Glorious Exploits

by Ferdia Lennon

I have the feeling that the future and the past aren’t separate at all, just different snatches of a single song always sung, given consequence when heard.

Biton twitches, and there’s absence in his eyes—a black sea under an eclipse. There’s nothing he won’t do. The soil is rotten, and no seed will grow again—our very own Medea.

Strabo is so tiny he stumbles when a prisoner takes his hand, but he persists, and soon the prisoner is up, and Strabo, grinning proudly, walks the fella over towards the wheelbarrow, and from a certain angle, you could be forgiven for thinking you were just seeing a man with his son, and something in the way the Athenians take the boys’ hands and the way the kids’ expressions change makes me wonder if, unbeknownst to them, that’s what these poor bastards are doing, performing fatherhood and childhood for each other, ’cause surely a lot of these men have kids back home that they’ll never see again, and I feel like I should look away, like I’ve caught an intimacy, and so I turn around and count the cheeses in the wheelbarrow.

A proper wreck the buzz is Cassandra. It’s rivers of blood with a hole in the boat, and you can’t swim.

Her mother thinks she’s mental. The chorus do too, and she probably is, but beneath the mania, there’s a point she’s trying to make—just ’cause their lives are fucked, it doesn’t mean they’ve nothing left. There’s always something left for the person who remembers. And Hecuba and her go back and forth, and it seems just an agon between madness and reason, but it’s not only that. It’s despair and meaning that are being pitted against one another, and it’s asking, if meaning departs from reason, might there not be wisdom in a faith-filled lunacy?

For the remainder of the night, he ignored the other guests and spoke only to this man. Amphitryon wondered how it had come to this. How on their final night he should choose to spend it listening to the imaginings of this broken fellow. Yet, he reasoned, perhaps in the end it was fitting, for his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story.