Medusa

by Jessie Burton

“Perseus, when you’re a girl, people think your beauty is their possession. As if it’s there for their pleasure, as if they’ve got something invested in it. They think you owe them for their admiration.

I was too young for what had happened to me; our bodies like precious metals that had been battered into weapons.

I’m not lonely. Self-awareness is a great banisher of loneliness.

I feel as if I might go on forever, or at least that my myth will. I could break into a million pieces and stalk a million minds. I could drive women to feats of fame and liberty and wonder. I might live for hundreds of years to come, crossing continents and oceans, empires and cultures. Because, unlike a statue, you cannot break up a myth or wedge it on top of a cliff. A myth finds a way to remember itself. It makes a new shape, rising out of a shallow grave in glory.

You will not find me in my deeds, nor in poems written by long-dead men. But you will find me when you need me, when the wind hears a woman’s cry and fills my sails forward. And I will whisper on the water that one must never fear the raised shield, the reflection caught in an office window, or the mirror in a bathroom.