Everyone Should Eat His Own Turtle (A Greek Myth Novel) by H.C. Southwark (nonfiction book recommendations TXT) 📕

She had done this before.

Further on, strewn along were the remains of the other women, nude and splayed and spattered, with blood and mud and who knew what, still lost in their own heads. Some were awake, at least a little. Isme passed an older woman who was humming to the sky.

There was a huddle of women around where the first trespasser had been brought down, and Isme startled—for although there was clearly a human hand, wrist chewed through, lying just outside the pile, so too was there a pair of antlers bloodied and battered, rungs broken. Isme passed them, and they were still as though all dead.

The sound of running water came, faint, among the trees. Isme threaded through the forest, seeking. This was as close as she could find to the ocean—and when she stumbled upon the river, something like a turtle—a land-turtle, she guessed, with claws—lurched from the bank into the water. Isme wanted to call to it...

But she had a feeling it would not answer. It was not her turtle.

Wading into the stream, Isme watched the silt from the creek bed and the flecked blood on her shins merge and melt away. The water was cold. Without hesitation she sank down, holding the head out of the water as her skin pebbled and began to quake from the temperature. Some time passed before her shaking stopped.

The only part of her that was not numb was her fingers, knotted in the still-warm head’s hair. Isme turned the face so that it could see hers. She said, “I want to bathe you, if that’s all right,” and the head did not answer, nor did she expect it to.

Dipping the thing into the stream, then under the surface, she rubbed at the scalp, the cheeks, smoothed the skin. It was steaming when she lifted it from the water.

Now what do I do? She asked it, turning the face back and forth to ensure she had gotten all the filth out. Do I burn you? Dig a hole with my bare hands? There is no Poseidon here who will reclaim you if I don’t do a good enough job. I think you probably belong to Dionysos. But I don’t know how to give you to him and I’m not sure if I would.

After all, she had done the killing, but Isme also felt that Dionysos shared blame.

Or perhaps she merely hoped so, to partly absolve herself. Dionysos was a god, after all. It was like blaming a force of nature—what good would that do? Should wine take the blame, and no woman ever drink away her sorrows ever again? The good was with the bad.

There was, of course, no answer from the head. It was clean now and looked peaceful, eyes shut and the lids paler than they should had been, like it was asleep and dreaming. Perhaps that was what death felt like—in the fields of Asphodel.

“I can’t wail for you,” Isme told it. “I still don’t know how. But I can do the next best thing—and—” she bit her lip, looking at the river, measuring. Would it reach the ocean? Did not all water eventually reach the sea? And Isme said, “This was good enough for my blood father, and so I hope it will be good enough for you.”

Lifting the head, she pressed lips against the brow, feeling the warmth, and then laid it into the current, fingers loosening, and sang as it was carried away:

I am not Orpheus

No songs to raise the dead

But what honor he has

I pass on to you

May you flow to the sea

And there the turtles

Will guide you below

May this song be the payment

That brings you over the river

Where you are going

I will follow soon

Oh, Lycander, Lycander

This is all I can do

I am sorry

When she had finished, feeling the waters of the well of songs within her gone smooth like glass, she could still see the head bobbing in the water. As it went around a bend, she called, “You will not have to see the end of the world!” And left off speaking the thought that trailed behind: Because your world has already ended...

She remained in the stream for some time, how long she did not know. The light through the trees became brighter. But there was no stirring in the woods. And in her own skin she felt prickling heat, as though the water was now warm.

Isme sat in the flow and wondered what she should do. Her father was missing and had not returned after half a moon of waiting. She had no allies left, since Lycander being gone would arouse suspicions, and besides she should confess. Who knew what would happen to her, then—but surely Kleto would hate her...

Maybe when you kill someone, Isme thought, you are more likely to kill again. I am dangerous, that much is certain—and so I should avoid them for their own sake.

“You know,” said a voice she knew, located somewhere invisibly parallel on the creek bank, “that water is cold and you’re probably going to die if you stay much longer.”

“Good,” said Isme, speaking without thinking.

“It’s your choice, of course,” said the voice in the woods. “But fate has a way of flogging someone when he tries to avoid it. Remember what happened to Oedipus.”

“If Oedipus had just died after he heard his fate,” said Isme, “then none of that tragedy would have happened.”

She did not quite know why she was saying this, because she knew the voice in the woods was right—surely if Oedipus had tried to kill himself, then some other twist of nature would have occurred and he would have ended up in his fate all the same. Indeed, perhaps things could have been worse—if there was anything she had learned from life, from conversing with Apollon, from the revelry with Dionysos, then it was this: things can always become worse.

Perhaps she wanted to argue. To hear herself speak into a void.

“You are fated