Can you even imagine? Hours sniffing my way through total darkness, every corner same as the next. Walls crumbling into walls, pillars caked with moss. But you needed no map because you knew the path by the long sour cut of his bull-breath. At the clearing, a little table hollowed from stone, a campfire, a cauldron, a few forks and spoons, snail shells and coins assembled on the hearth. Poor kid, just wanted a mother and a good meal, pronouncing in the saddest voice I ever heard “Do your worst, I am so tired of pretending” and bowing his head low as I sliced it off, the left horn gouging my thigh as it fell to the dirt. I suppose I could have taken a braver route– smuggled him out of the palace in a laundry basket, dug him a secret tunnel, that sort of thing– but I was a lovesick sap, could only think of Ariadne cheering my return, admiring my fresh manly wounds and the head skewered on my sword like souvlaki. Ari, with her milk-splashed skin and velvet smile, whispering legends and lore in my ear. Never did need her silly ball of yarn– I could smell the clean breeze home like a neon arrow– all it did was knot and catch around my ankles. Still let on that she saved me just for the kiss. In times before, I had brained thick-wit bullies, strung thugs from trees, served bandits to flesh-starved beasts. One guy I even stretched in half like a gob of carnival taffy. But no one warns you, when you bring death invited, how the dreams descend. I never sleep. I close my eyes even a second, and I hear that voice mournful and low in the flickering dark. “Do your worst, I am so tired of pretending.” Yeah, Ari with those light-up lips, such cliffs I scaled for her. I remember her sobbing, cursing, as we backed the boat away from shore and pried her fingers from the hull. She ran a little way after us, then stopped slack-jawed in the shoal, the yarn plaited through her arms like some tattered old garland. Just as we mounted the beat of the open waves she lobbed one skein seaward, let it draggle in the tide. Don’t you judge. I had to leave her. Too many memories. I made my choice to linger in these labyrinths alone– but damn if I don’t still feel the burn of that thread tugging, tugging me through the lidless days.
Roadside Bar, Athens by Kim-An Lieberman
