reworking of a piece I wrote last year, imagining Icarus as the mythic ancestor of the barrel jellyfish. it still isn’t as good as I’d like it, but I’ll always be a little melancholy where they’re concerned, and melancholy requires excision.
HELIANTHA : The Myth of The Sun-Flower
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wordcount: 2099
genre: fantasy / mythology / romance
rating: PG-13
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What greater pleasure is there, thinks the girl to herself, than letting your body brown softly in the naked eye of the sun, until the skin matches in colour and in honey the heavy sugar ground from flutes of fragrant rum-grass, the kind that yields also a golden, heady wine, prized so high by the sailors?
Hers is a family of pearl-divers; their village sleepy, coastal, hidden in the cleft of basalt cliffs. Bare, often, like the bones of a carp that has been suckled clean of its lovely pink flesh, left to bleach on the fine sand when it had given all it had to give.
There are never many people around during the day, as half the villagers leave together with the low tide in their curved fishing-boats, the prows adorned with chicory coronets — this for good luck, as it is said in heavy mist the delicate blossoms will light and cut a bridgepath through the fog. They’ve never seen it, but such is belief: a seed in the heart, rooting strong. Unpluckable.
Of the half that is left, most are weary mothers with children too small to be weaned off the teat; few are the ancient elderly, and perhaps fewer still the divers, themselves quick as fish.
Quicker, maybe. Her mother always says she’s bodied like a snake.
Just like your father, Side says, smiles grimly, shakes her head. She’s afraid she’ll lose her daughter like she lost her man: the girl’s already too sure of her lungs, too comfortable in violent waves. Someday a shark will come along, your name in his teeth. Be careful, my girl. Be mindful. You’re only blood and meat, try not to forget.
The one that had worn her father’s name on his teeth had tore into him like scissors tear silk: she’s hated their lot since, our girl, though she respects their might in the way we all come to respect that which repulses and enfears, and therefore fascinates us. She wonders how they taste — those supple bodies, taut muscles rippling under the smooth of their skin as though disposed in one long, uninterrupted cut. They were made for the blade, warm veins and white meat.
She dreams of that when she light-bathes, sun low in the sky like a half-opened eyelid. Dreams of a banquet, oysters and carp and octopus legs, the shark with her name in its teeth set as the centerpiece, served with all sorts of melons, with pale wines as well as reds.
It’s morning, and soon she will have to work, abandon the warmth of her rock-bed; after, when she will have scavenged enough shells, she will be free to return to her cove, the sun again low in the sky like an eyelid touched by the lips of Sleep. She will let its kiss harden the salt the brine will have in her peregrinations washed her body with, until she herself will glitter quiet, like a pearl — or more boldly, with the many fires of the opal; and the sun, that red, royal sun, will make her beautiful, the way she’s heard talk grooms make their brides.
It pleases her to think this. It makes her flush.
§
“You shouldn’t spend so much time lying around,” Side says one night over dinner. Oyster stew is brothing quietly in the iron pot between them. “It’s ill luck.”
Ania purses her lips. “Why? There’s never anyone around when I do it, so don’t say it’s improper, or I swear—”
Her mother smacks her arm with the back of the wooden spoon, lightly. “Stupid girl. Even if there are no men, there are always the gods. Always. Do you want to end up like Semele, beautiful and burnt?” She stirs the stew, counterclockwise. “Besides, if you tan any darker, you’ll look like an Egyptian. People are going to start saying I stole you, or that I dishonored your father.”
“But—”
Another smack. “Eat,” Side says. “Stubborn girl.” Then, softer: “Don’t make me mother to a bride of Death, will you?”
§
After that night, she takes fewer baths, and always in great secret; and the secret thorns in her, grows to be pleasure. It pricks at her heart like the teeth of a mad hound.
I’ve found my shark, she thinks, and coppers for him. Oh, how sightly is the sun! How beautiful this Death, this groom!
§
“She’s lovely, your girl,” the women tell Side, one festival night in May. High fires are cracking all around and between them. To her they sound like bones. “Cheeks like dark roses, and that hair…Smart, too. She’ll make a wonderful wife.”
“I wonder about that,” Side says, and sips bitterly at her cup. By now her girl’s on her rock near the cove, no doubt thinking she’s so sly.
As if you can hide a lovebite when it’s in your every pore. Gods, Ania. You’re breaking my heart.
But what can you do? The girl’s in love, and Side remembers being sixteen and thinking that the world, stretched as it is between its two great waters, is still no larger than a pearl you can with ease hold in your palm when the right teeth are offering it to you.
If only she’d picked herself a less troublesome lover, she thinks, and feels like burying her face in her hands to spare herself the scene. Oh, Ania. You’re breaking my heart, you’re shattering it.
§
In her dream-banquets there is now another partaker seated at the altar: a man with eyes like fire, like bronze when it burns, clothed in such fine and costly purpure as you can only buy in the east. She may be but a humble pearl-diver, but she’s heard plenty talk of the Tyre, that fabulous city where even the molluscs are dressed in royal garb.
He looks at her across the table, those green-gold eyes lidded heavy, each its own low sun. “What is your name, girl?”
“Ania.”
He sucks an oyster from its shell with delicate lips. “Do you love the sun, Ania?”
The thorn in her gives to his voice: pleasure is made passion, now, and passion is a whip. Her heart fringes, bleeds. Everyone knows him by his eyes, but she realizes she knows him by his teeth. She’s known him all her life. “My mother thinks we’re all born with a death,” she says, toeing the question, “And that for each of us it has a different shape. She thinks my death is bodied like a shark.”
“And you?”
“I think the sun is a shark,” she says, and her sincerity makes his mouth etch a smile.
“So you despise it, then?”
If she could see herself in silverglass, she’d see her eyes burn bright enough to be his match. “Hardly. I just wish it would hasten its bite. There’s nothing worse than that shiver before a wave hits, before a blade stabs — I hate suspense. Meals are the only things one should draw out.”
At this he laughs, and it is like rum-honey, like a balm on the wound of her heart: “Is that so.”
“It is.”
His teeth are gleaming, saying, As you wish — and oh, how she wishes. How she wills.
§
Side notices a change in her girl: she doesn’t bathe in light anymore, but rather seems to bask in it: she moves her cot so that it’s opposite the window, the first thing to be touched in the morning by the rising sun. She eats less. She’s gaunted, like a consumptive, like one who is sick in the liver or the lungs. She shudders to think of the reason. Shudders to know it, and in her bones she does.
But what can you do? Nothing may untie what the Fates have tied. It’s sinew-string, that knot. It can’t be torn or cut.
“Ania,” she says one night over dinner, fish browned in a skillet, cast all around with green olives, like a laurel wreath.
“Mm?”
She takes her girl’s face in her hands and weeps. “Stupid girl. Didn’t I tell you not to make me mother to a bride of Death?”
Ania’s face softens, but the eyes don’t lose their fever. “Mom—”
She hushes her with her thumb. “My heart’s broken, but all the same it blesses you: may you have days. May they be happy.” She sobs. “My stupid girl. May you be happy, so stupidly happy, as it befits the holy fools.”
What terrible thing, she thinks, to be wed to a god. To have your nuptials with your pyre, to smile like that as it melts the flesh from you, as it ashens the hair and hollows the bones of their marrow.
O, Demeter. I know you don’t watch over seamen, but I know you watch over mothers. Give me strength, Goddess. Give me heart.
§
“I think I’ll die soon,” Ania tells him, breathes it soft into his chest. They’re lying on her rock, entwined like a pair of freshwater fish; from a distance, you’d think them sculpted in metal, or jeweled in some secret amber washed up from the depths.
He rubs circles into the small of her back. “I can ask Zeus to make you immortal.”
“That’s sweet,” she laughs, “But you’d bore of me one day, and then I’d have an eternity to stare at either the moon or my own misery, too in love with you still to bear the light of day.”
“I wouldn’t,” he says, and it is the first time she’s ever heard him forlorn. “And I can’t bear to know you in Hades, away from my eyes.”
“Selfish,” she says, kisses the sharp of his jaw. “Not that I mind. I’d hate to meal more than one shark. Too tedious.”
He turns them over, laughing, and the disc of the sun above is now nimbus for the one below. She touches her hands to his face, marvels at her god. “I won’t make you immortal if you don’t want to be,” he says when he sobers, trailing a finger down her body. “But I won’t let you leave me, either. Gods are jealous. Even straining ones.”
She pulls her bottom lip back between her teeth and thinks. “Let’s compromise, then.”
He listens.
§
At nineteen, Ania’s a woman who has known the world in ways the clergy may only ever dream of.
At forty, Side’s a widow burying her only child.
But something strange happens, something the undertakers in those parts still hush among themselves in whispers reverent, reserved usually for the Orphic mysteries: a brilliance fills the burial-chamber, and when it fades the cleaned body is nowhere to be found.
“Rapture,” one of those present calls it, and without meaning to thinks of the ways in which husbands hometake their new brides.
Side, shattered of heart, tears her veil from her head and laughs. It was one like Hades who stole her girl, alright, but unlike Kore her girl demanded herself the pomegranate sacrament.
Oh, Demeter, mother many and same-sorrowed; keep me. I beg you, keep the earth firm ‘neath my feet.
§
A single golden flower sprouts from the soil around her hut, turning its head gently as the day waxes and wanes, tracing the movement of the sun with its lone, dark eye.
Side holds onto it and weeps. “Stupid girl. My stupid, stubborn girl.”
§
“Heliantha,” Helios calls, many years therafter, wandering aimless through a field of sunflowers. He has aged, and sickened, and his skin is now as the bronze on an old church-bell, green as if kissed with seasalt for many a storming year. The Old Gods, once thought immortal, are facing burials: Zeus was usurped by a Son, but not his own; and isn’t that the cruelest joke?
Ah; how fair the Fates are in their punishings of hubris, even divine.
He calls again: “Heliantha, sun-lover, dear wife.”
The flowers rustle gently, although there is no wind. Eurus has long since silenced his reed-pipe, and for Pan only the lady-beetles and the spiders remember to weep.
“The gods are dying, Heliantha,” Helios says, seats himself on a jut of stone with a sigh. His whole body aches. His whole soul. “I am dying.”
Slowly, her arms embrace him, the warmth of them near-real, near-there. “Are you afraid, my shark? Does Aion make you fearful?”
He touches his lips to the inside of her elbow, turns the question over in his hands. “No. Not anymore.”
She sings, then, a soft, all but forgotten sailor’s tune. He closes his eyes.
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