Sorry."

"Give me your gun," I said. "If I can't go to shore, I'm going to shoot at coral. I promise I won't hurt anybody."

He looked at my hand. He looked at me.

"Come on," I said. "I just want to shoot at coral, nothing else. I'm bored. I'm so bored."

"Go read a book," he said. "Go fly a kite, or read a book. Go walk on the beach. Collect shells. Make a necklace of shells to give to your mother."

"I want the gun," I said. "I want to learn to shoot with bullets, for real."

He frowned. He pulled it from his holster. He checked the safety, and handed it to me, handle out. I pointed the gun across the bow and pulled the trigger. The safety was still on, and I played with the gun, a moment, just for show. Then, I undid the safety. I fired across the prow, into the water. The gun jumped in my hand like a living thing. I nearly dropped it into the sea. I had to struggle to get it back into my hand the right way. I cocked the gun and pointed it at Peter's body.

"Start the engine," I said.

"No, and don't point that at me. Nausicaa, guns are dangerous. You could really hurt someone."

I pressed the gun against his knee. "I'll shoot."

He looked me in the eye. "If I take you to shore and something happens to you, I'm dead. Do you understand that? Your father will kill me, and it will be a long, slow, painful death. If you make anyone do this for you, they're dead. He'd kill your mother if she did this without his permission."

"Take me to shore," I said. "I'm running away."

"You don't know how to live out there," he said, sadly. "Away from the island, you wouldn't even know how to buy food, find a place to sleep that's safe."

"I'm running away," I said. "I mean it. I'm never coming back."

He looked at me. He looked at me hard. I did not flinch.

"Are you, now?"

I lifted the gun to Peter's chest, right over his heart where the surgery scars from his pacemaker push up like a mountain range on a globe. "I don't want to shoot you, Peter. I like you. We play cards together. But, I will if I have to. Then, I'll figure the boat out myself, and I might die at sea before I ever get to shore because it's harder to guide a boat than it is to shoot you. You don't want me to die, do you?"

He nodded at me. "Brat," he said. His hands were shaking. He looked around. "Watched you growing up out here. They're really fucking you up, kid." He looked around some more. We were alone, in the dark, at the island's pier. He took a deep breath. He nodded. "You know what? Fuck your dad. He's the one who made you like this. This is his own fucking fault." He pushed the button to start the engine. "I keep a money belt under my shirt. Don't let anyone see it. People will try to take it from you. We're only a couple miles out. Once we get to sea, I'll give you the money. You're going to need it. If you really want to run away, see the world, learn how things work out there, find a coyote. If you stay in the city, your father'll find you. Find a coyote and buy a passport. Go somewhere big. Europe, or China, or America. Better for you, in the long run. They chose this island. You were just born here."

"Where do I find a coyote?"

You told me. You told me everything you could. You told me where to find a good, reputable coyote that wouldn't murder me in my sleep. You told me to tell everyone I had HIV, but I didn't know what that was at the time. You just said saying it would keep me safe. You told me to keep a little money in my pocket in case I got mugged. Never fight a mugger until after he's got the money and he's not paying attention to me. Then, shoot him, if I've got the guts for it and I'm ready to run. I listened close, Peter. I don't know if you know it, but I was listening close to you. I stayed safe, mostly.

You gave me your business card, and told me to e-mail when I had a chance, if someone could explain it to me. It took too long to explain for now. I could find a webcafe, and they'd explain everything. You wanted me to let you know how I was doing in the world. You said that you were going to have to bolt, too, and you were ready for that. My father would kill anyone that helped me escape. Fuck my father.

When we landed, you grabbed me. You held me close. You kissed my forehead. I never realized you loved me like a daughter until right then. You wanted me to have an amazing, incredible, wonderful life where I could have my own destiny and I wasn't beholden to someone else's dreams. It was a lot to realize in one kiss, but it all came together for me, like that. Things do that sometimes.

I did what I could with your money, Peter. I was quick to buy new clothes. I had seen how to do it downtown when I was with my mother, buying a communion dress. I was quick to ride a bus to a harbor. I wanted to go where my father knew no one – had no men, no friends, no anything.

I found a coyote who could take me to Europe for eight thousand dollars, American. He put me in a cargo bin, and sold me fake IDs I could use to get around, but he told me they'd never work at airports, only buses and trains. Now, my name was Maria Garcia, and I was eighteen years old. I told everyone in the cabin that I had HIV, and they wouldn't touch me to shake my hand because of those letters I spoke. I didn't even know what they meant.

Ten days at sea, I shared a cargo hold with a dozen men and five women. We ate beans from cans every day. We shit in the empty cans and piled them up on one side of our little space, near the door. Once a day, the coyote came by to empty the cans and give us more beans. Men peed out the airholes. Women used cans.

I thought I was going to die. I got sick, and I thought I was going to die.

We landed. We were moved to shore. We had to wait until night to escape. I walked from the boat. I crossed a chainlink fence. I walked along a road into a city, where I could find a hostel and sleep the night. They wouldn't take my money, and told me I had to get my currency exchanged at a bank. I had to wait until morning, when the banks opened. I waited until morning. I got five-hundred Euro, and went back to the hostel and borrowed soap and shampoo and found new clothes, a bag. I was in Portugal.

Tourists with backpacks talked with big, wide, smiling faces about train stations, and I asked them how to get anywhere in Europe. I wanted to see the world.

Peter, I think I'm doing all right. I hope you are.

In Berlin, I liked it. The land was flat, and the roads were wide. The people didn't look me in the face. The East and West were like night and day after the wall, even though so many years have passed. The west was shopping malls and foreign restaurants and so expensive, and in the East it was easy to find a cheap room with a view of the street in case my father bangs on my door. There's an escape route, too, but I won't tell you about that. I'm always ready to run. The flat land was like a big, huge sprawl, and there was no water to hem anybody in and no mountain to stop the eye on the horizon, only beautiful skyscrapers and rivers and roads and trees and grasslands. I bought a bicycle to get around.

I found the square where all the books were burned just before the Jews and gypsies and queers got burned. I didn't know anything about it until I saw the memorial. I had to ask people about it, because I didn't really know anything about history, there, and I was told about the books, the Jews, the gypsies and the queers. I followed the directions I got from the people there, to an apartment building with a playground in the yard. There wasn't a plaque there, because no one wanted the neo-nazis coming to the place and trying to bring back the past.

There's a playground built over the bunker where Eva Braun agreed to marry the dying dictator, just before she agreed to die with him. I looked down on the ground where the bodies were burned on the ground, and left as ashy dust on the ground, an evil man and his elegant bride. I guess a part of me still misses my mother and father, but I'm never going back.

Bits of food wrappers, papers, and dead leaves are on the ground here. The trash melds with graffiti seamlessly. The dirty, jagged spray paint looks like trash rising up upon the walls. Everywhere I look, I see things left on the ground, things left on the ground, things left on the ground.

I encountered these things on the ground: two dead birds in a parking lot, smashed flat like feathered crucifixions; a single worm flailing on the sidewalk, eyeless and ignorant of how come the soft, dark earth has suddenly become hard and dry and hot concrete. I gently nudged the worm with my shoe back to the edge of the sidewalk to help the creature slip into the grass - poor, frightened thing.

Berlin - dirty, pretty thing \- someday the street sweepers will come for us, and wipe away everything that makes us beautiful. The men will come with brooms and scrub the spontaneous spray paint love-letters off the brick walls, and hoses will blast away the left behind pieces of life splattered onto the ground until a clean, brick and concrete city remains like a naked rock. There's so much spray paint here, I don't know what to think of my quiet island.

And here I am, Peter, and I think I'm home at last. I think this is where I'll stay. Don't ever tell my father. I smell like stale bread, crumpled bits of greasy paper, empty juice bottles, concrete dust, sweaty train seats, mostly-clean urinals, hand soap, toothpaste, coffee, stinky boots, sweat socks, mud, pine sap, iron, and money that has changed a thousand hands and will change a thousand more.

Lost things.

Frightened things.

Dying things.

Used up things.

Cars left in parking lots where the buildings are all quiet, all dark, all empty.

Moonlight.

Also, my new friends.

8

Peter,

I got a job in a giant shopping complex two buses out from my apartment, working the cash register. I short-change customers coins most of the time, if I think I can get away with it. At the end of the week, I get enough coins to buy my own new clothes at a discount store around the corner from my rented flat. I still wear my money belt all the time, under my clothes.

Today, in the shopping complex, birds flew overhead. They had slipped into the cracks of the open doors, open windows, open garages. They got lost in the rafters. They swooped down to the floor to sift through the food court trash and the flies and mosquitoes that had made the same mistake as the birds.

In the springtime, they will make nests from shoelaces and discarded clothes piled up in the dressing rooms.

I'm starting to understand my own life.

I guess it's time to get a better job, where I don't have to steal. I guess I'll do something to make more friends – go to bars and clubs and churches and try to meet people. I guess I'll fall in love, and get married, and have children. That's what I'll do, now.

I guess you would have e-mailed me back if you had gotten away. You never write back, and I think it might be because you didn't make it to a coyote, like I did. I guess I've been writing to my father all this time, or maybe nobody, but probably my father.

Probably my father. I've been careful, and you've never found me, papa. If you do, I'll run so fast. I'm ready to escape, again.

You will never find me.

I miss you, though. I think about you and mom a lot.

I hope you're Peter. I hope you found a home, and people to care about you. I hope you and the man that washed ashore are alive, and laughing, and in love with new people.

I think I'm getting married, soon, and I've never been so scared before – and so happy. I don't think I'm going to keep writing to you much, anymore.

I wish I could remember you better than I do, Peter.

Thank you, for this life. For listening.

My name is still Nausicaa. That's my real name.

~~~

Epilogue:

There are a thousand stories for every myth, and a million for each mythology. There will never be enough sounds to fill out all the meanings in a single name of history's quiet daughters.

The muse bows and steps away from the spotlight.

Perhaps someone will paint her face like that, as it looks just on the other side of a spotlight.

Perhaps someone will write new songs for her.

I'm in Decatur, Georgia, listening to the birds, the wind sweeping out the trees and cars passing outside my apartment window. I'm thinking about what is older than all of us, and of the long sunset moment in time between the union of the song and the word and the dissolution of everything when they inevitably fall away from each other forever and ever into a cool, dark flame.

I'm making no sense.

I'm making nothing.

I'm through.

