Wake, Siren

by Nina MacLaughlin

  MEDUSA

  Translators build the bridges. The chasm between languages is a deep ravine of silence. So what can we do but trust that the translators’ bridges are sturdy, will carry the weight of meaning from one side of the ravine to the other? But all these bridges are faulty. Hitches and chinks because one language cannot cross over to another language unaltered and unflawed.

  And some of these bridges lead meaning into exile.

  Which is where this story has been living. Far removed from its home. I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people’s tellings, of all these different bridges, of the wrong words leading meaning and truth astray, I’ll tell it myself. The story of how I got my snakes. It’s short.

  Let’s be specific. These were the colors in my hair: wheat, copper, and mahogany. It fell in waves down my back. See it. Wheat. Copper. And mahogany.

  I was this tall and when I told people I was this tall they always said, you seem so much taller. I was one of those people who seemed taller than I was. I stood up straight and I carried myself with force. I remember how I was.

  A certain sort of voice tells the story long enough and part of you ends up believing it. In hearing the telling of my story, I have heard the words “seized and rifled.” I have heard the word “deflowered.” I have heard the words “attained her love.” The words have made me question, was I wrong? Was it maybe not that bad? Was I just not strong enough to handle it?

  “Attained her love.”

  This euphemism, this shorthand, this obscuring. Let me tell you. Neptune, who smells like the sick, muddy rot of low tide, forced me into the temple of Minerva. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked it so hard I screamed. The words for what happened next are not “seized and rifled.” Not “deflowered.” And not “attained her love.” The word is force. The word is violence. Violation. Force. Chaos. Force. Violence. Chaos. Force. Violation. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Let’s say what it was. He put his body where I did not want his body. This is the moment I was amputated from myself.

  Minerva stood there and hid her eyes and didn’t help. Untouched, above it all, she was disgusted that this thing should happen in her holy place. This desecration. But she wasn’t mad at Neptune. He went back to ruling the seas. Unscathed. Unpunished. Continued with his life as though returning home from a morning’s errand to the butcher and the bank. Got what he wanted. Went on his way. Not me. I did not get what I wanted, and I did not get to continue on with my life. I was the one who was punished by Minerva. It started as a tugging, a tightness across my scalp, as though some large fist had grabbed my hair and pulled. My waves of hair, its rich color, its thickness, all of it tightened, coiled, twisted. I put my hand up to my head and ripped my hand away. Where there was hair now muscled creatures writhed and hissed, scaled and with eyes that burned. The snakes grew from my scalp like thick carnivorous vines rising out of the rich pulpy soil of the marrow of my skull. I became a serpent-headed calamity.

  And Neptune rules the deep. He did not rifle me or deflower me and he sure as fuck did not attain my love, I’ll tell you. He forced his body on my body. A tidal wave of foul water. And in all the tellings and retellings, no one got it right. And my words can’t get there either. They’re closer though. They’re closer, I’ll tell you that.

  And another thing. It wasn’t just the twine and snarl of the snake nest on my head. I deserved more punishment than that for the crime committed against me, vilified further for the wrong this so-potent god force did against me. So to look upon me, to see my monstrosity, was to be turned to stone. I watched as people’s eyes would fall on me, and the horror in their faces as their limbs filled with wet cement, curing, hardening, stilling them for all time in stony rictus. My hall is a menagerie of statues, an exhibit of a perverse and masochistic sculptor carving different personifications of fear. I was too much. I was too much for anyone to bear. It was the most terrible thing, to horrify a person into paralysis, to know, with every encounter, that I am a monster too frightening for anyone to see, or touch, or love.

  I am so lonely. I have been in exile so long. So many other people have tried to tell my story. For a long time, it made me disbelieve what I knew was true. Now, I tell it myself, with the force of the words that I choose.

  And the last thing I’ll tell you? It’s not the snakes that are so petrifying to people. It’s not the serpents writhing from my head that turn people to stone. Don’t you know?

  It is my rage.

  I hope for a day when a fury as white-hot as mine can be held by another, accepted, understood, maybe even shared. I am not optimistic and in the meantime the statues in my hall grow in number and cast gruesome shadows on the floor.

  CAENIS

  I didn’t “lose” my virginity. Someone took it from me. On a beach. I was young. He felt sorry afterward and said, more or less, I’ll grant you anything you want. Anything I want? Why’d it take doing what he’d done for my want to matter? Why hadn’t that mattered before on the beach? Anything I want? Now? As if there was something on offer in this world that could undo what had been done? As if I didn’t understand that this was not remorse but another display of power? As if I didn’t understand who he was and what he could do? Did he think being a god made a difference at all? Anything you want. As though I was a child with a skinned knee, kiss kiss, you’re okay, here’s a Band-Aid, you’re all better. Why are we put on this earth? To experience pain and see where it takes us. Anything I want. “I never want to suffer like that again. Make me a man.” “You got it,” said the rapist. What else do you need to know?

  ARETHUSA

  I am my own microclimate. Forecast: too warm, probably humid, ever-present chance of flood. I used to get so embarrassed about how much I sweat. Not everyone understands what it feels like when your body is a swamp, drops slipping down your temple, or collecting at your lower back as you stand there chatting about the coming rain or the size of the moon.

  I sweat when I laughed. The big full-body laughs that distort your face and remind you of the muscles in your stomach. I sweat sitting on the papered table of a doctor’s office, no matter how air-conditioned those small and windowless rooms might’ve been. I sweat when I cried—or, maybe more accurately, I sweat when I tried not to cry, a prickle of sweat at my back a first signal that tears were coming, drizzle before the drench.

  At some point, I overcame the embarrassment. I accepted my lot. This is the body I have, this is one of the things it does. So instead of trying to pretend it wasn’t happening, I’d say out loud to anyone I met, first thing, Oh hello I’m sweating! or I’m probably going to drip sweat all over you! I’d hug people, knowing they’d feel the damp, and say, unselfconsciously, I’m soaked! What a relief, to shed that cringing sense of interior horror at myself. Plus, I was good at keeping people warm.

  * * *

  But this warm body of mine brought trouble, too. A summer hunt in the woods, and I’d pushed especially hard, run miles along paths in and out of shade, and I was hot and happy, my hair clung to my forehead, you could’ve wrung sweat water from my clothes. I came upon a stream, its banks lined with willows and poplars, the trees seeming to tilt themselves toward the water. I laughed at my luck to find this place and removed my shoes. After hours on the trails, each step a pounding down on earth, to feel the cool water surround my feet, cool each tendon, unswell each well-used muscle, a euphoric pleasure. I pulled up my dress and went knee deep, and a thousand tiny cooling hands rubbed the weary out of me. Knee deep, another step, my thighs, and I knew then I needed to put my whole body in the water.

  I had this section of the forest to myself. It was around the time when Proserpina disappeared. There she was picking flowers in a field. Then she was gone. Everyone in the woods was talking about it. A lot of people were looking. It was a hotter summer than usual, maybe from the heat of Ceres’s fear. I removed all my clothes and draped them over a low branch of a young willow by the water’s edge. What a pleasure it is being naked
outside, to feel the air touch parts otherwise covered by clothes. Air and sunlight touching the belly, the lower back, the full length of the legs. But something felt different. I’d spent a thousand summer afternoons stripping off my clothes and swimming, but this afternoon I lingered for a moment by my clothes. Proserpina’s disappearance haunted the back of my thoughts and I wondered, am I maybe not as safe as I think I am? But we cannot live our lives in fear.

  Ankles, shins, knees, I paused. Thighs. Mid, inner. Higher. A clench, a ripple, goosebumps. Water around the waist and I lowered myself in. I dove around like the dolphins do, hair slicking down like an otter’s tail. Sweetest reward to surrender yourself to a body of water. Body because it is something to enter and be absorbed by, because it offers a certain release, in a way not possible on mountainside, or forest path, or dune. The water holds all of you.

  And then the noise. A squelching burble rising from deep and breaking through the surface, a glotted sticky heaving, the noise the big animals make after you’ve slit their throats and they are gulping on their blood. Fear leaked down the back of my spine—this was not a noise that signaled something good or right—and I splashed out of the stream onto the opposite shore. I paused for a moment, saw my dress on the limb across the water, and listened again, my heart thumping inside me.

  Then the bubbling rattle became clearer.

  “Don’t go,” said a hoarse, choking voice. Each of my muscles tightened at once. Especially the ones around my ribs. Especially the ones in my calves. “Join me again.” River god, Alpheus. “Back in the water,” he said.

  In the bad dream I used to have again and again, I’d find myself someplace and realize I had forgotten to put on shoes. Everything fine and familiar and then everything all wrong, a sense of chaos and doom, a vulnerability, a humiliation. The horror is twofold. One: something is deeply wrong with my mind if I have forgotten such a basic thing. Two: I won’t be able to run. The combination brought a sickening fear.

  Here on the bank of a stream, my nightmare was real. “Don’t leave,” said the muddy voice again. My clothes on the other side of the stream moving in the breeze like laundry on a line. And there in the shade my shoes, still as stones, their leather straps waiting to be laced. But they would not be laced. And my clothes would remain on that branch. I had to run. Bare bodied, barefoot. My legs, which I’d used so much already, found speed and strength, and I whisked away from him. “Why are you leaving?” he yelled. “Don’t leave!”

  My naked flight only increased his excitement and he took human form—slick skinned, glistening—and began running after me. Twigs snapped beneath his steps. His breath was steady and quick. He called my name.

  For a moment I was reminded of being a child, of the feeling of pure fright that comes when running up the stairs with a darkened house below, sure there’s something there behind you. The giddy fearful leap into bed and the pulling of the covers all the way over to render you invisible to the force that pursued you up the stairs, absorbed into a cloud of undercover safety.

  I ran without shoes, without clothes, unaware of the leaves against my skin as I raced by, unaware of the stones and sticks beneath my feet. I ran to the east, the sun at my back. Over open flat fields, up hills and down. Faster than him for miles. Until I couldn’t, and the god of the river was close behind me. So I used my voice and I cried out for help. I pleaded to Diana, my mentor, my goddess, to protect me, please.

  Diana heard me. She pulled a single cloud from the sky and steered it earthward so it wrapped itself around me, obscuring me from Alpheus. Inside this thick damp fog I stood, still except for the rise and fall of my chest as I tried to catch my breath. This muggy mist held me, the moisture all around, particles dense and close, like the humidity from breathing too long with your head under the covers. A gray-white nothing all around me, the color of blindness, I imagine. Not dark, but a muted, glowing gray. A shadowless cloud. It almost felt like drowning.

  Alpheus couldn’t see me, but he was close. He moved around the cloud, circling me—he’d seen that my footprints had stopped, he knew I was nearby. He waved his hands through the mist and the minuscule pearls of vapor shifted around them. He said my name, the sound carried to me on tiny beads of moisture, his voice bursting in my ear with every droplet. I couldn’t move, or cry out, and here, now, from running, from fear, from being enclosed in the clammy hold of a cloud, I began to sweat.

  Every pore opened and on came the water. Drips slid like an army on the move down my back. Broke through the stormwall of my eyebrows and slid into my eyes. Beads rose and collected around my wrist. Ran down my chest and slicked over my breasts. A cold dread sweat, and water dripped from my shoulders, from my hair, from my fingertips, and the drops hit the dirt and darkened it. I shifted my feet and felt a puddle and the puddle grew as my solid form dissolved, the bones that held me up, the muscles that helped me move, each fingernail, each tiny strand of hair, the slick red insides of me, my teeth and jaw and tongue, all melted away into water. My whole self liquefied.

  I still wasn’t safe. Water is drawn to water, and Alpheus recognized me in the water I’d become and returned to his river form so that he could join with me, so that we could mingle and run together, one whole flow.

  Diana rescued me again. She cracked the earth and I sped into the chasm she created, cascading down deep into the dark undercrust. I moved quickly in the dark places, and lost Alpheus behind me. The world below was new to me. The things I saw underneath. Underground mountains, creatures that glowed with blind eyes that dangled off antennae, butterflies with bodies the size of bread loaves and wings the size of kites whose abdomens throbbed a jewel-like blue light, plant blooms that lived off the inner waters and the earth’s internal heat, feathery leaves that spread across warm rock. Other creatures, furred and fierce, skulked about, with long claws and long jaws lined with mean teeth. These demons hid in caves, in the darkest parts of the world below. The thing I felt as I moved through this dark new place: in the depths, I am getting close to something important and true. I saw the small furred clawing monsters who slipped around in shadows. I saw the glowing bits that brought small light to a pressing sort of dark. If I kept going farther down, I’d come upon something I needed to know, that maybe not everyone could access. The pull was strong and I went darker, leaving the world I knew behind. There was so much to explore here. Altered now as water, I went down.

  I slipped through worlds I don’t have the words for, where the gloom and dread pressed, where gravity tugged with more muscle, each step an effort, each blink testing the limits of your energy, when it’s all you can do to keep from placing yourself on the ground and letting yourself get gobbled by the dark creatures, how that, in some ways, would come as a relief.

  Darkness has its own gravity. It has its own ways of seducing. Just a little lower, keep coming, you’ll find something extraordinary. Painful, maybe. Frightening, maybe. But just stay down here long enough and you’ll reach it. That’s the promise of the dark, that eventually you’ll hit something real.

  I shifted and moved and slid and finally edged into the trickling tributaries of the River Styx, into its gray-watered eddies. I raised my head and that’s when I saw her. Proserpina, slumped in a large dark throne, looking small and wan. Her eyes were aimed at some non-distance, the static of fear buzzed off her. She sat in nervy stillness. She’d been stolen by Pluto, it was clear, snatched from above and made unconsenting queen of the land of the dead. What a land it was—the color of ash, a dim untouched by dawn, all noise muffled, a strangled inchoate whispering, the shifting shades of sentient body-shaped mists, mouthless, drifting, an orchard with trees bearing gray fruit, spoiled before falling from their stems, every plant looking strangled, small animals darting in the shadows, each breath in my chest became more and more of an effort against the oppressive, unrelenting gloom. And Proserpina, a stranger in this world and a stranger to what her underworld king wanted of her.

  I watched her for a while. She look
ed so alone, and so young, her eyes dull and darty, the color absent from her cheeks. I couldn’t carry her back to her mother, but I could tell her mother where she was. And so I made my way back up.

  On the surface of the world, her mother, in mourning, had salted the earth with grief. Crops withered. Livestock starved. A spreading state of barren. Ceres, I called. Ceres. You can stop making the world a wasteland, please. I know where your daughter is. I saw her with my eyes. And I told her where she was and Ceres stood like a statue, a stony rage took hold of her, as though the news had paralyzed her. But her senses returned. She looked at me with fire in her eyes, nodded, and aimed her chariot toward Olympus to take it up with Jove.

  Now, above again, I see the stars I had forgotten. I feel the tree limbs bend and skim my skin. The whole broad sky opens itself above me. Even in the dark, bits of light shine. I lift my head, I wring the water from my hair. There, the moon. The white light of it dances on my surface. I’m made of water. I dance with the light.

  THE HELIADES

  Parents set up a circus tent. Parents—these clowns, these trapeze artists, these lion tamers, these strange ringmasters trying to control the show underneath the tent. Parents or their stand-ins, the different forms caretakers can take. As children, we live underneath this tent, and we watch the highwire act, we see the acrobats fling their bodies over their bodies, we touch the trunk of the elephant, we get roared at by the sad, scared lion, and we think, This is life, this is regular, this is how it looks for everyone. In time we learn that’s not true at all, it’s different under every tent. But what’s the same? It’s probably strange for each of us. The strangeness of learning how to be alive from the people under the tent with you, who brought you into their tent even as they were trying to set it up, doing the best they could maybe, but fumbling with the ropes, hitting rocks when they plowed in the stakes, still learning how to balance on someone else’s shoulders. It’s their first time through being alive, too, and they don’t recognize the power they have in the miniature world they build. It’s useful to have brothers and sisters, people who know what it’s like under your specific tent, because it can be a hard thing to make sense of, and it can be hard to make another person understand. Brothers and sisters can sometimes make things feel a little easier. Sometimes they are protectors.