by Simon Archer
All the air left the room. I didn’t like her tone, her expression, or her stance. It was her soldier demeanor, which she hadn’t worn with me often since we started dating. Something had to be seriously wrong for her to be acting this way around me in my own home.
As if they knew what was coming, Khryseos and Argyreos lined up on either side of me, guarding me against the oncoming news.
“What is it?” I asked, steeling myself as well as I could. “Just go on and tell me.” Like a band-aid, I thought, thinking of my mom’s own anticipation just moments before.
“You might want to sit down,” Hailey offered, gesturing to the couch with a stiff arm.
“Just tell me,” I told her, my voice hard and unrelenting.
Hailey took in a big breath, and I watched her swallow hard with discomfort. My anxiety only grew with every breath that passed between us, the seconds of silence dragging into a full minute before my girlfriend spoke the news that would forever change the rest of my life.
“It’s Sarah. She’s dead.”
3
Raindrops fell off the edges of my umbrella in a rhythmic pattern. I never got along with water. Wet and cold were pretty much the antithesis of my entire being. So, of course, on one of the worst days of my life, it just had to rain.
Despite the constant thrumming, I could still see the coffin through the curtain of water. It was a long, dark wooden thing with silver handles. It sat atop the cot that would lower it down into the six-foot deep pit where my mentor’s body would rest forever.
I knew that there was a cemetery on campus for fallen students and teachers of the Academy. I just never thought I would have a reason to visit it. Now I was at the center of the ceremony, being her main pupil. Sarah’s sister, Noel, stood beside me, stoic and still as a statue.
In the corner of my eye, I could see Hailey under her umbrella. She kept trying to catch my eye and reassure me that everything would be okay. But I didn’t want her comfort just then. I wanted to watch every moment of this funeral because I needed to convince myself that it was real.
None of it seemed that way. Not from the moment I fell onto the kitchen floor in a fitful rage when Hailey told me the news. Not as I went to the Academy to start my third year and headed straight to the forge, expecting to see the endearing grimace of my mentor, Sarah. But she, of course, was not there. She was in that coffin, leaving the school and me forever.
Sarah was a daughter of Poseidon, but instead of inheriting an obvious power from her father, like something to do with water, she gained a natural connection to horses. As horses were a symbol of Poseidon, they gravitated towards Sarah. She was their caretaker, alongside Ann the farmer, and the on-campus ferrier. Because of her work with the steel of horseshoes, she was the resident blacksmith on campus and taught the weapon making classes.
However, when I met Sarah two years ago, I learned that she had Parkinson’s disease and struggled to complete the projects the Academy asked of her. Together, we struck up a bargain, and I worked on the projects while she instructed me. She had become an integral part of my experience at the Academy, one of the main reasons I looked forward to coming back every year.
And now she was gone.
When I fought through the first wave of tears, I finally managed to ask Hailey what happened. I assumed it had been her disease that finally took over, but that didn’t make sense right away. Our girlfriend Daniella was the best healer on campus and had been working with the blacksmithing teacher on managing her symptoms and even working on a cure for her. So then my brain instantly thought something had happened, an accident maybe? Like the fire in the forgery during my first year at the Academy.
However, the reason Hailey eventually gave me never, ever crossed my mind.
“They say it was suicide, Cameron,” Hailey said gently as if she knew the words would break me.
Essentially, they did. Instead of crying, I launched into a rage that I’m not proud of. No one on campus knew Sarah better than me, not even her sister, and I knew as well as I knew my own name that Sarah would never take her life.
Ever since I had arrived on campus, prepped for this funeral, I knew that I had to get to the bottom of what had actually happened because whatever bullshit reason they were offering just simply wasn’t true.
My jaw began to ache as I realized I was clenching it. I tried my best to loosen the muscles, but the tension never subsided. My whole face was tense as I contorted it into a look of sheer contempt. Jade, my best friend and girlfriend, tried to get me to smile or at least look a little less severe but when I inadvertently growled at her, she took a step back and decided that today of all days, I was allowed to be upset in whatever way I saw fit.
Jade and my other two girlfriends, Daniella and Beth, stood off to the side with Hailey. Daniella and Jade huddled under an umbrella while Beth shared one with our other girlfriend, Bella. Beth and Bella had gotten together during last year’s love fest and were one of the few couples that stayed together after the whole ordeal ended. Beth wanted to be with me and the girls as well as Bella, and Bella expressed interest in me and the girls. So before summer break came around, Bella had officially become part of our relationship.
Suddenly my mind thought about Sarah and Marsella, her lover who passed away before I ever had the chance to meet her. Sarah talked about Marsella as her great love, the other half of her life. If anything, that was one prominent reason that I knew Sarah couldn’t have taken her own life. If she committed suicide, she wouldn’t get to reunite with Marsella in the afterlife on the Elysian Fields.
In Grecian lore, there were three levels to the Underworld ruled by the god of death, Hades: Tartarus, the Asphodel Meadows, and the Elysian Fields. The Elysian Fields was where all of the good mortals ended up, in a blissful afterlife for all eternity. The Asphodel Meadows was the sort of Purgatory of the Greek myths, where the mortals that were neither good nor bad ended up. Finally, Tartarus was the place of punishment.
An ignoble suicide automatically landed someone in Tartarus, or the Asphodel Meadows if they were lucky. Sarah firmly believed that Marsella had ended up in the Elysian Fields.
“If for nothing else than for having to deal with me,” she used to joke.
So if she ever had the hopes of being reunited with her love, then taking her own life was not an option for Sarah. Ever.
I held onto this notion as Effie, the Elemental Official who was the daughter of Hades, presided over the funeral. But I was only half-listening to her as she prayed to the gods and performed the ceremony of putting a coin under Sarah’s tongue so she could pay Charon and cross the river Styx. My eyes hardened on the Stratego who stood with the eleven other Elemental Officials on the other end of the coffin, directly across from me and Noel.
After demanding more details from Hailey, she told me that the Stratego had been the one to find her, which made me all the more suspicious.
“He’s got something to do with this,” I said as I stomped around the apartment. “I just know it.”
“Cameron,” Hailey said, her voice still low and gentle, like speaking to a crying toddler.
I swiped the back of my hand across my nose and continued on, without acknowledging her comment. “He has always had it out for Sarah, been suspicious since the fire.”
“No, Cam, he has it out for you,” Hailey corrected. I could sense that she was trying to talk some logic into me, but I wouldn’t have it. I was logical because there was no way that Sarah would have done this. “Don’t project that onto Sarah.”
“Maybe he killed Sarah because of me,” I said with a lump in my throat.
“Cameron!” Mom cut in this time. “That’s absurd.”
“Is it?” I said as I whirled on her. My eyes were wide and wild, red and swollen from crying. I had bit my fingernails down to nubs in my anxiousness to understand what the hell was going on. “That man hates me. I’m still not sure why, but he would do anything to knock me down a peg.”
“You
seriously think he would commit murder?” Hailey gaped at me. “Come on, Cam, that doesn’t make any sense. He’s the Stratego.”
Even though Mom and Hailey spent the next twenty minutes talking me back down off the cliff, I still held true to my theory. Which is why I continued to shoot daggers at the Stratego every chance I got during the funeral.
However, the son of Zeus never once glanced my way. His eyes shifted to Noel at my side or to the casket in front of us. I wanted to believe that he was purposely ignoring me, but another, smaller voice informed me that the Stratego really just thought so little of me so as not to acknowledge me at my mentor’s funeral.
I heard the creak of the mechanism before I saw the casket descend. It echoed out throughout the cemetery, bouncing off the other headstones. It was as a modern tradition to bury the dead, more American than Greek, especially since the Greeks were the first to burn their dead rather than bury them. However, I appreciated having some commemorative place to go to mourn Sarah. I knew I would be visiting her grave more often than was probably healthy, but I would have to go every day to remind myself that she was actually gone.
There was a thunk as the casket hit the bottom of the grave. Two soldiers pressed a button on either side of the lowering device, snapping the straps and sending them whirling back into their containers, like measuring tape zipping back into place.
Next to me, I felt a jab at my side. I looked over to see Noel holding out a handful of mud to me. It was supposed to be dirt for us to throw into the grave, symbolic of her burial before they covered the whole thing. But as it was raining, our handfuls of dirt quickly turned to brown sludge.
The cold penetrated my hands instantly, and I wanted the dirt out of my hands as soon as possible. I reached out my arm, holding my hand over the casket, and opened my fingers. The mud slipped down at a snail’s pace, coating my entire palm in its gross paste. I put the umbrella handle in the crook of my neck and used my other hand to slide it off. I knew I looked ridiculous as I tried to get the mess off my hand. The inevitable embarrassment didn’t help my confidence or my sour mood. Finally, the chunk of mud fell into the pit with an unceremonial thunk.
Smartly, Noel rolled her chunk into a ball and tossed it in with a gentle underhand throw. We both wiped our hands on our pants, not caring about messing up our uniforms. As we did this, Noel caught my eye and offered me a small but understanding smile.
I tried to return the gesture, but I couldn’t muster up the right emotion. Anger and grief still prevailed. I didn’t have room for comradery at the moment.
Effie interrupted our moment with a few words in Greek, concluding the ceremony. “μπορεί η μνήμη της να είναι αιώνια” she said in a voice that echoed out over the rain.
The rest of the onlookers repeated the phrase, but in English. “May her memory be eternal.”
“May her memory be eternal,” I whispered the phrase under my breath, a second behind the others.
Then, two Eda soldiers stepped forwards without any protection from the rain. They each stood on either side of the casket. Their arms were straight at their sides, palms flat and faced forward. The two of them eyed one another as if exchanging a silent conversation. As one, the soldiers moved their hands forward like there were slowly pushing a wall.
There was a rumble beneath our feet and, unprepared for the lack of solidity, I stumbled and lost my footing. Noel quickly reacted and reached out to straighten me. I jerked away from her grip, determined to stand without her help. As I did so, I got a glimpse of the casket.
Slowly but surely, the dirt around the casket poured into the pit. It trickled in like a steady waterfall and filled up the grave. Before I knew it, there was no sight of Sarah’s casket. All of it was buried beneath our feet, never to be disturbed again.
The finality of seeing the closed grave took all of the breath out of my lungs. Sarah was never really coming back. That was it. Her body would stay in the ground until it joined the rest of the earth. I would never get to speak to her again or see her prancing about the forge in her iconic overalls.
The last step was the gravestone. Another Eda soldier, this time one with a rock specialty, squatted down in front of the blank headstone. Then they proceeded to punch the air. Water droplets flew off of them like a shaking dog. But with each punch, a new letter appeared on the stone. When the Eda soldier was finished, a new inscription shone crisp and clean:
Sarah Equus
Daughter of Poseidon
1955 - 2019
My eyebrows shot up at the inscription. Before I knew what happened, I voiced my thoughts aloud. “That’s it?”
Even the rain seemed to go quiet at my exclamation. It slowed to a light mist while the guests of the funeral stared at me with mixed expressions of horror, surprise, and caution. But I didn’t pay them any mind. Once my mouth opened, it couldn't seem to close again.
“That’s all they’re going to say about her?” I balked as I used my umbrella to point at the headstone. “That she was a daughter of Poseidon.”
“Cameron,” Noel said with a warning tone.
“She was so much more than that!” I said, not bothering to lower my voice. “What about something like ‘Beloved Teacher,’ ‘Lover of Horses,’ or ‘Partner to Marsella’? Anything but that.” I sneered at the inscription in disgust.
“That is how all of the headstones are written,” the Stratego said, his voice measured as though he were reading from a history text.
I whirled on him, my tongue ready to lash out. “Is that really how little you think of her? Or of us? That we’re only the product of our parents and no more? What a terrible existence.”
“It is an honor to serve the gods,” the Stratego snapped, his grey eyes growing stormy. “You would do well to remember that, child of Hephaestus.”
“My name’s Cameron, and you know it,” I said without hesitation. I leaned forward, my irritation making me combative. Suddenly, I felt a hand strap across my body like a seat belt.
The arm was connected to Sarah’s sister, who held me back but didn’t look at me. She kept her gaze trained on the Stratego.
“Forgive him, Stratego,” Noel said, her own tone monotonous. “He is grieving and knows not what he says.”
The Stratego took in a large breath through his nose, the air pinched to make a sharp, narrow sound. His bulky chest rose in time with his breath. It stayed inflated for a moment before the son of Zeus released it, with the same amount of gravitas.
“His grief is understandable,” the Stratego conceded. “He is forgiven.”
I didn’t like the fact that they were talking about me like I wasn’t even there. I opened my mouth to say so, but as though she could read my mind, Noel pressed her arm harder into me, a clear warning. I smacked my lips shut and bit on the bottom one so as not to lash out again.
Effie coughed in an attempt to break the awkward tension. “We invite you to the cafeteria for the traditional makaria meal,” Effie announced, opening her hands to the group. She gestured back towards the center part of campus, down the hill and away from the graveyard.
The Stratego spun on his heel and led the other Elemental Officials away from the burial site. Soon, other students followed. No one came over to me and Noel. There would be time for their sympathies at the makaria meal, or the Meal of Mercy as it was known in English.
Noel didn’t release her hold on me until no one was left save for the two of us, Ann, Hailey, and my four girlfriends. Ann didn’t approach us, however. She continued to stare down at the mound of dirt, wringing her wide-brimmed hat around and around in her hand. She paused only for a moment to wipe her nose with the back of her hand. Then the farmer turned on her heel and headed off in the opposite direction from the crowd.
“Ann,” Jade called out. “Where are you going?”
“I need to go and check on the animals,” Ann said as she gestured back towards the farmhouse with her thumb over her shoulder.
“You’re
not going to come to the makaria meal?” Jade said with a little disappointment in her voice. “I made all of Sarah’s favorites.”
“Sorry, Jade, but I…” The words seemed to stick in Ann’s throat. She put a hand to her throat and gurgled a little before continuing. “It’s too hard right now.” Then the farmer looked up at Noel and me. “You two understand, don’t you?”
Noel nodded solemnly. “Please do what is best for you and the animals right now, Ann. They still need you.”
Despite its wetness, Ann slapped her hat on her head and tipped it in Noel’s direction, not saying anything more. We watched her hunched shoulders and slow frame move back towards the farm. It took until she disappeared over a hill for anyone to say anything.
“We’ll see you down there, Cameron?” Beth said as she reached out her hand to touch me on the shoulder. Thinking better of it, she retracted her hand and gripped the handle of her umbrella tighter.
I didn’t answer them, but Hailey guided our girlfriends onward. She planted a kiss on my cheek before leading the group down the hill towards the main part of campus.
“You don’t have to go to the makaria, you know?” Noel said as though she were apologizing to me.
“Really?” I said, not bothering to hide my relief.
“Really,” Noel confirmed. “It’s technically for the family, which you aren’t by blood. All of Posideon’s children will do a processional as others offer their condolences.”
“But not all of Posideon’s children even knew who she was!” I exclaimed, my anger returning in full force. “She didn’t have a single one in the blacksmithing class last year.”
“I know,” Noel said as though the words pained her. “But it’s tradition.”
I scoffed at her answer, my disgust on full display. As if my eye roll and my crossed arms didn’t give it away.
The rain came to a full stop, though the sun still hid its face behind some gray clouds. I closed my umbrella and shook it out away from the burial mound, consequently turning my back away from Noel.
