The Door

by Magda Szabó

Perhaps there was a deeper issue here than nursing our mutual grievances. What I had seen, as Viola sat eating, might not have been the idyll it seemed. The banquet might have expressed a deeper level of feeling, something more properly mythological. When I thought about it, the pair of them at that table weren’t at all like a mistress giving her good little dog his reward, they were more like figures from a Greek myth, taking part in some horrific celebration. The roast meat the animal had snatched was only a semblance. It was more than food, it was a meal not for human witness, a tangle of viscera, a species of human sacrifice — as if Emerence were feeding the actual person to the dog, along with all her fond memories and feelings. The person who hadn’t come that afternoon, who had merely sent a message, had wounded that most important part of Emerence about which she would never speak, not to anyone. Viola was the unwitting Jason. Beneath Medea-Emerence’s headscarf glowed the fires of the underworld.