“You’re filthy,” she said, fighting a smile.
“I’ve been called much worse.” I picked up a loose rock from the bottom of the boat and tossed it into the water. “Better to be a filthy monster than a bloodthirsty fool.”
A laugh slipped out of her, and I watched from the corner of my eye. Her hair cascaded around her face and shoulders as the water rocked beneath us. Her smile was as bright and brief as the tail end of a falling star, and I watched her until the smile faded.
Circe sighed, her shoulders dropping. “For someone who didn’t speak a word to me for an entire week, you sure have a lot to say.”
I didn’t have to spare a second to consider why. “You give me permission to speak freely in a space where I feel comfortable. It’s a space I’ve never found before.” We looked at each other. If she only knew how many years I’d found comfort in every drawing of her.
“You trust me,” she said, knowing.
“Yes.” I exhaled, at ease. “I feel safe with you.”
She turned her attention to the Atlantic.
Out here, the ocean seemed to surround only us. She clutched her necklace and looked into the distance, where the ocean line met the sky. She looked at it with questions in her eyes, perhaps wondering if that was where the gods had stopped painting. I wanted to tell her that the horizon was endless. Not far from cosmic. But as I gazed upon her, all the right words were lost on me. “What are you thinking about?”
“My beloved black sea,” she said.
And with those four words, I was no longer an outsider to the thoughts inside her head.
As time passed, we caught two bass.
Heavy clouds moved overhead, letting us know we should head back soon.
“Stone,” Circe called, and I bid her a look. “What happened to you? Who hurt you like that?”
I thought of Bly and Chief Etu, of William and Chayton. I thought of the tribe, with pitchforks and torches in their eyes. Then I thought of the graveyard I’d left behind. “It makes no difference. They are gone.”
“It matters,” she said. “I want to know.”
I looked at her. “I am not as I was, Circe.”
“Please,” she whispered.
Nothing positive ever came from digging up old graves. Still, I’d rehearsed this moment many times since I’d last seen her. I had waited for her return for this question. Though, I hadn’t realized it would come in a moment like this, where it was quiet and peaceful. The cowardly words I was about to say had no place in such a chivalrous space.
“For most of my life, in the years I wasn’t raising myself, war-like tribes who worshipped the sun were my teachers,” I said, the words coming out easier than I’d expected. “In my culture the sun comes before all, so the nighttime is the only time for fucking. If one fucked in the light of day, it meantI worship thee more than the light of the sun.”
“Do you believe this as well?”
“Yes. No human or thing should come before a god.”
“What does that have anything to do with what happened to you?”
“It has everything to do with it, and if you want to know, I must start from the beginning.” She nodded, and I shifted on the wooden bench, creating a safe distance between us. “Things happen around me. Things I can’t explain, and because of this, from the moment I was born, I was rejected by every place I ever traveled. This forced Mother and I to live with those who believed in the unnatural.” I wasn’t telling her of my monstrous face and how many people I’d killed. The last thing I ever wanted was to scare her away. “At fourteen, I watched a man fuck a woman through a window. It was the first and only time I witnessed the act of a union, and the brutality of it was much like a hunt. The man was powerful, and the woman begged him to stop.”
She blinked numerous times, trying to piece this together while the two of us sat on opposite sides of the boat.
“This man caught me watching and dragged me to the center of the tribe, telling me it was time for my coming-of-age ritual.” Flashbacks from that night resurrected in my mind. The heat, the fire, the burn. “A circumcision was a test of manhood and bravery to become one of them, but this was not what happened. They instead hung me from a tree by my neck, tortured me, then forced me onto my knees. The rest of the tribe, including my mother, watched as it happened.”
“You were only fourteen,” she whispered.
“The pain was unimaginable, but I made sure not to show it.”
There was no emotion in my words—No tremor in my voice.
I was detached from what I was saying.
