Circe

by Madeline Miller

His mortality was always with me, constant as a second beating heart. Now that he could sit up, reach and grasp, all the ordinary objects of my house showed their hidden teeth. The boiling pots on the fire seemed to leap for his fingers. The blades slipped from the table a hairsbreadth from his head. If I set him down, a wasp would come droning, a scorpion scuttle from some hidden crevice and raise its tail. The sparks from the fire always seemed to pop in arcs towards his tender flesh. Each danger I turned aside in time, for I was never more than a step from him, but it only made me more afraid to close my eyes, to leave him for an instant. The woodpile would topple on him. A wolf who had been gentle her whole life would snap. I would wake to see a viper reared over his crib, jaws wide. It is a sign, I think, of how addled I was with love and fear and no sleep, that it took me so long to realize: that stinging insects should not come in battalions, and ten falling pots in a morning was beyond even my tired clumsiness. To remember how, in the long agony of my labor, Eileithyia had been kept from me. To wonder if, thwarted, the god that had done it might try again.