Stones in the Swamp - Part IV
Catch up on Parts 1-3 before plunging into the final chapter:
A Legacy of Stone & Snakes
It takes some time, but I see the two-snaked woman again after I stalk the orange line for days, riding east to west and back again. The screeching wheels, the hissing and whirring of the cars at each stop, tranquilize my body and lull me to sleep. It’s not until I’m jolted awake at Metro Center, the central hub station, that I notice the woman has boarded again. She looks outwardly how I feel inwardly: rumpled with ill-fitting clothing as if we are both creatures who haven’t quite figured out the frequency of our bodies.
I study her from several rows back and wonder what it is about her that seems familiar. Maybe the same cravings call to her that call to me? Does she see all these humans and think they want to be turned to stone as much as I need to petrify them?
She gets off at Eastern Market, and I trail her from a distance. We eventually surface above ground, where it is oppressively nice out for this late in the year. Exactly seventy and sunny. That makes it difficult to track her through the throngs of people out and about, perusing the outdoor stalls of posters, clothes, and all the little trinkets humans obsess over. I lose her somewhere by the toasty and nutty smells permeating from a local coffee roaster.
I tell myself to be patient, as hastiness can ruin a hunt, although I am growing tired of losing things. I have lost so much already. My head to Perseus’s blade. My bond with my sisters due to the time I spent in the Underworld after my death. And now, I am losing my sense of purpose in this wildly different world, inhibiting a wildly different body.
“Why are you following me?”
The voice buzzes behind me, mosquito-sharp in my ear.
“Because I know what you are,” I say. “I am one, too.”
“Keep looking forward,” she says when I try to turn around.
“I didn’t realize there were other Gorgons. What’s your name?”
One of my snakes wrestles loose from my wrap, curiosity getting the best of the boldest of my girls.
“Gorgons?” the voice asks. The word sounds clumsy in her mouth.
Suddenly, a stinging pain flares at the nape of my neck. When I turn around, the woman is gone, and drips of blood are left behind. She has cut off one of my snakes.
Even though it is a high cost to my pride, I allow this humiliation because this small misery is the patience before the lunge.
Walking down a side street late at night, I can hear an owl's deep yet soft hoots nearby. I wonder what Athena has in mind for me this time, but some man dares to interrupt my thoughts and halt me from going further, pestering me by trying to tell me what I can’t do. “These streets ain’t safe,” he says and grabs me.
Sorry, I am not interested in you, creepy street urchin in an alley—I am busy. Yes, he is absolutely right...I am a nasty whore for snapping my head around to stare at him, defiant, as he touches himself with his other hand. Let me give up my search to find my missing sisters right quick so you can put your filthy hands wherever you want. A brush with one snake in the dark will have to be enough. I cement his one hand around his pecker. Humans are soft creatures who bruise easily, like dropped apples. One good spook like this can haunt a man for a lifetime.
Much better than killing him outright.
I continue down the alley, ignoring his cries as I am occupied with treading over cans and broken pallets. The rankness of the tight corridors sticks to my nostrils and almost stains my clothes. The stench won’t override what I am tracking, though: the trail of one of my precious girls. Her beacon leads me to an abandoned building, and when I press open the door, I see my sisters.
I run to them, but it isn’t like the old days when we cock our heads and let down our snakes and push our leathery wings together, each one of the trio taking strength from the rest; Euryale and Stheno both sit in chairs, their entire heads shaved as they radiate stillness. The stillness of mice blinking in the dark.
A Gorgon can’t live without her snakes, immortal or not.
I meet their eyes—and it isn’t easy to meet Euryale or Stheno’s eyes when they are dead, trust me—and cry.
Even if the paths we have walked are different, I still love them.
“What have they done to you?” I ask the shells of my siblings.
When I look up, I find that I am surrounded.
Women encircle my sisters and me as I wipe away my tears. The idea of being tricked down this path, the hunter turned hunted, both plagues and pleases me. The one I was tracking steps forward, no longer gaunt or timid looking. If fear darkens that woman’s face, I can no longer see it. She has resolve, a shining determination. I have half a mind to show her a thing or two and turn her to stone right then and there, but when I see one of my girls writhing freely on top of her head, right alongside one of Euryale’s snakes and also one of Stheno’s, all three hissing in delight, I stay my impulse.
In fact, all the other women have two snakes a piece, one each from my sisters. And I finally see them for who they are: women who have fractured, unraveled, or cracked open in some way, women who have been called on to shrink themselves or rein in their ambitions or wait. But they are hungry. And they can’t keep waiting and hoping forever. They have an entire conversation in their eyes, and I understand them completely, this army of Gorgonettes. They are the ones who are responsible for the stoning on the news and hopefully many more to come.
You would think that after all I have endured, after all I have seen, I would be a knot of anger and melancholy, having been decapitated, having missed several lifetimes with my family because of it, having to face death—yet again. But oddly, on this occasion, I only sense a peacefulness within.
I lower my head and offer the rest of my snakes to them freely, as I imagine Stheno did before me and Euryale did before her. As they carefully remove my girls, one by one, I feel the most alive I’ve ever been, even though I am soon due to ride in some black chariot at a ninety-degree angle right through a cleft into the Underworld. This rebellion makes sense, and I am not a hero in it. Or rather, we all are.
And at long last, my sisters and I will be together.
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