I felt you in my mind, you pelagic lecher, your heavy fingers pressed against the pleasure centers of my brain as the white bull drove into me. Your hand lifted when he was spent, and I knew what I had done — what you had made me do.

I repudiate you. I spurn you. I spit on your gifts, king of the salt spring. They were right who chose sweet olives over your bitter sea. Least of your brothers, you rage and slap against the land and people you gambled away. Weep, winedark fool, for what you lost and cannot have, for the love you can never earn, never feel. You can compel our worship, but not our affection; who could care for you without fear to drive them?

I have felt its teeth gnawing inside my womb, its infant horns tearing at my walls. Gestation was a horror, birth an atrocity, to be coopted by your wrath, reduced to breeding stock for the exaltation of your name. Here on this beach I return your son to you. May you find joy of him beneath the waves; he shall not have a home above them.

An interloper in the fullest sense, he is: godsent, heroic, fraternal, doomed. In that we are united. The inexplicable cruelty of our fathers, that pit us against each other! What sin is this, to pit teeth and hooves against flesh and warm bronze? We have deserved more, my brother, my soul, my destroyer.

Cruelty is our birthright, my sister; he will use you and cast you aside. We have never met, but I have heard your weeping on a summer’s night, heard your voice as the rock is rolled away from the gate to this my tomb. What did they tell you of me? Did your father explain his crime to you, did our mother trace her humiliation upon the shore?

They cast me here in horror before I was even born, built this charnel house even as I turned overlarge within an amniotic sea; through flesh and fluid I watched it descend into the earth, traced its singular coil with half-formed eyes. I might have spoken prophecy for them, had they listened, had they waited, had I a more commanding tongue. This moment, this meeting, was inevitable as the returning tide, as the flood water rising to reclaim the plains.

Eventually the tributes stop coming and hunger pricks him forth from the laybrinth’s comforting coils. Pushing through a thick bramble, Asterion blinks weak eyes in confusion at the ruins above. What has become of the city he barely remembers? The palace court that towered above his infant head? The people that recoiled in fear and holy dread when he passed? Roots have riven the stones of the road, each from the other, flowering shrubs have colonized the roofs, attics resound with the untroubled burbling of pigeons.

He is alone with the grass and wild beasts and the sound of the waves. He is used to being alone, used to wandering in places that refuse familiarity; this is no worse than that, but still he wonders.

Days and weeks of privation have worn his body hollow, and when he stumbles upon a group of giant rabbits, two feet long and a foot high, who stare utterly unconcerned into his eyes, his fingers twitch for a second with old habits. But the sun is high and warm and no one is screaming, no one is fleeing, there is nothing he has to do in the moment.

Asterion of Minos crouches down, curves his back, his neck to brush the earth with his lips, and takes his first bite of grass. Unwatered wine was never so sweet.

for Jane

There is no sign on the door and you have to call ahead to get in.

Only the desperate and the despairing find this place, those who spot the number scratched into the dull metal of a phone booth, who hear about it from someone else who has made it to the center. Those who risk the call, not knowing what will be at the other end.

The voice on the phone is warm, but anonymous. It gives an address and a time, and disconnects. Pick up the end of the skein and venture in—there is a monster at the other end who eats children, they say, but some children need to be eaten.

The apartment is warm, but anonymous. Full of women and children and noise; bright colors. It has been partitioned into several soundless cubbies; the door swings open just wide enough to swallow you in. Everyone here is nervous, with half an eye on the door in, the door out.

If you pass—some don’t—you will be grouped with others. Outside there is a van waiting for you, which will take you on. Some of you will have gone through this before, some of you will be here for the first time.

“It’s easy,” one of them will assure you. “They’re very good at this.”

Maybe you will want to forget; some do. Maybe you will stick around, learn their ways, spread your own cautious network. The work will always need to be done.