Elektra

by Jennifer Saint

He named me for the sun: fiery and incandescent.

People only ever spoke of her dazzling radiance, sometimes moved to poetry or song in praise of it.

My prophecies rip out my insides, but still they come, unbidden, even as I quake at the consequences.

He had breathed it into me; a gift I was sure I would not survive. Prophecy, the prize my mother had warned me never to ask for.

There was no crime more terrible than slaying your own kin; no greater evil imaginable.

Such a man speaks poetry in place of facts and thinks he tells a higher truth when all he spins is fantasy.

My husband sailed soon to slaughter enemies in the pursuit of power and glory, but I had been slaying monsters for years, smoothing the path at my children’s feet so that they could step confidently into the future.

We would lay down our lives for our children, and every time we faced birth, we stood on the banks of that great river that separated the living from the dead. A massed army of women, facing that perilous passage with no armour to protect us, only our own strength and hope that we would prevail.

My children came from my body; their flesh was born of mine. Their arms reached out for me first, they called for me in the night and I scooped them into my embrace and breathed in the sweet scent of their little bald heads. As they grew, I felt the echo always of their infant selves. My body could not know what my mind did; it ached with her absence.

I had gone everywhere before her; trodden the paths I sent her down to make sure they were safe before I let her go. How could I let her go now, to where I did not know, without me at her side?

I wasn’t so alone in my grief any more; not so alone in my rage.

Now I am the prize of a dead man, the property of a corpse. I feel a shudder of relief that I will never feel his hands upon me again.