Medusa

by Jessie Burton

Or would you run from me, this mottled mirror, this body of unusual flesh?

I was lonely and I was angry, and rage and loneliness can end up tasting the same.

But seeing as I’ve been accused of vanity enough times by people who nevertheless thought it their right to ogle me, I might as well tell you: my hair was lovely.

But when put together, the ache of loneliness and the bitter soup of boredom are more dangerous than any snake venom.

A matter of minutes and my life was changed. And, briefly, I will say it: happy.

She was a woman who’d done nothing wrong except exist.” “Except exist,” I echoed in a whisper.

I could taste Danaë’s loneliness because it tasted exactly the same as mine.

Love had been a ghost for so long. Until that day, I could have walked through it and not even noticed it was there.

I thought of what it might mean to have a boy admire you, not for how you looked, but for who you were. For your thoughts and your deeds, your fears and your dreams. Was such a miracle to be my inheritance? To know I was treasured, adored, and celebrated; to be allowed, encouraged to shine, to feel perfect in the majestic mirror of someone else’s gaze—could such a life ever be mine?

It’s the hardest thing in the world to explain yourself, to tell your story clearly. We are all of us such complicated creatures, whether we have snakes for hair or not. Who we are, and why we are like that—I do not think there is a soul this side of Mount Olympus who can effortlessly explain the twists and turns their life has taken, why they might prefer a fig cake over a honey one, why they fell in love with that man rather than his friend, why they cry at night, or cry at beauty, or cry for no reason at all. But still. It’s all we can do.

“Well, I think it’s easier being told you’re a handsome boy than it is to be told you’re a beautiful girl. When beauty’s assigned you as a girl, it somehow becomes the essence of your being. It takes over everything else you might be. When you’re a boy, it never dominates who you can be.”

Athena is a bitch.

My friend, my dream, a boy; dead and gone.

| LCGFT: Novels. Classification: