Achilles Was A Queer (and other queer musings)

“So, translating with a different ad hoc agenda is better?”

Greek Myths and Legends - Created by Carly Allen-Fletcher

-Meggie Royer

When we’re born, we arrive on the shores of a wilderness. 

Our minds. 

We search for shelter. We tumble into ravines. 

We taste the berries that nourish and the ones that leave us delirious for days.

 All our lives we struggle to find footing in the forests of ourselves. 

There are strange hills inside our skulls. 

Slowly, through trial and error, we become native to these inner landscapes. 

This process isn’t easy or tidy or graceful. 

Don’t be ashamed of your stumbles, your scars, your sleepless nights. 

When he entered, it was strange within as well. But he found a bed-box filled with dried grass and bracken, water in a stone bowl, and fresh vegetables and fruits lying on a stone shelf. He ate, and drank, and lay down to sleep.

Almost half a year later, a new house began to emerge from the ground. He said it grew out of the ground not like a tree, slender at first then growing outward, but like a stone emerging from sinking flood-water, whole and complete. When it was finished growing, he went inside, to find three box beds, and three stone bowls. He had a garden, then – everything grew there, in the rich forest earth, so fast as to be uncanny – and he had found the overgrown remains of an orchard. So he placed food in the new house, thinking to repay his debt.

That night, Albina and her children stumbled out of the trees, thin and weak. He showed them the house that was meant for them, and the food, and they ate, and drank, and slept, and in the morning they arose and began to plant their own garden.

When I came to the village there were six houses, including mine. I had fled from a husband free with his fists and miserly with food for a mere wife, walking until my shoes wore through and my feet bled. Lost in the forest, about to drop from exhaustion, I found a path that led me to the strange little village. The people who lived there welcomed me, leading me to the house that was meant for me. There were more comforts there than there had been in the first few houses, I learned later. When a new houses began to grow, everyone had prepared a welcome. I had a bed covered with furs and woven blankets, carved wooden cups and dishes, food and tools and everything I might need.

There was a tiny box bed in my house, though I didn’t need it yet. When my child was born, Albina and Maike assisted in the delivery. The hunters, Franz and Nikolaus, brought me meat to eat, and rabbit fur to wrap my baby in. When the seventh house grew, I was already knitting a woolen blanket for the bed.

Toshiyuki Enoki -

One day, your skull will be as empty as a conch shell on a fence post,

full of wind and gentle quiet.

Today, it’s a cauldron of ghosts.

Flesh and electricity.

Water and memory.

A machine that makes reality.

This one was crouching in the hollow its impact had made in the sand. Six limbs - arms or legs, hard to tell in that position - and naked wings sticking up like spars from the thin back. I wondered what the feathers would look like when they came in. 

But for now I went over to it, crouching beside it and speaking in a gentle, soothing voice. “Welcome, cousin,” I told it, not touching it yet. “You’re tired and hungry. I’ll give you something, if you’re ready.” 

It lifted its head, showing me a still-glowing face, six-eyed and sharp-angled. It opened a mouth full of light and pale blue tongue, and made a confused sound. They often don’t know how to speak, right at first. 

But I wrapped it gently in a blanket, soft and worn by many washings, and poured soup out of my old thermos and into a cup that looked the right shape for its mouth. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m good at fitting a cup to a face. It drank eagerly, then reached out a long-fingered hand to touch my arm lightly, tugging on my sleeve like a child. “Uuuur?”

“The words will come,” I told it, still quiet and soothing. I spread out a flat pad – my second largest – and coaxed it onto it, off the stones and sand. It huddled into the soft blanket and watched me while I brought over the fire-pot and lit it. They like the fire, watching its glow as the light that burns inside them slowly fades. I fed it carefully… more cups of soup at first, then pieces of fruit and flatbread. It ate from my fingers at first, like a baby bird, and I had to be careful. They must not taste blood, during the first eating, and they don’t know yet to be careful.

When dawn came, the glow was gone, and I could see it better. It would be tall, half again as tall as I am, when it stood erect. Two legs, four arms, and the wings, all long and spindly. No obvious signs of sex yet, but that sometimes comes later. Its skin had settled to a deep twilight blue, but the eyes still shifted from colour to colour, pupils shrinking to cat slits, then opening to circles or oblongs or ovals. Tiny quills were beginning to sprout on the long, naked wings, their blue skin stretched over fine bones. It looked at me, when I put more fuel on the fire, and cocked its head. “Who are you?” The words came clumsily, but clearly.

“My name is Sam.” I crouched down. Once the sun is up, it’s safe for them to eat meat, so I offered it some. Its teeth had come through at around three in the morning, pearly and square, and now it chewed carefully on meat stewed soft and flaky. “I’ll be here as long as you need me.”

“Why?” it asked, when it had finished eating. “Why are you here?”

I gave it the simple answer. “Because you need me.”

A pair of wings - huge, black vulture wings, far too large on her tiny body - were the only things that suggested she was divine.

The general shifted his weight from foot to foot. Obviously respect had to be given to gods, but… “Er - I’m sorry, I was invoking Ares? The god of war?”

The child god shrunk in on herself, and pulled the shawl over her shoulders. She muttered something. “Sorry?” the general asked.

“Ares is the god of slaughter,” the child god said in a slightly louder voice. “Not war.”

The general looked at the priest. The priest shrugged, clearly lost at sea. “Well,” the general said, “then maybe Athena? Goddess of tactics in war?”

“Tactics,” the child god repeated. “Not war.”

There was a long, ugly silence, as the huge vulture wings shifted with the whisper of brushing feathers. “My name is - was - Iphigenia. Daughter of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, commander of the Greeks who stormed the walls of Troy. When my father disgraced Artemis, and the winds of Greece would not blow her battleships to Troy, I was brought to Aulis. For my wedding, I was told. I was-”

She sobbed. Teardrops dribbled off her chin and fell to the temple floor. “I was fourteen. And then I was brought to the highest altar in Aulis, and - and then - and-”

Another sob. “I was fourteen,” she said.

The vulture wings draped over her, and she disappeared under the cloak of black feathers. When they parted, and when the child god looked up at the general, he fell backwards. Those eyes. Eyes he’d seen a thousand times in battle -

“I am the true spirit of war, general,” the child god said. “I am the goddess of bloodshed, of sacrifice, of the slaughter of innocents. I am invoked when men ravage, burn and pillage. I am invoked when mothers cry out, when sons die, when daughters are stolen. I hear it all, general. I have heard it all since the fall of Troy.”

IT’S HERE, IT’S HERE!

I sat down (metaphorically) with Liv of Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! and we ranted for over an hour about how the myth of Medusa is so often purposed by awful cis men on the Internet to abuse and harass women. Have a listen, if you’re so inclined! If the above link doesn’t quite work for you, it’s also available on Spotify and Apple Music - links to all platforms here.

The fossil is not the animal.

The fossil is not the bones of the animal.

The fossil is the stone’s memory of the bones of the animal.