Atalanta

by Jennifer Saint

I didn’t want to lose the way it had felt, the exhilaration I’d known clutching the mother bear’s fur, holding on tightly as we ran through the forest, her powerful muscles shifting beneath me and the trees flying past.

the wisps of hair that had escaped my braid. “You’re mortal, Atalanta. Not like any other mortal who has ever lived, but you will grow and age like every human does.”

She was my sister, mother, guide, and teacher all in one, and just like her, I wanted to fear nothing.

Framed against the sky, her golden bow shining, she was so fierce and wild, and I thrilled to think that she had chosen me to bring her glory.

It felt as though every moment of my life had been building up to this: my destiny.

pulled his face to mine and I kissed him. It was nothing I had ever known before, nothing I had been allowed to know. A sunburst of color, his hands tangled in my hair. A heat sweeping through me, his body pressed against mine. I had thought of this before, the image of it flashing in my mind before I could stop it, but I hadn’t known it would feel like this.

He tasted like salt and smelled like springtime.

He smiled, the same broad, honest smile that had become so familiar to me, unencumbered by any hint of regret or anxiety.

He smiled at me, and I couldn’t stop myself smiling back.

“You see people as they are,” he said. “Perhaps it’s because you don’t conceal anything about yourself. Artifice stands out to you.”

“Maybe I’m enjoying the journey too much to want to reach the end of it.”

The warmth in his voice was like honey in sunlight, his fingers brushing the nape of my neck.

felt drawn toward them by something other than their magic. It was their rage, I thought, the anger for their stolen girl that made them punish every man they saw.

how laughable to think he could be Oeneus’s son, this man of fierce grace, tall and powerful, throwing back his head, his face upturned to the sky. All the savagery and strength of his father, Ares, was at once embodied in him as he yanked the sword from his uncle’s body and thrust it, already crimson with Plexippus’s blood, smoothly into Toxeus’s heart.

I couldn’t bear his pain. I wanted to hold him, to ward off the hurt and give him comfort.

I needed to remember who I was, who I had always been. A woman who was unafraid.

I wasn’t going to try to shape myself to be like one of them, a ruthless, self-serving, glory-seeking man. I was something different from them all.

“Since I saw your face after the centaurs knocked me unconscious, I’ve thought of nothing but you.”

The oracle warned that I would lose myself, but the opposite is true. I am more myself than I have ever been. I am wild, I am free. I am Atalanta.