mythology

These stories are true and they are not true. Is a lie about unicorns a real lie? If it’s possible to be wonky about mythology, these stories are hella wonky about mythology.

The Earth Curses The Untrustworthy Sky

Prometheus regretted it the instant the chains slipped away and he tumbled forward off the crag. Swallowed, into a mouth of blue.

He fell for days, night passing into day into night, until his devoured liver regenerated and his torn flesh reknit itself, an unpain grown long familiar during his eternal confinement. The wind of his passage tore the moisture from his throat and eyes.

He has fallen before, many times, from earth to earth, from Ossa to Pelion, from sky to grave; this has happened before, will happen again. He could resist everything except a revolution — or, rather, revolution was worth failure; the fall was worth the climb.

Still: he had grown into the rock, and the rock into him, skin as hard as petrified oak; the generations of eagles that had grown fat and powerful on his recurring liver now old friends, loved the way a stone loves the root that shatters it. Breaking free was not without cost.

Colony Collapse

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.

The Body Is A Language

When they were scattered to the winds, words lost, minds mazed, it wasn’t just an exile from place, but from each other. Community gone, language gone, every friend a stranger, every stranger a foe, they wandered the earth, incomprehensible not just to others to but themselves, too. They must relearn speech, even for their internal conversations.

That first generation never ends.

They do not notice at first — they have no words for passing time, no numbers to count the days or months — but when they have clawed enough of a sense of self together, they find the world has changed, their children’s children long dead and gone, their great work a rumor for a shepherd’s night, nothing more.

They do not recognize themselves in these new faces.

The gap may have always been there, may have grown wider during the unknowable period of their wandering. These new people are soft, without the pliable layer of keratin that keeps them safe, with only vestigial moons at the tips of their fingers and toes, and with no skyward ambitions. They rage to see them so. They try to seize them, to call them back to what they were, by deed if not by words, and pass through them like smoke, like carbon monoxide, invisible, inaudible, inimical.

Water Weeds

An inch of water in a pool closed for the season, and a young man face down in it, wrists tied together behind his back with duct tape. They found him when the snow melted in the spring, seven months after he’d disappeared, after the whole county had turned out to search for him, after his name and photo had spread for a thousand miles in any direction, after fourteen press conferences by the police. The snow melted, and the country club opened, and when they pulled the cover back there he was, preserved by the cold for the most part.

A suicide, the cops said, and refused to answer questions.

Years later, and miles away across the state, another young man face down in a river. Disappeared in the winter, disappeared from an empty car, leaving behind a laptop, a phone, a change of clothes. No search parties, no news coverage, no updates; a father making the rounds from precinct to silent precinct and church to church, pleading. A handful of mourners wandering the banks, calling his name, hours past sunset. The river never froze, but there he was in the spring, newly dead.

Suicide, said the cops, and closed the file.

Cancer

So we’d been living quietly enough in the swamp, the hydra and me, and if it wasn’t a glamorous life it wasn’t so bad, either. The fat days had ended, presumably because the mother hera had gotten bored, or hydra, she’d grown big enough, either way, but we didn’t go hungry. There’s plenty to eat in a swamp if you’re not picky.

Anyway like I said, we were living quietly, just the two of us, talking about the old times and the old folks, when news came through the grapevine that her brother the lion had been killed by some dingus and that she was next on the list, even though she wasn’t doing anybody any harm that didn’t come into the swamp first. Meat’s meat, as they say, and a gal’s gotta eat; you can’t blame someone for that, or who their parents were, or anyway you shouldn’t.

Anyway, eventually he rolls up, big and brawny and brooding, handsome enough if you’re into that sort of thing, growling and sobbing from underneath the hood he’d made out of her brother’s skin, weeping and penitential and determined, swinging around a sword and firing off those flaming arrows like a real jackass. Hydra, well, we’d put together that this was what the mother hera had been after anyway, and death or glory, y’know, so, out she goes.

I go out with her; I’m not so big and my parents weren’t fancy, but you do what you can. I took a good couple of chunks out of his toes with my claws before he kicked me way deep in the swamp. By the time I got back hydra was dead, all except the one head that couldn’t die, and he’d buried that under a boulder.

I dug down deep, for years and years, and I’d still be digging if I hadn’t died first. She’s still down there, far as I know, that stubborn central part of her; I like to think she’s grown back, spread subterranean back to the swamp. Always good times there. It’s okay up here looking down, but it’s not the same.