Medusa, Or The Ones That Do Not Drown

The sea loves me. She laps at my stonebed and I soothe my webbed, aching fingers in

Her body; She licks fresh cracks down the walls and I breathe in Her slow triumph; She

thumps Her fists on the cave’s uppermost curve and I drink in her saltwater until my lungs,

my belly, my bones are full.

Worry not about my drowning—if you have care to spare for a creature such as

myself. Many have harmed me, but the sea never will. She and the priestess are the scintilla

of gold in my unfortunate lot, the two coins I can count to smooth my descent through

Charon’s hands into the Underworld, if a glory-hungry someone comes to slay me.

The someone that descends into my lair now brings no hunger of their own but the

alleviation of mine. A darkness curves at the mouth of the cave, through which the light

crawls from the outside world inside to die. The priestess’ sandals smack on wet stone, step

after step after step. With the tide’s retreat, there is enough floor for her to safely cross and

place a plate of fresh bread or a cup of sweet water within my arm’s reach.

I see none of this, naturally. I have yet to use my curse for harm. The priestess

murmurs a prayer over my closed face, her veils whispering in conversation with my snakes

as she leaves.

The bread melts in my mouth the same way my mortal mother’s did, in the life I am

barred from. I hate her. Tears swim in my cursed eyes, corroding what little of human skin I

have left in their trails. There is nothing to do but wait for the tide to come and wash them

away.

She stays a little longer each time she comes. I mean the priestess, but it is true of the

sea as well—Her waves rise stronger after each tideshift, beating in my calcified heart and
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my cave, the cusp between Gaia’s and Her rule over mortal creatures. Salt sinks to my

marrow, presses me under. Only the priestess’ descents make me resist that pull.

I want to ask if she wears through a pair of sandals each time she comes, if she could

bring me a cup of wine. Instead, “Fear you not my curse?” is all that comes out, stale air

slipping through my rough-toothed mouth, my snakes hissing their mimicry.

“Yours is no curse,” the priestess says. Unclothed of prayer, her voice hides

cavernous depths. “You bask in Athena’s mercy.” There is a sound of stones dropping into

water and on each other. My laugh, unfamiliar as the rest of my being.

She slips closer. “Anywhere else, the weak would raise you a secret temple, would

bring you bread and wine, praying you might do away with whoever brings them harm.”

Enlightened pebbles thrown in the depth I have sunk, in the darkness between my lids. Of her

glory tale, only the secret I can count.

“Have you never been harmed, then?” In my ribcage something awful churns—the

thought of her body so close by, a body that never suffered such to receive mercy so scarring

and so late, mercy in the form of another world’s being. A body unlike mine. A being like

me. “Is that why you bring me no wine?”

Silence bleeds between us then, the tide’s seeping return a rub of salt to our wounds.

In the stillness of her whispering veils and her faint human heartbeat, I think I could love her,

the way the sea does.

“I am Apollo’s disciple,” she murmurs like a prayer that brings her no light. The

water must engulf her calves by now.

“Pythia?” There is some humanness crawling under my scales yet, it seems, nerves

alight with her proximity. My eyes itch to drink her in.

“No.” It must be dark, the curve of her smile. My cursed eyes are learned to darkness.

“This is Delos.”
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Delos. My father’s warship whose belly I crawled into, hungry for adventure. The

soldiers dragging back the cloth I hid in, dragging me. Their hands, their awful human hands

“—will drown.” The priestess lapses into silence. My ears have been full of the past;

her voice, though cavernous, doesn’t fill them like the sea.

“Who will drown?” Not me. I swallow the pebbles down.

“The gods did not want war. They will drown them all.”

With Her eyes, I see soldiers sinking, mouths agape in the dark water, swallowed by

the depths where Her hungry offspring wait. Where I belong. I grin, all teeth.

“We will all drown,” the priestess whispers. Up to the waist the sea must have

swallowed her. I laugh, the sound all mine, the curse all mine.

“Bring me wine,” my snakes hiss, “and you will not.”

I hold her close when the sea’s wrath rises—I felt it in my marrow and in my tiniest

scales, Her hunger. We wait on the stonebed, my arms around her human skin.

“They never let me learn to swim. I would never leave the island,” the priestess says,

water seeping into the caves of her voice. Above us, Delos basks in Apollo’s farewell.

Human hands hold onto me as the tide cradles us.

She will learn. Worry not about us—the ones that the sea loves.