Elektra

by Jennifer Saint

The two of them gazed into one another’s eyes as though they wandered alone across a fragrant meadow, rather than being trapped in a hall with a hundred fraying tempers and the spark about to be struck to light them all into flame.

People only ever spoke of her dazzling radiance, sometimes moved to poetry or song in praise of it. No one ever mentioned that she was thoughtful or that she was kind.

Once night fell, I knew I would yearn for dawn.

I didn’t have Helen’s confidence that the future would always be as sunny as the past.

Maybe I didn’t want a conquering hero shouting about his victory; I had rather preferred the tormented anguish of the exile.

And however fast our defences against the world beyond our kingdom, I didn’t know how I could keep her safe if the enemy was already inside our walls.

I knew this man carried the collapse of the world with him.

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.

Nothing brought them more joy than the fall of a lovely woman.

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?

the storm of motherhood would wreck me against still more jagged rocks.

She wasn’t so easy to hate when she was standing right in front of me.

But I knew how easy a decision it must have been; how hatred crystallised the world, how it made everything so simple.

‘Don’t think about what he did. Think about how we’ll punish him for it.’

If my daughter dwelt anywhere in this world, no army or ocean could stop me from reaching her.

This time, please let me not see the disaster before it happens.

But there is no dignity in being poor. It is a grinding, exhausting existence,

Do you really believe that those thousand ships carried men who wanted only to restore one wife to her husband?’

The ache in my chest is still there, but it hurts only with the memory of the wound.