Circe

by Madeline Miller

My name in his mouth. It sparked a feeling in me, sharp and eager. He was like ocean tides indeed, I thought. You could look up, and the shore would be gone.

Yet the weariness had begun to show through, like rocks when the tide recedes.

Living with him was like standing beside the sea. Each day a different color, a different foam-capped height, but always the same restless intensity pulling towards the horizon.

The world was made of mysteries, and I was only another riddle among the millions. I did not answer him, and though he pretended frustration, I began to see that it pleased him in some strange way. A door that did not open at his knock was a novelty in its own right, and a kind of relief as well. All the world confessed to him. He confessed to me. Some stories he told me by daylight. Others came only when the fire was burnt out, and there was no one to know his face but the shadows.

The words slid into me, smooth as a polished knife. I had known he loved her from the moment he’d spoken of her weaving. Yet he had stayed, month after month, and I had let myself be lulled. Now I saw more clearly: all those nights in my bed had been only his traveler’s wisdom. When you are in Egypt, you worship Isis; when in Anatolia, you kill a lamb for Cybele. It does not trespass on your Athena still at home.

He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.

The only thing that calmed him was the sea. The wind that was as restless as he was, the waves filled with their motion. He would stand in the surf, his small hand in mine, and point. The horizon, I named. The open sky. The waves and tides and currents. He would whisper the sounds to himself all the rest of the day, and if I tried to pull him away, show him something else, fruits or flowers, some small spell, he would leap from me, twisting up his face. No!

Why should he be peaceful? I never was, nor his father either, when I knew him. The difference was that he was not afraid to be burnt.

There was not just stiffness in his voice now, but bitterness. I waited. I had begun to see that silence prompted him better than words.

for what my mother said always came to pass.” A true-made bow, Odysseus had called her. A fixed star. A woman who knew herself. “I asked her how she did it once, how she understood the world so clearly. She told me that it was a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves. She tried to practice with me, but I made her laugh. ‘You are as secret as a bull hiding on a beach!’ she said.”

He was like a summer storm, lightning bright across a pale sky. When he was there, everything else faded.”

The room was silent. I could feel the place where the fire’s warmth faded and died against the winter air.

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

He had liked this place. I remember him running his hand along a trunk. It was one of my favorite things about him, how he admired the world like a jewel, turning its facets to catch the light. A well-made boat, a well-grown tree, a well-told story, these were all pleasures to him.

Not even Odysseus could talk his way past witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.

Her voice was matter-of-fact. Loyal, songs called her later. Faithful and true and prudent. Such passive, pale words for what she was. She could have taken another husband, borne another child while Odysseus was gone, her life would have been easier for it. But she had loved him fiercely and would accept no other.

She had grown up trained around his cruelty, and in the end it seemed she had not learned how to hold another shape.

Penelope said, “What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?” “I do not know for certain,” I said. “I once thought it was passed through blood, but Telegonus has no spells in him. I have come to believe it is mostly will.” She nodded. I did not have to explain. We knew what will was.

The anger stood out plain and clean on his face. There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. He would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open.

There were flowers and forests growing thickly inland, but I did not go look. I was seeing before me again that rocky mass that had been Scylla. She was gone, truly gone. For the first time in centuries, I was not lashed to that flood of misery and grief. No more souls would walk to the underworld written with my name. I faced the sea. It felt strange to have nothing in my hands, no spear-haft to carry. I could feel the air moving across my palms, salt mingling with the green scent of spring. I imagined the gray length of the tail, sinking through the darkness to find its master. Trygon, I said, your tail comes home to you. I kept it too long, but I made good use of it at last.

An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

Less than a month we had spent together, yet he seemed to know me better than anyone who had ever walked the world.

warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.