Stones in the Swamp - Part III
Before plunging ahead, catch up on parts I & II, where Medusa slithers deeper into D.C.’s underbelly.
Of Blood & Stone
“What do you mean stay inside?” I ask.
“You promised me you wouldn’t hunt alone,” Stheno says. “You could have died.”
“Been there, done that. I can’t stay cooped up in this apartment and hope everything will fix itself. Euryale needs our help. She’s out there somewhere, alone.” I point to the snakeskin laid out on our dining room table. The one gifted by the owl. Athena’s symbol.
“She’s also immortal.”
“That doesn’t mean she isn’t hurt or in pain.”
“You think I don’t know that? I’m just trying to—”
“I know,” I say, “You’re so good at trying.”
“I’m protecting you!” she hisses. “We have to start looking out for each other more. I already thought I lost you once when Perseus decapitated you. I’m not going to lose you again. This is a different world Athena brought you back to, and it’s dangerous for creatures like us.”
It is strange to hear Stheno be so cautious. When we were younger, back when our bodies were covered with scales like dragons, our teeth equipped with tusks like swine, and we flashed beautiful, golden wings by which we flew, she was the most ferocious of us three Gorgon sisters. The quickest to murder.
Now, she has a hunted air about her.
“I need to consult one of the local underground priestesses on the matter,” she says. “We must be careful if this is a sign from Athena.”
“Fine. But I’m going with you.”
“No, you aren’t. Not with your track record with the gods. Besides, I need you in prime form when I get back.”
I relent. Only because my bloated body agrees, even though I loathe to admit my sister is right. So, I wait. And for a while, when I open any dating apps, the whole thing feels unhappy to me anyway. The more smiles I see in profile pictures, the more disappointed I feel. None of these men would be as fulfilling as finding Euryale. Not even another Daniel.
But when Stheno doesn’t return within a week, I grow listless, unsure of what I am supposed to do when I am not hunting, when I am not objectifying people. Since Euryale’s disappearance, neither Stheno nor I have turned the television off. And since Stheno has left, I see no reason to break from tradition. Honestly, it is nice to have the moving images fill up the empty apartment. Nice to pretend someone else is home to watch them.
I recall my last conversation with Euryale as I gaze out of the apartment window like some sort of domesticated hunter.
“Why don’t you turn on the sound?” I asked her. Before Stheno picked up the mantle, Euryale would always watch the news on mute, skimming to ensure the city was not growing suspicious of our hunting.
“There’s enough sound in this city, buzzing all around us constantly. No, in this apartment, I will have my moment’s peace,” she said as if all she wanted, all she had ever wanted, was to live unbothered in a dark, deep cave.
“There are other places to live, you know. Places not overrun with humans.”
“Are there?” Euryale asked. “You’ll soon learn that much has changed over the past couple of millennia, dear sister. This place is overrun with humans. We’re all sacrificing something to get by in this version of the world.”
One day later, Euryale disappeared.
With my sisters gone and the fast approaching season of prolonged slumber and slow blood, I know something is wrong. The last time I was alive, we always spent brumation together. At first, I rationalize that Stheno is avoiding the apartment, avoiding me. Truth be told, this isn’t the old days anymore when we pushed our squamate heads together, hissing happily before sharing a final stare. A certain kind of distance has settled between us. We have spent more years apart than together, more strangers than sisters.
But we always check in with one another, I remind myself, as Stheno revels in telling me that I look haggard and that I need to eat. What I desire and what my body desire are two different things, and I frequently forget to nourish my form properly. I have grown used to numbness from my time in the Underworld, thus, adjusting to life above ground and its accompanying orifice management and sensations is challenging. Since returning to this plane, Stheno has never missed those opportunities to harangue me. Put me in my place. If anything, the last thing she wants is for me to think too highly of myself. My name, after all, does mean “queen.”
I pace the apartment, wondering what to do next, hoping for another portend. My girls jerk their heads at all the heat signatures on the neighborhood streets, frequent and close humans there just for the turning. I wonder how the little snacks taste, but I wonder even more if they have seen my sisters.
It isn’t until I make my fifth loop through the room that I realize the sign is right in front of me. I unmute a breaking story unfolding on the television about a strange home invasion. When the cops arrived for this 911 call, they only found a shattered window and a statue in front of the target’s house. Some professor at Georgetown. Intriguingly, the chiseled figure, with a gun sculpted into its grasp, resembles an elusive burglar notorious for a spree of recent break-ins.
“That’s definitely Stheno,” I say to my girls as they show the sculpture. They zealously hiss in agreement. Whereas I prefer granite or limestone, Stheno always casts humans in marble.
Part of the block is cautioned off by the time I find the house. A stately, narrow thing, nestled in a row of similarly renovated homes. They all have colored bricks and short ironwork gates that lead past tiny plots of grass, right on up to a stoop of steps.
If Stheno has left a sign of her plan, I will not be able to find it with the buzz of police, neighbors, and reporters spilling out onto the sidewalk. But I do feel her nearby. Euryale too. I swear they lay around me, the way people say of a ring or a bracelet that’s floated off them while swimming: it’s down there somewhere. I loop around the block and the next one over as well. I creep down alleyways, stalk strangers, and peer into cars. Nothing. Neither of my sisters is anywhere to be found, yet I sense them nearby.
After a while, even that feeling vanishes, and some piece of me wonders if this is all a cruel joke that the two of them are playing at my expense. In years past, we used to be a tighter-knit hunting trio, but ever since my return, things have been different among us three. Perhaps things have always been different, and I only realize that now. After all, Stheno and Euryale were born immortal. Eventually, only I will return to the Underworld. And how can I be around my sisters without feeling a little bit of envy that they have always had one another? And they always will. They will never understand that mortal life is a series of extinction points, scarcely avoided.
I walk back to the Farragut West Metro, and some idiot is standing on the left side of the escalator that churns people down to the platforms. I don’t have the desire to turn him, something I would have deliciously done before. He is spared my gaze only to be targeted and schooled into submission by another local: Stand on the right, walk on the left!
People filter in and out of the vaulted-ceiling station with recessed squares that remind me of the waffles Stheno eats, only these are made of concrete. Gazing at those panels, I could not have felt more alone if the station had been empty.
Getting on the orange line, which goes back and forth from Virginia, through the District, and finally on up to Maryland, I see a woman with two snakes in her hair already seated in the train car. The serpents are hidden under a faded Washington Nationals cap, but snakes have a particular heat signature instantly recognizable to us Gorgons. They look like coils colored in purples, dark blues, and even black, emitting much less heat than the yellow hues I detect on humans.
Awkwardly, I position myself across from the woman, whose listless face looks older from further away and belies her youth up close. She is just worn out.
Tired.
“Long day?” I ask.
“I don’t have any money, lady,” she quickly says and turns away from me, probably thinking of me as one of the homeless people who frequent the metro, sometimes shouting strange things—often obscenities—at riders. They always go first for those that make eye contact.
“I know what you need,” I say softly.
Her eyes snap alive. “You don’t know anything about me.”
Before I can say anything else, she hustles out at the next stop just before the doors close, her thin and wilting body like a flower pressed between pages…
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