Circe

by Madeline Miller

If you had asked me, I would have said I was happy. Yet always I remembered. Cold smoke, marked with my name.

“I’m sorry to say, you don’t look like much of a man.” “I’m not meant to look like a man,” I said. “I’m meant to look like my brother. Scylla loved him once, perhaps she still does.”

“It’s just so funny,” Pasiphaë was saying. “It took you so long to understand! Did you think they were dying from the pleasure of your exertions? From the sheer transported bliss? Believe me—”

“A golden cage is still a cage.”

But I pressed his face into my mind, as seals are pressed in wax, so I could carry it with me.

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.

A golden cage is still a cage.

They were perfect and unscarred.

I had lost him long ago.

Sons were not punished.