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No longer was my world one of brave heroes; I was learning all too swiftly the women’s pain that throbbed unspoken through the tales of their feats.
I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man’s actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes, and the world would shrink from me instead.
She was thirteen years old and considered herself quite the expert in anything and everything, most of which she mocked.
The cold green of his eyes. Like the shock of the chill waters when the seafloor drops away unexpectedly beneath your feet and you realize that you have swum out far beyond your depth.
In those crucial moments when fateful decisions were made, did they feel the air brighten with the zing of destiny? Or did they blunder on, not realizing the pivotal moment in which destiny swung and fates were forged?
I had never imagined the scale of a king’s cruelty when he has endless wealth and unchecked power to indulge his most crazed and filthy fantasies of revenge and torture.
I was on fire at the thought of what had already been, what might have come, and what was still ahead. I longed to submerge myself in the clear waters of his certainty.
I let a stream of invective fly from my mouth, incoherent and venomous, like a stream of burning arrows dipped in poison. I directed them at Theseus, calling him things I did not know I had the words for, but I foamed with anger for Minos, as well, and even for Poseidon—these men, these gods who toyed with our lives and cast us aside when we had been of use to them, who laughed at our suffering or forgot our existence altogether.
“Does she grieve the beast?” he asked. “Or with its death, does she grieve what it represented? What was done to her all those years ago, that so scattered her mind, perhaps now it is ended she can afford to mourn it?”
“When I was a child, I trusted the gods,” I heard myself say. “But Poseidon sent us the Minotaur, and my father stood by. When Theseus came, I thought he was not like them. But he was worse—for at least they never pretended to be what they were not.”
Why mortals bloomed like flowers and crumbled to nothing. Why their absence left a gnawing ache, a hollow void that could never be filled. And how everything they once were, that spark within them, could be extinguished so completely yet the world did not collapse under the weight of so much pain and grief.”
I know the dizzying joys of humanity: the fragile, ferocious power of human love and the savage force of grief. When I share wine with mortals, we celebrate together and I feel the clustered hopes and yearnings, the pain and fears that you all share. In those sacred rites, as simple and ancient as the world itself, we raise a cup and we drink together, and our souls are freed from the constraints of the everyday. We find what unites us, what we have in common with one another. I have felt the gaping wound and the bruised, ragged edges of grief. I know that human life shines more brightly
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I would not let a man who knew the value of nothing make me doubt the value of myself.
I was thankful to live a life that I had never even known to dream.
As if we hadn’t learned from living with our shattered mother and her monstrous spawn that all a woman can do in this world is take what she wants from it and crush those who would stand in her way before they break her into fragments like Pasiphae.
Pasiphae. Semele. Medusa. Now a hundred grieving mothers. The price we paid for the resentment, the lust, and the greed of arrogant men was our pain, shining and bright like the blade of a newly honed knife.
