by Cat Bruno
Thinking back on that lunch brings me joy: Three goddesses munching on fries and sliders in a no-name diner with unsuspecting mortals seated around them.
“Fucking Jake, man. That is one I wish I had never met,” Lizzie groaned.
The Botticelli-shaped woman was still using. Pink and black plaid sleeves covered her arms, but I knew what I would find streaking from elbow to wrist. She was one of the lucky ones, I concluded before our plates were cleared; one that could use, yet lose none of her beauty or vitality. In the photographs that I have of her, she rivals models and celebrities without effort. Tall and thin, yet healthy and blushing with eternal spring and the flushed pink skin of youth. Her beauty was unaffected by the latest trends or styles, gorgeous in jeans that dipped low enough to reveal her lower back and rounding hips. A combination of practicality and vibrancy that I recognized as wholly Midwestern, yet otherworldly. How her usage had not grayed the peachy glow of her skin or stripped the sweet curves of her body, I could not explain, except to wonder if she did not still sip ambrosia.
Lizzie is dead now. I attended her funeral and watched from a corner as all of her past lovers cried beside her coffin. One final tribute to their goddess, their tears a sacrifice offered at her funereal altar. Each one lamenting what might have been, for she was divine even in death – her blond tresses lightly waving across her bared shoulders and her lips painted with nectar. The sweet rose lip stain tinted her lips pink with one last taste of mortality. Someone else – to my true shock since I thought most could no longer recognize the divine – had known of her history and glory and dressed her as she deserved; even her makeup had been matched to resemble her past beauty.
I stood beside the thickly-papered, cream-flowered wall of an aging funeral home and wept. Around the room, the late morning sun cast an amber glaze, misting the coffin with a yellowing, angelic shadow. There, Lizzie rested, golden-crowned and shimmering like the moon. Her white dress, delicately laced and embroidered at its edges with tiny flowers, shined like a blazing star, making the colorless hue appear like a flaming robe. Vases bloomed with flowers and surrounded the casket; just above her hip, the collection of red roses that I had sent stood bright and bleeding in full blossom. I had wanted to send myrtle, a flower sacred to and cherished by Aphrodite, but could find none on such short notice. Despite my own dislike of roses, I recalled how fond she had once been of them and smiled at the memory.
Later, when the room had emptied and the group readied for the trip to the cemetery, I placed a small, gold-dipped dove at Lizzie’s side. An hour of online shopping and overnight shipping guaranteed that it arrived on time, and I would have been heartbroken had it not. I could not let this goddess depart for the Elysian Fields without any of her beloved animals at her side.
They would not be the only tears to flow from eyes that would see much in the coming weeks.
“Charity loves her dad, so at least one person does. I think she is the only one,” Lizzie laughed as Lyra asked her about the man who had introduced her to heroin.
For most of the two hours that we sat there, I had said little. Once was to ask permission to take a picture. That shot can be found in the middle pages of the feature. Lizzie and Lyra are both laughing, with mouths open and teeth gleaming in glee. Lyra’s dark eyes, the ones rimmed in kohl, echo with foresight, as if she knows what will come of Lizzie. For her part, Lizzie holds nothing back. Fearless and fresh, caring little for tomorrow’s worries and woes. You would not think either of them to be drug addicts, which is what this assignment has taught me more than anything. It was toward the end of the lunch that Lyra mentioned her own boyfriend, a man who she had met years before, during the time when she used. They had split up when she decided to get clean, but he had come back around over the last year and was now in recovery himself.
“He’s been drinking a lot lately,” Lyra admitted when Lizzie asked how things were. “And his temper is worse than ever. I need to kick him out.”
“I know what you’re not saying, Lyra,” the younger woman interrupted. “He’s hitting you. Let a man try to put his hands on me. He’d get a bullet between the eyes. Kick his ass out tonight!”
Her voice rose, in anger and encouragement.
Months later, I would wonder what impact Lizzie’s words had on Lyra. More, I would regret not speaking up, not warning the modern day Isis to disregard such terribly destructive advice. There’s a better way, I had thought, but did not say. I did not tell her how foolish guns are. I did not tell her that I knew of a cleaner way to kill. I did not tell her to prepare herself and to stay silent. Instead, I reached for my wallet and began counting dollars to pay my bill.
What a coward I was, selfish and afraid. This book is one attempt to amend that error and prevent other women from suffering. But had I offered my own tale, it might be me in a jail cell and not Lyra.
Rage has never been permitted to you, my mortal friends. For millennia, to be an angry woman was a fate punished by the men around you. Even I, in this human skin, have been forced to quell the simmering embers of fury. Fathers, husbands, brothers, god, government. All masculine and all ready to shackle our hands so that we might not strike. To bind our mouths with cloth so that we might not scream. To burn us. To imprison us and to silence us. Until we are ruined and paralyzed by that defeat. If we dared (and some have) raise our voices in rage or complaint, how soon would we be struck down?
Now? I beg you to rage. I beg you to rise. Yet we must do both better than them. Perhaps that will be my next tale.
In the end, she took Lizzie’s advice, shooting her boyfriend after a night of heavy drinking for both of them. He had passed out on the couch, which she admitted. Despite her bruised cheek and blackened eye, the cops arrested her. Had the man not been sleeping, her plea of self-defense would have been convincing. Now, she faced a murder charge, one that would most likely be reduced, but guaranteed that she could not get released on bail. Her daughter, Katelyn, was twelve and now lived with Lyra’s mother. A girl raised by her grandmother – does that story sound familiar? I have since created a college fund for her, anonymously of course, and accessible only when she turns 18. It was another attempt to make amends, to clean up a mess that I could have prevented had I not remained silent.
The Franklin County detectives were already suspicious of me by the time that Lyra’s pre-trial hearings took place, and I could do nothing to help her. By then, she had admitted to the crime, which, you’ll recall I hope, I have repeatedly warned against. Lizzie, like myself, made no mention of our earlier conversation with Lyra, one that might have suggested premeditation. As a counselor, Lyra had never made much money, and the lawyer she hired was average at best, which I can conclude even having never met him. Since that time, I read every article I could find about the case, and nearly threw my phone across the room when I learned of her plea deal. Initially, she had been charged with aggravated murder, but she pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to ten years in jail. Ten years!
The punishment I would have faced would have been three times that or more. Let this be a lesson, readers, in what might happen if you do not take great care in what you plan. Lyra acted in haste and in folly; in a drunken fit, she shot a sleeping man. Did he deserve to die? Perhaps. But her sloppiness and impulsiveness means her daughter will grow up without a mother for a decade. Lyra knew no better, though; this book had not yet been written.
After lunch, we returned to the clinic. Lizzie, with nothing else to do until later that evening, floated across the white-gray linoleum floor and chatted with those who caught her eye. She was so lovely that day, brimming with her Midwestern magnificence and charm. Her plump cheeks glowed red as she flitted about, and I could not help but imagine her in the flowing robes that often cascade across her body in ancient art. By then, her hair had been untied and surprised me with its length, hanging in silky curls to the middle of her back.
Why must the gods die? I thought when I learned of her death. Does
Mickey have the right of it? Will glory only come to modern humans when we have let the old gods die?
In the moments after my editor sent me a link to an article detailing her death, I hated him. My head dropped and my gaze fell from the brightly lit computer monitor after I read of her overdose. Unlike other overdoses, Lizzie’s made the news in part because I had featured her in my story. Sadly, her daughter had found her, which carried the news even farther. Through the media coverage, I learned more of Jake, including his last name, which made it fairly easy to set up a trust fund for Charity. The money is not so significant that the goddess’s daughters will not have to work or attend college, but I hope that it reminds them of their mothers and of the legends that fade more each day from the minds of humanity. More, my wish remains that they will not have to be silent in their majesty.
Would the mother of us all not want women to unite in such a way? Helping and supporting each other and the children we bear? How many names has she been given – that one who ignited the spark of our existence? From Cybele and Hera to Rhea and Danu. Gaia, Nut, and Devi. The more forgotten Asherah, the supreme Durga, the Aztecan Coatlicue, the upholder of truth Asase Yaa, Frigga from the north. Shakti, mother earth in Hinduism. Freya, kin to Frigga. Pachamama to the south. Ishtar/Innana. All women, all creators; most no longer worshipped over or whispered to. Forgotten by so many.
Their blood mixes with our own as it weaves through our bodies in support of our breath and bone. What can be traced more than anything from antiquity? The answers lie in our mitochondrial DNA, a treasure map that takes us from present to past along the path of all those women who have come before us. The ones who were queens and pirates, mothers and whores, witches and priestesses. Beaten, raped, silenced. Praised and protected. A complicated, twisting cord that bound us and hung us, burned us at the stake, yet still brought breath to all. Do not forget from where you come, my friends. We are all goddess-born, even if most of us have forgotten.
Rage and rise.
Where was I? Telling you of my time with Lyra and Lizzie, oh yes, let’s return there.
That day in the clinic I listened as Lizzie offered advice, bits of guidance that she herself would not take. Lyra noticed as well, but shrugged when I glanced her way, as if to say, “She is not ready.”
What struck me most those days spent in Toledo was how devoted both women were to helping others, even when they were both so broken themselves. One trapped in a dangerous relationship and one struggling to parent a young daughter while fighting her addiction. Lizzie loved her curly-haired, green-eyed toddler, I noticed when I accompanied her as she picked up the girl from her own mother’s house. As she did with most, Lizzie demonstrated a soft kindness toward the girl. However, parenting was not something she could focus on, not while she still used. Most days, Charity stayed with her grandparents or her father, which did not concern the woman, I had concluded. It freed her to wander, which I learned the next day as I trailed after the glowing woman as she visited her many lovers and friends.
I cannot remember how it came to be that I drove her around northwest Ohio, but she chatted to me while we made our way as if we had known each other for years. Perhaps we had, millennia before, both residents of Mount Olympus who would travel to the mortal lands when the desire came upon us. Now, we sat beside each other, not in a golden chariot, but in my dirt and dust covered sedan, the engine rumbling between us as I merged onto tar-patched highways. There was no pair of white stallions to lead us to our merriment, but we found such fun regardless. Lizzie bought bags of heroin twice that day, both transactions occurring in front of me as if she had no fear of consequence or betrayal. She was not wrong about the latter, as my camera lay untouched that whole day.
Many times I have thought about the men we visited and wonder which sold her the fentanyl-laced packet. If I find the answer, I fear I might return to Ohio. The two of us did not spend enough time together so that I would call her a friend, yet I had told her of William (not the truth, of course) and the wedding and of my job. Unsurprisingly, she did not seem wholly convinced of my pending wedding bliss, and a gleam in her eye reminded me that I tried to deceive a goddess of love.
“Do not let him hurt you, Dandelion,” she told me in a darker tone than I had heard from her. “No man who hurts a woman should be allowed to live.”
Have you read The Iliad, my friends? That ancient, important tome written so long ago is just as important today as it has been for thousands of years. And most of it is true, I can promise. Lizzie’s words, both a warning and advice, rung as true as Homer’s own words once did. During the final fight between the Trojans and Greeks, Aphrodite enters the battlefield to save her dying son Aeneas. As she sweeps him into her arms and carries him off, she is wounded on her wrist by the spear of a mortal man. Once safely back on Olympus, she tells her own mother Dione what has occurred. The Titan goddess consoles her daughter and mends her ichor-dripping wrist.
Lizzie now offered me her mother’s wise judgment.
“No man who fights with the gods will live long.”
Dione’s decree can be found in the fifth scroll of The Iliad, a story written nearly 3000 years ago. Lizzie’s announcement – spoken with today’s semantics and slang and lilting with a Midwestern accent that merges vowels – echoed as loud as the clanking swords crashing against one another on that glade outside of Troy.
And I heard it as she intended it to be: A divine proclamation.
By the end of that night, I wanted nothing more than to call Mickey. The band traveled farther west each morning, and played a new venue by the time the moon rose. I had dropped Lizzie off at some man’s house, and Lyra’s shift at the clinic had long ended. I needed no other images once I peeked at the one I shot of the two women in the diner. Two days’ worth of work, hundreds of images, and only that photograph mattered.
No one at that family-owned restaurant with yellow and blue octagon-styled tiles and wooden-framed flowers lining the walls, could see beyond the jeans and t-shirts of the two women. Their robes had been replaced, their hair shortened, their sandals discarded. To the others, the women were unremarkable. To me, they were the goddesses they had once been.
It was after midnight when I fell across the hotel bed. The chemically-bleached comforter still smelled of Clorox as I lay upon it, but I did not move except to pull the burner phone from an inside pocket of my satchel.
I miss you.
Had the day not been such a powerfully illuminating one, I might not have texted him. Unlike the other times when I had messaged him, Mickey’s response was delayed and my phone did not buzz until an hour later.
Thought of you during our encore tonight. Played a new song that I just wrote. Wonder who it’s about?
How terrible is it that my first thought was that I hoped he did not use my name or anything so easily tied to me? That is what has become of me throughout these months of planning, and it will happen to you as well to some extent. Trust is so fragile, like a tiny bird egg, and, once it falls, lays in jagged halves on stained concrete, blue and broken. I was not ready to attempt to pick up that shell, fearful that it would shatter further between my fingers.
Yet, I could not deny Mickey’s presence in my life. Before I could think of a reply, my phone vibrated again.
Wildflower.
Alone in my room, wearing nothing but underwear and a bra, my heartbeat fluttered and my lips widened into a smile.
At least you didn’t call me a weed.
A few more texts followed, and, an hour later, he called. But I could not answer. His voice, that magical tool of his trade, was like a drug to me by then. That gritty edge, as course as sandpaper, smoothed out my imperfections until I shimmered. Beneath, however, I was as defective as ever.
One day you’ll answer, he wrote.
One day I would. For now, I turned off the phone and jumped into the shower. Fake marble, white with curving silver threads, gleamed around me as I let too-hot water spray across my back. The
streams burned my skin, as if I had angered the great Zeus and his aegis now shook a wrathful tempest upon me. He is many-named, but he arrived here as the thunderer, the great mover of clouds and aiming to punish me for my misdeeds. In my mortal skin, I could not defy him. More a fool I would be if I tried; instead, I pivoted to face the steaming torrents. Across my chest and neck, my skinned reddened and puckered as welts swelled. Aside from a muffled whimper, I dared not cry out or struggle lest the gods hear me and batter me more harshly. Pain is penance. My hair remained unwashed, despite how sopping it had become, and I blindly crawled free once the water had cooled.
A mist covered the bathroom, veiling the mirror and thickening the air. As I made my way to the door, where the towels hung, my back foot slipped on the water-covered tiles. I remember falling, but little else.
Perhaps it was Iris who took pity upon me. Why do I believe it so? When I woke, a rainbow of light reflected off the mist-free mirror and spread a glittering prism around me. The sun had risen some time before, and my fall had pushed the door open, which allowed the morning’s rays to collide with the bathroom mirror. I do not recall seeing Zeus’s messenger goddess, but she has been known to serve as his assistant, and the bands of color around me suggested she had come while I slept. In truth, it was not merely sleep. Most certainly, I lost consciousness along with blood from the fall. Across the top right side of my forehead, a gash had opened, larger than any William had ever given me.
A god’s fury is many times stronger than any man’s. By now, you should all know that without doubt.
