Circe

by Madeline Miller

Her eyes are yellow as piss. Her voice is screechy as an owl. She is called Hawk, but she should be called Goat for her ugliness.

It is a shame you cannot hide your voice the same way.’

but the truth is, I’m afraid I might have floated on, believing those dull miseries were all there was, until the end of days.

Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two.

There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see.

infant’s discovery that her hand is her own.

that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.

What of me? I wanted to ask. Shall I rot?

though I could hardly understand half of what they meant, poverty and toil and human terror. The only thing

That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

The words struck like stones, but I would not give him up so easily.

which was not like the sinking numbness Aeëtes had left behind, but sharp and fierce as a blade through my chest.

This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.

‘If the world contained that power you allege, do you think it would fall to such as you to discover

Worst of my children, faded and broken, whom I cannot pay a husband to take.

‘You do not think it convenient that their truest forms should happen to be your desires?’

useless,

and an ugly one would be nothing, less than nothing.

But when I cast my gaze to him, he only looked back with all the rest.

Even our exiles live better than kings. You see how deep our strengths run?

I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open.

you would be surprised how long he will go on. But yes, in the end, it’s best to give him something. Then he will be happy again. And you can start over.’

Aeëtes, Glaucos, these were only

‘I am the one who made that creature. I did it for pride and vain delusion. And you thank me? Twelve of your men are dead for it, and how many thousands more to come? That drug I gave her is the strongest I have. Do you understand, mortals?’

In thanks, it would know no comrade, no lover.

take what they want, and in return they give you only your own shackles. A thousand times I saw you squashed. I

You loathed them as I did. I think it is where our power comes from.’

But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

Surely there was some divine trick to make the hours go faster. To let them slip past unseen, to sleep for years, so that when I woke again the world would be new.

How could I have forgotten what it was like among the lesser gods? The desperate clawing for any advantage.

The fragility of mortals bred kindness and good grace. They knew how to value friendship and an open hand. If only more of them would come, I thought. I would feed a ship a day, and gladly. Two ships. Three. Perhaps I would start to feel like myself again.

At the word, the air changed in the room.

As it turned out, I did kill pigs that night after all.

But I had been a stranger to myself, turned to stone for no reason I could name.

None of it made a difference. I was alone and a woman, that was all that mattered.

Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

Only instead of wood, you work in men.’

‘You promise mercy to spies so they will spill their story, then you kill them after. You beat men who mutiny. You coax heroes from their sulks. You keep spirits high at any cost.

They have not seen their parents grow old and begin to fail. They have not seen them die.

Death’s Brother is the name that poets give to sleep.

A year of peaceful days he had stayed with me, and still every night he went to war.

His words carried no malice. Though perhaps that was what malice sounded like in those perfect tones.

No matter what I did, how long I lived, at a whim they would be able to reach down and do with me what they wished.

I would look at him and feel a love so sharp it seemed my flesh lay open.

My whole life, I had waited for tragedy to find me.

for I had desires and defiance and powers more than others thought I deserved, all the things that draw the thunder-stroke.

‘You do not know what I can do.’

It was not much of a game, because the answer was always the same. Anything.

But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of