Here, The World Entire

by Anwen Kya Hayward

There's enough blood on these hands already, I think. Blood turned from red to grey, hardened and lingering in veins long since rendered as stone. I wonder if those statues still have hearts. I think about lungs and arteries wrought in rock, pulsating dully like magma.

Call me a monster, I think. Give me a name of your own. I have been called so many things over the centuries. Sometimes I forget which names have been given and which have been taken. Monster-goddess-Photine. I am that which you say I am. Let me be the monster.

As though pretending that her loneliness was in some way a choice, and not a sentence.

This is how you keep him safe. This is how you forget. This is how you live.

Let him take this, too. Let me not see this. I am sick of talking about my suffering. I feel thick with it.

The thing about the absence of solitude is that it makes loneliness much harder to bear. All these years of nothing and no-one, all taken away. Start again.

"I do remember that she was beautiful," he says, wistful. "Perhaps that's what killed her in the end." I want to tell him that I know too well the burden of being a beautiful woman in a world full of angry men, but I don't. I want to tell him a great many things, but I don't.

I have no votive. I have no offering. I am burning myself up at this altar. I am my own sacrifice.

The world is bleeding, I think. I have taken the world in. The world is Perseus. Foreign tongues and heroes, gods and monsters. Mothers left to die in the dark. Children raised by strangers. A life writ large in the absence of mine.

I could damn myself, I think, if I could only see him, just for a moment. Except, of course, I can't damn him too.

I think that it is terrible, that Danaë had to be unmade for Perseus to live.

All my life has been leading up to longing. It builds up behind me, a trail of desire in my wake, and I wonder what it would be like to live. Atlas' burden is only the world. I wish that were all I carried on my shoulders. I wish I bore nothing but the crust of the Earth and all the hollow things in it. I wish I were weighted down by nothing but the elements and the spaces between the beginning and the end. Atlas meets the eyes of the world, and I cannot.

To behold is to be held, and my hands are empty. For fear of being seen, I have never looked.

I wonder how many times he thought he saw me in the dark.

even though I have been sightless for so long, the world has not left me.