And he broke off. As though chiding himself, he shook his head and said, “No. Those aren’t truth. Those are my excuses that I have been telling myself all this time. No, truth is I didn’t want to tell you. I always knew that I would have to explain in the future, but then the time was there and I did not want things to change.”
That sounds ominous, thought Isme. She said, “Nothing will change. I am still your child and this is our island and we will wait here for the end of the world. Same as always,” and she hesitated. “Except I will stop singing because it is dangerous.”
Her father shook his head again. “No, Isme, that is not truth. You should be careful when you sing because words can be dangerous. But other times songs may be the safest thing in the world, the thing that the world needs. Or, at least that was truth for your father.”
Isme stared at him. “But you are my father. And you have never sung like me.”
Her father shifted again, then said, “As I have been all this time. But this is what I hesitated to say, when you became a woman. Isme, you were not born to me. You were born to a man you know from my stories. If you merely put your mind to task, looking in the stories for similarities, you will figure out who he was soon enough.”
Isme wanted to object—but she had never called her father a liar before, and there was no reason to do so now, even if he had never told her that she was not born to him. Plenty of people in stories were tossed away and raised by other parents, anyway... it did not truly seem so strange to have her origins be the same.
But... to have another father? Some stranger, who was in her father’s stories? Isme considered this, looking over her father’s shape, hulking and still damp from the storm still screeching outside. Her birth father was someone else? Someone her father knew. She was similar to him, whoever he was. How? She had heard in stories that children often looked like their parents, and she had wondered what this meant. She had nobody to compare herself to but her father, and of course he was the thing most similar to her on the island because they were the only men around.
She had wondered, sometimes: what would other people look like? When she imagined other people, she filled in their faces with her own and her father’s; all the men were broad-waisted with round nostrils and all the women were button-nosed, tanned, with ratty dark hair extended to their waists. But she knew they could not all look the same—how else could people recognize each other in stories?
But now she thought that perhaps she and her father did not look alike, if they were not related by birth. Perhaps a person who knew other people would not make Isme’s mistake. Would see that they were strangers by blood. They would look too different.
Then she found herself rebelling against that thought—that someone, a stranger, might see her and her father and not notice that they were family. Because they were. Did not stories always emphasize that the inside of a person was what counted?
Isme said, “Who is this blood father, to me? He is not here in this cave with me.”
And her father smiled, his relief crinkling the corners of his beady eyes. He raised one of his club-like hands to his broad chest, placing fingers on his breastbone. And, as if introducing himself for the first time, said, “As for me, you have always just called me ‘Father.’ But amongst men I have another name: I am Epimetheus, the afterthought. I do not see forward, only back. So I’m able to tell you all of the stories of the world since you were very small.”
“I know you,” said Isme, and her voice was tinted with wonder, but not in shock. She had never heard her father’s name before, except in stories. The tale he told about himself was not very flattering. Epimetheus had been assigned by Zeus, king of gods, to create men in the last age, helped along by his brother, Prometheus. He had been chosen to give creatures form and Prometheus was to give them life.
Epimetheus had been given a bag of talents and skills to allot to each creature according to their needs. Flight for birds, warm fur for animals, breathing water for fish. And yet when he had come around to man, he had discovered that he had already given out all of the other talents. Man was left cold, naked, with only two legs instead of four, no sharp teeth, and no beautiful or distracting shape.
Distressed, Epimetheus had pleaded with his brother to fix his mistake: this last creature, Man, deserved something, some special talent like every other animal, or else they would all die.
And so Prometheus had plucked one of his own hairs from his head and woven the strand into the creature’s mane, thus giving men minds like the gods.
If Father is claiming that he is not my actual father, thought Isme, then he is not claiming truth. If he is Epimetheus, then he is a father to us all. At least, to us men who belong in the current age, because we are the children of Deucalion and Pyrrha...
For the ages of men ran thus:
A gold age—before Zeus ruled the world, a time of the previous generation of gods, known as the Titans. Mankind had been peaceful and lives wonderful. But nobody
