Now I sat up, and I pushed the blankets aside.“Aster?”I asked.
Over here.
I left the bed and crossed my arms at the chest, and I found Aster crouched on the floor in the middle of the mess, sucking at an open wound on his right hand.“Did you cut yourself?”
I might have underestimated this task,Aster admitted.He pulled his hand away from his face and winced, pressing down on the wound now with his left thumb.
I watched the scene with wide eyes and an opened mouth.Aster, wounded?Until now, I hadn’t been sure anything at all flowed through his veins.Then I glanced up and located a medicine cabinet within reach.After I pulled out a box containing a variety pack of adhesive bandages, I selected the one best for the job.Then I squatted on the floor next to Aster, careful not to step on any of the glass.“Hold out your hand.Let me fix it up.”
Aster’s eyes were wide, a sea of confusion.I’ve never been hurt before.Not like this.I didn’t realize I could bleed.
“The glass did it,” I assured him.“Slivers like that could cut anyone.Even a muse.”
Aster handed me his hand and lifted up his thumb from the cut.From what I could tell, there was no glass left in the wound, but the blood itself fascinated me.Aster’s blood was dark, more brown than red, with a blue tint.It didn’t look human.
Is something wrong?Aster asked when my shadow stilled over him.
I swallowed, unaccustomed to his respect.“You know, when I was a kid, I got cuts all the time.My mom used to kiss them before she put a bandage on.Heal them with love.”To demonstrate, I lifted the hand to my lips and kissed the wound over the blood, taking in the odd toughness that his skin had evolved since the first times I had touched him and the unexpected sweetness of the blood itself.A second later, I pulled my lips away and applied the bandage.“There you are.Good as new, and it should feel better soon.”
Aster stood.You know what?Your mother is a wise woman, and I think I’m feeling better already.Tired, though.I’m going to go take a nap for now.You can sleep beside me if you wish.Those bandages do more than they let on, don’t they?
I smiled and followed him into the bedroom, but already I knew this was not the result of the bandage.I felt different too.Energetic, tingly in my fingers and toes.
For one terrifying moment, I wondered if I was hallucinating.Aster wanted to whisk me away on a dream again.Or he wanted to kill me.The scenario played like a tape in my mind: Aster’s blood was poison.Aster poisoned me by playing at pain, and now while he slept pleasantly beside me I would soon find myself writhing in silent agony and slipping away into more than just the sample of death he had feared for me.
The shadows grew darker.The whole room did, even though I could see that the sun was glowing brighter outside.The warm colors, like the wood on the closet door, grew warmer, burned, and the cool colors, like the bathroom on the other side of the hall or the white of the wicker dressers, all turned to a particular shade of frost.
Then the shadows began to move.
Instantly I stiffened and held my breath, watching for any signs of a dream or hallucination.The hall, the closet, the space behind the dresser all began to take shape, to step out of their places into what should have been direct sunlight.Then I blinked, and they stepped back.
“Aster,” I said.
He grunted and budged.
“Aster, something’s happening.I’m beginning to see things.”
Another grunt.
“Please, Aster, I’m scared.I think I accidentally tasted some of your blood back there, and it’s doing something to me.What’s going on?”
A third grunt, and he rolled over to face me.Don’t be silly.My blood wouldn’t do anything like that.
“Are you sure?”I asked.
His eyes opened more fully.Well, it’s never happened before.But that would be crazy, wouldn’t it?If your tasting my blood would make you...more of a muse, and me more...He wiggled his fingers.Human?Look, whatever you’re seeing is going to pass.Don’t worry about it.
I waited for him to say more, but sleep had already overtaken him.
My heart sped, and for the first time I began to understand what it was to be a muse.
THE MYTH
Muses didn’t havedistinct beginnings or endings the way humans did, with conception or birth or death.They were creatures of myth elevated into being by people who dreamed, commencing their lives with the earliest dreamers of all in antiquity.This theory stayed in line with the actual Greek canon, which claimed that the muses were the daughters that Zeus had through the goddess of memory.In those early myths, muses worked primarily by blocking memories of their clients: obligations, fears.They did this to help people focus, to cut out distractions so that others could work to their best abilities.
All muses shared a basic consciousness.I knew that much for a fact.I could tell that much as soon as I kissed Aster’s wound.I saw him as one manifestation or face of something much greater, more all-encompassing.One could argue that only really one Muse existed and that all others were simultaneous incarnations of the same creature.
Now that I’d accidentally infected myself with a piece of his soul, I could see it all much better than I could have before.My eyes had peered into a new life, a new plane of existence.I could see Aster going back to the beginning of time, and like any myth, following time to its own end.
