Nu (a modern-classic fanfic)
If she noticed him she made no indication.
He’d already tried and tried again, in vain, to bore through the black lenses positioned like shields over the bridge of her nose. The ad had warned him not to, but he did anyway, and thought she must be watching the birds in the orchard beyond her porch. They dipped between branches, singing revelation pains and awe to the newborn sunset. She was spread out like butter on her wicker loveseat, purportedly oblivious to the battered man and truck that had rumbled up her dirt driveway, though they, too, were in her line of sight.
He checked his watch-- NO PHONES, the ad had said-- and left the vehicle on unsteady feet.
The birds tittered at the hitch in his voice, the wobble in his gait, but the man marched on.
She smiled, bright and toothy; on a screaming impulse, he ducked his head.
He was at the bottom of her porch now, looking up at her headwrap. Geyser of deep greens and blues shooting up two feet from her hairline. Her dress inhaled as she stood to greet him, catching a gust of summer wind that turned the simple beige garment into a robe reminiscent of the ancients.
She descended, and he noticed she wore no shoes.
“I’m Greg,” was all he could say.
“Well. We should. Start then?”
Nu waved a hand. No polish. No rings. “No rush.”
She breathed in deeply. He joined--the air was weighty with overripe fruit-- and on the exhale, they fell into step on the clay path that wound through the front garden, into the orchard, below the writhing banner of birds.
He eyed her between conversation: the pecan complexion blessed by the golden hour; the tiny feet that drove down into the ground immune to stones and bramble.
Between the faint smile and the headwrap, though, would remain a mystery until the end of the night.
They pressed on until the rose-gold sky went lavender, and the lavender grew heavy and dim. By now, the house was a hazy memory, and the heady-sweet fumes of tropical fruit lulled him, almost as if the branches were massaging his back.
He shook his head. She noticed a trembling start in his ankles and shimmy up up til his frame quivered like a web in the wind.
“Everyone has questions.”
But the man only bites his lip and looks to the grass for comfort. Or answers. Honestly, if his bones were bells he’d wake up the ones who came before him.
Nu sighs, letting that familiar weight in her chest set up shop for the night.
She looks to one of her trees, who only motions to its roots.
Her children are hungry. This man is the first to answer her advertisement in months.
Her phone usually rings twice a week. The patrons shuffle in half as often. The trees and her bank account grow fatter every time.
Oh , you never heard the tail of Menusa? Hiding under that sweet plain dress? It rattles when she’s shaken. Strikes when she’s ready. And constricts when she’s hungry.
No, she’s never eaten a man. Not directly. These days, she mostly eats the fruit from her orchard in the mountains. Fruit thick and ripe on broken, stony flesh.
She haunts the churches and the bars, places where guilt thickens the blood, where the running fellas stumble, leaving her shadow, her cards, a promise, and a number.
Her service--a wine, dine, turn to limestone kind of deal--is cheaper than most hitmen and euthanaisias, and she doesn’t really need the money, since no one can find her if she doesn’t want them to. But she understands that cash speaks louder than magic in this world, and she sends her earnings to her grandvictims. That is, the victims of her victims. That is, the families huddled in shadows, the bruises unhealed, foundations upturned.
Some call her righteous, but she doesn’t feel like a champion.
Back when she was called Medusa, on the temple floor, at Athena’s feet: she wailed, grief heaving her body until the weight became a dull ache, and blindly stumbled about in that until she was flailing, and a flame somewhere deep inside her caught on and a voice she never knew lived in her tore out.
She’d never known how to be angry. Only beautiful. But Athena, after watching her seethe, then simmer, then sit to cool in the steam, after forty days of listening to Medusa’s morphing heart, granted her the gift of the Gorgon.
Tonight. She uses it on her umpteenth visitor.
The tail lashes out and sweeps the man’s ankles, catches him before he falls and pulls him in close, coiling tighter as the distance, as his meager life, fades.
He does, slowly, and she can feel his heartbeat stutter at an unnatural pace.
She gleams down at him as the veil is lifted.
She hasn’t seen her eyes since the baptism--a fiery affair--but she likes to imagine their color based on reactions.
This one wrenches himself into lockjaw, strangle-screamed contusions, bugging like a mealworm in her grasp.
The ground rumbles, thunder from the depths, and the first root inches its way out. They like to watch Mama at work in their kitchen.
The man must use all his strength now, to reach up and undo the cloth, to release a cumulonimbus cloud of hisses and fangs, some still unfurling themselves out from bantu knots. He’d surely marvel if he weren’t writhing at the gates of death--the snakes are done up in beads of all colors, colors he hasn’t even seen on Earth, and some sport painstakingly crafted grills. These are the calcified hearts.
She holds his eyes in hers. Sweet Menusa. Who wanted nothing more than a farm before she enlisted in Athena’s army.
There’s no filter but divination, for the ones worthy of her gift. Some crawl to her on broken wing, hoping to be forgotten by a world they littered with fearful decisions and empty gray dawns. These she turns back, with a few curt words of encouragement.
“You’re not evil. Just depressed.”
But some. Some come in and she can smell, Athena willing, the shame on them--shame they’ve packaged as love and pounded into the ones they draw close. Leaving body after body mangled, spirit after spirit snuffed. And these she welcomes.
Now, Athena is a just goddess, and she wouldn’t send a bloodthirsty soldier to do her bidding. So Menusa is cursed to smell the joy on them too--the innocence of little boys shunned to corners of the mind, watching the world from hollow sockets, starved-skinny arms waving and begging for a scrap of something.
It was their choice to cut themselves off, Athena consoled her when the scent first hit her and dredged up mourning.
Menusa offers meals to the boys. Tries to talk to them, to see them play again. And they’ll crawl up to the glass but the men, their gatekeepers, decline her warmth, beat the boys back into cold recesses.
“No need to gimme false hope,” one told her drily. His eyes were almost as hostile as hers. “I came here to end all that.”
And the souls sit in the fruit, waiting to be packaged and shipped off around the world.
If they are lucky enough to be eaten by someone hoping for a child, they will latch in the womb and be reborn.
If they spoil, or land somewhere unfertile, they will get in line with the other spirits readying for reincarnation.
Menusa looks into the eyes of her umpteenth visitor--the eyes are the last thing to harden--and holds them, bores into him her gift. She weeps, but never wavers, for the fate of his soul is a spectacular horror that she must impart.
“You,” she whispers. “Will be reborn.”
His eyes are stilling. Fogging over.
“You will be reborn: a woman.”