Here is a retelling of the Medusa myth that I’ve been working on for a few months, and thought I would post the full first draft on International Women’s Day. It is not one of my usual comedy retellings; it’s a reinterpretation of the original myth. I’ve put most of it under a cut, because it’s quite long, and there’s also some context / points of discourse under the cut as well. It’s something a bit different from my usual fare and I’m quite nervous about sharing it, but I think it’s ready.
TW: rape
The most striking thing about the absence of light is that
it illuminates the presence of sound. I hear the man moments before anyone else
would, before he has even entered the cave. He is light of foot, and I know he
is trying to conceal himself, treading softly and slowly. I hear him anyway. I
hold my breath, willing the darkness of the cave to overcome him with fear and
drive him out, but the footsteps come closer. He is the worst sort of man,
then. He is brave.He is brave, and he is in danger.
Shrinking back against the cave wall, hoping to make myself
even more invisible than I know I already am, I cry out. “Don’t come any
closer! I don’t want to hurt you.”The footsteps stop.
I hear a sharp intake
of breath, a shaky exhale. He is scared, then, but like any brave man he is
concealing it. If I tried, I could probably hear his heart. It would be racing.“Who are you?” asks the man, after he has caught his breath,
voice carefully measured.I wonder if he has seen my statues, the ones that line the
entrance to the cave like watchmen. I wonder if he knows that I put them there,
out of my sight, because I could not bear to see them motionless.“I’ll tell you,” I say. I hear him take another step, and I
recoil. “Please don’t come any closer,” I beg. “I’ll kill you!”Silence. “I thought you said you didn’t want to hurt me?”
He is so brave, and I am so afraid of hurting him. “I don’t.
Please, please; go back to the entrance of the cave, and I’ll speak to you from
here. I’ll give you whatever you’ve come for, and you’ll leave in peace, I
promise.”There’s enough blood on these hands already, I think. Blood
turned from red to grey, hardened and lingering in veins long since rendered as
stone. I wonder if those statues still have hearts.After a moment, I hear the man withdraw, and I release a
breath I hadn’t known that I was holding. “Thank you,” I say. When I can tell
that he’s retreated to a safe distance, I inch forward; not close enough to see
or be seen, or to remove the shroud of total darkness that the cave has granted
me, but close enough to feel as though we inhabit the same space. “I told you
that I would tell you who I am, and I will. I’m Medusa.”He’s too far away for me to hear his heartbeat any more. I
can only hear my own.“I’m Perseus.”
The eye of the Gorgon turns mortals to stone. That’s all I
know. I’ve always known, from the moment I opened my eyes and saw nothing, that
everything had been taken from sight. The halls of my childhood were lined with
marble statues, and I could touch, but could not look. I grew up in a temple,
and the statues were beautiful, carved of gods by human hands.I live amongst another kind of statue now. We cannot always
live in temples.All my life has been leading up to longing. It builds up
behind me, a trail of desire in my wake, and I wonder what it would be like to
live. Atlas’ burden is only the world. I wish that were all I carried on my
shoulders. I wish I bore nothing but the crust of the Earth and all the hollow
things in it. I wish I were weighted down by nothing but the elements and the
spaces between the beginning and the end. Atlas meets the eyes of the world,
and I cannot.The living wait outside, and I
am within and without. I hold death’s glare in my gaze, and I am powerless.
There is a periphery between seeing and being seen which I dare not cross. To
behold is to be held, and my hands are empty. For fear of being seen, I have
never looked.
I can hear the sound of a stone being thrown against the
outside cave wall; dropped, picked up, thrown again. The sound of a man growing
bored. The sound of a man who wants to leave, but cannot.Most men who come here get neither the choice nor the
chance.“Why are you still here?” I ask, after hours of hearing that
same stone, that same heartbeat I’ve always heard.“I need to talk to you.”
“It’s not safe,” I tell him.
“Not even if I stay out here?” he asks, and sighs. “I’m not
trying to hurt you. I need your help.”I wonder why he thinks I am afraid of him hurting me, and
not the opposite.“Look around you,” I say, presuming that he’s in the same
place as my statues. If he’s right by the mouth of the cave, he isn’t alone. I
have seven statues there; all with swords and shields once gifted to them by
the gods, now made of stone; helmets forged of bronze by master blacksmiths,
now crumbling. One man wears armour made by Hephaestus himself. He is as still
as the rest of them. “Do you really think I can help you?”For a few brief seconds, there is nothing.
“I know you can,” he replies.
I pledged my services to the
gods when I was a child. I chose Athena. My mother begged me not to leave her. Athena will ruin you, she told me. She won’t keep you safe. I will. Stay with
me.My mother had two other
daughters, each by a man she had never wanted to lie with, and I wondered how
my mother could promise to keep me safe at all when she had been in so much
danger all her life.I lived in the house of Athena
until I bled for the first time, and then his name.
Glorious Creatures
Published
Steel Phoenix Studios 