Echo

I use my voice. I use it like a shield from the hungry old man. I speak endlessly to his wife who delights at my stories. And so her husband does not bother to seduce me. She sits close to me and lets me speak directly to her. She wraps my voice around her like a shaw on an autumn night. We spend hours talking until her husband is fast asleep. He finds other ways to keep busy. The young fair-skinned villagers didn’t stand a chance against his magic. They never saw it coming. They have no shields, and despite their fevered protests, he takes them all. They are like branches on a tree where the flowers have yet to bud. And he snaps them and whips them through the air. He brandishes those girls, and when he’s done they are kindling. They warm the room where I sit with his wife.

We perched that way forever it seemed.  She was enthralled.  I told her stories of magic and monsters and the magnificent mountain where the gods lived.  She would close her eyes and let my voice be her eyes.  She imagined all of the enchanting things I said to her.  I created a universe for my mistress, and she was too blind to see what was happening. Some nights she wouldn’t open her eyes even after I was finished. Even after I stood up to slip off the bed. She found her way to her chambers like a blind woman.

One morning I woke and I could feel a trembling dryness in my throat. When I went to speak, there was nothing but sand. I was terrified.  How could I avoid her husband’s rolled up fists? How could I escape the fate of all the other village girls?  I was terrified.

When she awakened and had her eggs and toast, she eagerly rapped on the door to the samll room where I slept. I opened the door slowly, but she rushed in.  She told me she dreamt of Zues battling his way out of Cronos’ belly,  She wanted more.”I need to turn this horrid home into a canvas painted with your whispering world.

I spoke.  Words were heavy gravel in my throat.  I had lost my voice. I tried to enchant the woman, but she could not stand to hear my voice so broken and so dry. I tried to listen for her husband’s heavy steps upstairs, but the silent house told me that he was up with the sun, searching for twigs and branches. 

The woman turned away from me only to see her husband coming in with another bundle of young girls.. She recognized one of them…a girl who went to school with her son. She was enraged. She looked at me with her hollow wet eyes because she had deduced that I had been nothing but a distraction. My stories would be a cover for her husband’s terrible hunting. I was a tool to clog her ears while her husband trapsed the woods with his fever. She looked at me so hurt and betrayed, but her expression of all this was to grab me by my long unwashed hair and drag me to the door that still stood open since her husband’s hands were full. She banished me from her home. She would no longer hear my stories.

No one would ever hear my stories if my voice still escaped from me.

Now I was homeless.I was alone. Unseen. All I could do was sit and listen to the people in the streets. I could no longer speak, and so I craved the voices of others. I sat under trees, straining to hear the banal, the treacherous, the private, the gossip that swirled around the tiny corner of the universe where I was now an immigrant.  

I would try to repeat their stories to myself even with my broken voice so that maybe one day the woman would take me back and let me sing stories in her ears again. I know her husband ignored me for his bundles because I was the perfect cover for his foul deeds, but the truth was that I enjoyed telling her my stories.  I enjoyed my voice.  I enjoyed the coziness of our relationship. I missed our tea with our feet so close to the fire. 

Over months and years since I had been tossed from her home, I could feel my voice almost completely disappear. Repeating other people’s stories had worn me out without the reward of an audience. I was unraveling. I aged hard.  My spine twisted into a gnarled shepherd’s staff. My skin was fallow, and my mouth curled into itself. 

Into the woods I went hoping that maybe the old man would break me off at the trunk and send me to hell, but he did not see me. And if he could, he would have taken me for a withered old crone, not the young girl whom he lusted for but was not so foolish as to destroy the unfolded wall that kept his wife dark and blind. 

My breath was wasted. I saw a bird that was perched at the edge of a lake. It stared into the water where its reflection was the second most beautiful thing. I approached the bird, but it was scared of my withered arms and legs and sunken chest. The bird looked up at me and made an awful noise which I could not resist but to repeat. It hurt my throat. My echo scared the bird. 

So this is what it came to? Repeating the snubbings of a beautiful bird? It hopped so gently and so quickly so that it was on the other side of the lake with its back to me. I was finally dead. I fell to my hands and knees and then tumbled to the ground where my head hit a rock that cut my skin. The blood that I saw spilled onto the ground looked like the red feathers of the bird, and I thought about everything that I had lost. It was the end. It was my end. How dare this bird reject me? Who was he to turn his back on me just so that he could stare uninterrupted into himself?

I picked up the rock and I took careful aim. I launched it at the bird. Well, he was so busy with his reflection that he did not hear or see the rock hurtling through the wooded air. When it hit him in the back, he lost his footing and fell into the lake. The blow had dazed him and he was unable to tell up from down. He sank and sank, faster than the rock, down into the lake that had once been such a comfort to him. I never did see or hear that beautiful bird again. And when I looked out past the lake, I saw a field of flowers. I turned my guilt into those flowers and every time I would see them again I would be happy to repeat the bird’s last words, “Oh me, oh my, I’m killed. I’m dead.” I would echo those words again and again and warble them to any foolish ear that would listen.