A statue loomed in the darkness at the edges of the room, its shadow flickering slightly.
Heat rose in me, spreading through my belly like the intoxication of wine. Eros, desire, pure and simple. I looked at Melanion and saw an answering heat in their face, lips parted and cheeks lightly flushed. We moved toward each other, entwining our limbs, finding the best of all possible ways to keep warm in the cold.
Then I looked up and saw the woman watching us.
She had ink-black hair and honey-brown skin, and was so beautiful that my breath left my lungs. But with the appreciation of her beauty came fear, because she was too perfect to be mortal. Furthermore, she was angry.
I screamed, prompting Melanion to startle as well. Melanion rolled off me, and we clung to each other in the face of this sudden apparition.
“How dare you desecrate one of my temples?” the apparition demanded. “It’s been subject to neglect, true, but there’s no need to rub salt into the wound.”
The interior of the building came into focus more sharply. I noticed for the first time the faded fresco of doves dancing around the intact portions of the ceiling and the cult statue that presided over a corner, its features too worn to make out but its shaperecognizably feminine. With growing horror, I realized that what I had taken to be an abandoned farmhouse was in fact a decommissioned temple.
The goddess peered at Melanion. “Oh,” she said with obvious distaste. “It’syou.”
Melanion tensed in my arms. “Aphrodite,” they began, “I am so very sorry...”
Oh, my dear one,I thought,what have you done?
“Really, Melanion,” Aphrodite began with a huff. “It was bad enough that you never paid up after I gave you those apples, and now I find you likethis?! In one of my temples, no less! Unbelievable. Well, if you are going to act like animals, then animals you shall be.”
She raised a long-fingered hand, and fear flashed through me. I thought of little Parthenopaios, my precious son, left to grow up without a mother. I thought of Medea, who would spend the rest of her life waiting in vain for a response that would never come. I knew with grim finality that I would never make it to Corinth.
But I did not die. Instead, I watched my hands change, fingers shrinking and contracting into paws. Fur sprouted all over my body. I tried to scream, but my vocal cords had changed and a snarl was all that emerged.
Something was happening to my companion too. I found myself looking into a furred face, topped by a triangular nose. Whiskers twitched, and the velvety cups of ears swiveled toward me. The lion’s golden eyes were wide with shock.
I could see myself reflected in those eyes, my own face turned leonine through the wrath of the goddess.
My mind was changing to suit my body, my thoughts becoming simpler and more direct, but the divine curse was so close to my childish wish that I nearly laughed at the irony.
So close!was my last human thought.So close, but still not a bear.
62
Medea
Years passed, one after another after another. Thessalus shot up like a weed, growing even taller than me. As soon as he was old enough to be somewhat self-sufficient, I found myself pregnant again after a hazy night following a festival, and gave birth to twins named Pheres and Mermerus.
And the cycle started all over again. Dishes, diapers, darkness.
My one respite was Atalanta’s letters. They came sporadically over the years, the handwriting so atrocious that sometimes I could scarcely make out the message. But each letter was precious, a breath from another world. I stuffed them in the bottom of the trunk where my festival clothing was stored, not wanting Jason to see them, though I could not quite say why.
Once there was discussion of a visit, about fifteen years ago if my memory served. Atalanta here, in Corinth! I’d worked myself into a near frenzy at the thought, only for the agreed-upon date to come and go without her shadow darkening my doorstep. After that, I gave up hope of ever seeing her again, though I still read her letters hungrily.
More years passed. I watched my sons grow up and grow away from me, turning from needy babies to rambunctious toddlers to children eager to explore the world beyond their mother’s side.Thessalus left home for an apprenticeship, and it felt like my heart had gone walking outside of my body.
Jason, of course, was a shadow.
One night, when Mermerus and Pheres were about ten years old, I came to the end of my endurance. The moment came quite suddenly as I was brushing my hair, just as I had done thousands of times before and would do thousands of times afterward. Caught in this featureless infinity of days, the hand holding the comb dropped into my lap, and the comb fell to the floor.
The clatter echoed against the walls and ceiling, emphasizing my aloneness. This was the room where I usually slept, in the near-empty women’s quarters of the house, opting to leave the marital bed for Jason when he spent rare nights at home.
I looked at my life and realized that I could not keep living this way, trapped in endless monotony. The fallen comb was only a symbol of a greater problem: I’d lost the thread of my story. I’d forgotten who I was.
Abruptly I felt hot, like those flashes old women tell you come with the change of life, though for me that was still a few years away. My breath came short and quick. Feeling as if I might suffocate under the weight of this revelation, I fled from the women’s quarters into the courtyard, desperate to gulp down fresh air.
The crescent moon drifted through the sky like a greeting. Or an invitation.
