“Not hell.” The words are not mine. They come from outside me; I’m awake enough to know that.
“Where?”
“Delphi.” The voice quavers at the edges as though the vocal cords have been slackened by time. She pronounces the word
Moving my body hurts, but I manage to feign sitting. An outsider might see me as a sack of potatoes, and that’s how I feel, my weight constantly shifting, my insides compressed yet lacking the structure a skeleton provides. My perspective shifts. The fire retreats to its pit, leaving the room awash in a preternatural mix of shadows and light. The woman lingers in the half-light.
Two stone men tower over me.
“Who are they?”
“Kleobis and Biton. Heroes rewarded by Hera with the gift of endless sleep.” The words are hesitant.
“Not something you can regift.”
“What is… regift?”
This is Greece, the woman is Greek, and though her words are English, I realize their slowness is a result of translating the words in her head before presenting them to me. I wish I could offer her the same courtesy.
With simple words I explain and she nods.
“Gods give freely… or not at all. Their mother sought a boon and was punished for her pride in her sons.”
Their mother. My hands go to my stomach. “My baby—”
“Still lives inside you. He is strong.”
“He?”
“Or she.”
I close my eyes. The ache is too much—relief that Nick’s child still lives, despair that he isn’t here with me. “At least I have that.”
From the shadows she comes, her face a tangled web of burns. “Snakes,” she says as my gaze slips away from her right side. “A gift from the sickness.”
I look at her and her face, and I know at once what she did. “You burned them off.”
One nod. “Yes. I burn them off with the fire. It was”—she raises a hand to her face, then pulls away as if she dare not touch—“very painful.”
“Like Medusa.”
Another nod. “Of all the figures from mythology, this is the one my body chose. Me who is nobody, just a servant of the gods.”
“The gods? Not the one God?”
“I find more comfort with ones who walked the same path as I. Their feet… mine…” Two fingers step through the air. Then she changes tack. “You know someone follows you.”
For a moment, I’m confused. “Did the gods tell you that?”
“No. I hear. Now is time for rest.”
I close my eyes but do not sleep.
My child is fine. My child is—
—healthy.
My savior finds me on the low wall outside the museum. Her gaze fixates on the ground as she walks so that her hair falls forward, concealing the scars with a black waterfall threaded with silver. She’s older than I first thought, skimming the edges of fifty. Only when she’s seated beside me does she lift her head.
“Are you… sick?”
The snake woman’s words tug at the elastic band binding those thoughts, but it does not snap; the bundle of doubt remains.
I shake my head. “Last night, you said someone was following me. Did you see them?”
“No. I just hear.”
“You heard what, exactly?”
It takes her a moment to translate, formulate her reply, then translate again. “Shoes. Who?”
“I don’t know. A ghost, maybe.”
She turns to face me, a question in her eyes. Daylight is cruel and unforgiving: out here the scars are knotted and gnarled and red as though irritated.
“A dead man.” I draw a line across my throat, wiggle my fingers in the air. “Ghost.”
This time she nods. “The dead, they stay with us. But I do not hear your ghost. Maybe mine, eh?”
People used to flock here for this sunshine, this view, this experience. A cobblestone path stretches from the museum’s steps all the way to the famed ruins, interrupted in places to accommodate sapling laurels. The museum is a geometric hillock rising from the path in a seamless transition of color and stone. Someone planned carefully, matching the colors of the new to the centuries old. I can’t see what remains of ancient Delphi from this angle, but there’s a quiet energy that hums through the trees. There are ghosts here, spirits of the dead who walk these paths like death was an inconvenient stepping-stone on their way back to right here, right now.
I’m not convinced and I’m sure she’s not, either, by the uncomfortable way she raises her hand to her face and gingerly scrapes a nail across the mangled flesh.
“Does it hurt?”
She smiles with one side and shrugs with the same. “Eh, a little.”
My hatred for Pope flares anew before fading to a dull contempt: what havoc he wreaked on the world because of his selfish desires.
“Do you have a family?”
“My family is here.” She waves a hand toward the disappearing path.
“Children?”
“I am the child.”
Grief shivs my heart, but it’s dry of tears. “You’re lucky.”
“Perhaps.”
The cryptic word accompanies an equally impossible-to-decipher half smile. Who is this woman? I ask her and so we swap names the way people in polite society do, then we go back to staring, both of us fixated on the same stretch of cobblestone, both of us seeing something completely different, neither of us having shared a thing about ourselves beyond an arbitrary title.
Abomination.
Aren’t we all now?
Morris leaps from her seat. “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong?”
My cold, clammy hand slips and slides against the door’s slick painted jamb. “Don’t come near me. I’m sick.”
Fear blossoms in her dark eyes, shrinks as her face softens into concern, twists as anger rages in. She snatches up the clipboard on her desk, hurls it at the wall. Two broken pieces clatter on the floor.
“Fuck.”
“It’s okay,” I reassure her, like she’s the one who’s sick. But it’s always like this, isn’t it? The terminally ill assuring their loved ones that everything will be just fine if everyone thinks positive and wears a smile. Nothing holds death at bay like a rainbow over the river Styx.
“It’s not okay. It’s so not okay. It’s not even on the same planet as okay.”
“I have to leave. I can’t let it spread.”
“No,” she says. “You have to stay. Besides, if we haven’t caught it by now, we’re immune.”
