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

of absolution. You, too, long for forgiveness, that the weight can be lifted. But you have told me enough—now I have no idea how such a thing can be done. I did not comprehend the magnitude of my offense, that murder remains murder for all time—it is inescapable.

Isme lifted her head, found her eyesight blurry, tried to think. If only there was a way of becoming another person. Perhaps that would eliminate the blood guilt; a different Isme, an Isme who did not sing to the turtles, or who otherwise had not killed. She had dreamed of such a possibility but that was just that—dreams. All her life seemed a dream. Perhaps that was the way of this world—

Her arm was a pool of red—sticky and sickly-sweet like the undiluted wine.

She moved her toes, her fingers. Sluggish. She had the impression that this was not due to poison—indeed, whatever had been in the serpent’s bite had faded. Looking up, she saw that the unfamiliar stars above were whirling, like the ones in the night of the living sky, but from the nausea in her own belly she knew the cause lay within her, not them.

I will die here, she realized, thoughts forming slowly. I’ve asked too many shades advice, and the answer I found is not to my liking, but such is truth. I will die and wander a murderer in this asphodel for all eternity. The world has not ended—I have. And the prophets and Persephone were all wrong... which is just as well, because how can I go on, knowing what I know, waiting for the end?

Yet as she was thinking this, there was the padding of pale feet, stopping in front of her, and then hands reached down to her wrist, tearing cloth from the ends of their own peplos and binding the wound. Other hands were at her feet, and a voice saying:

“Wild woman, if you die here, then I shall use what life remains in me to punish you. Here you go dragging me on a big wild adventure, but you don’t have the decency to finish the long road that you have barely started down—I am going to rage at you.”

Blinking the focus back into her eyes, Isme found herself enveloped by a shower of golden hair, Kleto’s face smiling down, her hair unbound like Isme had seen only a few times before, but each time more beautiful than the last.

“There you are,” Kleto said, “Awake and alive again.”

Isme struggled to pull herself up, was helped by other hands. And then she was shoulder to shoulder with Kleto, sitting in the dusty asphodel, watching the powdery puffs spring up under the feet of Pelagia running toward them. To her left crouched Lycander, his hand steadying her shoulder to keep her propped upright.

Pelagia knelt before them, loose brown hair swinging. “You look too pale, wild woman. I’m pained to say it, but burned dark by the sun looked better on you.”

Isme flicked her tongue behind her teeth, managed, “How?”

“What do you mean, ‘how’?” Kleto responded. Her eyes were as vicious as always, yet lacked that vital glow from before. “We’re dead, of course. It’s you who don’t belong here—or perhaps I should say, didn’t belong here, until you went and got yourself cursed. But even then that’s a stretch, since everyone belongs here.”

“This is the world of the dead, after all,” Pelagia added.

“But—” Isme struggled to speak. “But you all look alive.”

“For now,” said Lycander. “While our bodies above remain, and memories of us last, and we are not so far from our deaths—we will look like this. But the clothes will rot on us, and our shapes thin from hunger, and the asphodel coat us, and we will drink from Lethe in thirst until there isn’t anything else we remember.”

“I’m told it’s not so bad,” added Pelagia.

Isme held back a sob, but her arm came up and pulled tight around the shoulder of Kleto, who leaned closer until Isme could feel herself breathe against Kleto’s side, though of course there was no answering breath from Kleto’s own lungs.

“How did you find me,” Isme said, but what she meant was: Why are you here?

Lycander shrugged, beside her. He said, “I was wandering near the dock, Pelagia and me waiting for those we knew, when Kleto arrived. Then we heard a voice whisper your name in the distance. We came running and here we are.”

“But I,” said Isme, and she could not finish the sentence—I murdered you—and somehow the words still reached them, Lycander’s head lowering.

“I’ve killed lots of people,” he said. “Sometimes it was necessary, traveling, protecting the slave-girls, and more. But each time I felt a cutting in my own insides, and now I know many of them are here wandering the expanses. How can I blame you?”

“Besides,” said Kleto, “I explained things, and we know you still have a job to do.”

“The end of the world,” chittered Pelagia, “How exciting! Of course, it pays to be dead when you hear about that, because then you don’t care as much. Oh, Isme, when the world ends, can you spare a bit of blood and let us know it’s happened? And why?”

“Of course,” said Isme, feeling as though everything had become surreal, or perhaps that reality was surreal, and she was just now becoming aware of this. She found herself thinking of what she had told Kleto, the night before her death: Sometimes I wonder if there is something about the nature of reality I don’t understand...

As if sensing Isme’s thoughts, Kleto pulled on her shoulder, dragging the both of them upright. She began walking, Isme forced to pace along, and Lycander and Pelagia were following, attentive. The shore was ahead, empty and calm.

“Come,” whispered Kleto in her ear, “Your adventure isn’t over yet—there’s a place for you to wait for the last part. I wasn’t much help in the world of the living but I can help bring you there now. Here is where