Elektra

by Jennifer Saint

I felt a swell of sympathy for a blameless infant born to parents such as Agamemnon and me: his father a monster beyond all imagining, and me, his mother, unable to summon a scrap of the devotion I had lavished on my girls. It was a mechanical kind of mothering I brought to Orestes. I cradled him and fed him and kissed his tiny face, but I did not build his future in dreams. I handed him off to the nurses whenever I could. I did not turn to the smoking altars in the city and pray he would be granted a life. I knew those prayers would go unheard. Every mother in Mycenae made these fervent bargains – not just that their babies be spared plague and fever, but that their husbands would sail home from Troy. That latter prayer, I joined. But it was the only entreaty I would make of the gods now. Better for Iphigenia if she had succumbed to sickness before she could talk, before she could dream of her future herself.