She might have stayed rooted to the spot if Jupiter had not happened to notice her. The father god had recovered from his disappointment as soon as another maiden had caught his fancy. But he remembered his annoyance when he saw how delighted Alephestra was with the world. He dispatched Mercury to show her the worst that the earthly realm had to offer.
Mercury saw how Alephestra admired a virgin forest, so he took her to the hills around a city where men were cutting the last trees. Alephestra knelt beside a broken stump in awe of the fresh wood’s color and smell. The messenger showed her war. She was fascinated by the scarlet wounds and the smell of flesh. He opened graves for her, and she sighed with pleasure to see corruption and the feast of worms. The world of mortals was not at all what she had expected, but everything about it amazed her. Mercury showed her everything that was base. Nothing displeased her. When he had run out of ideas, Mercury returned to tell the father god of the little moon’s ceaseless fascination. On her own Alephestra continued to walk the world, astonished by the shimmer of moonlight on a river, the sound of wind blowing over dunes, the smell of smoke, of mildew, of blossoms. She sampled the taste of dew, of copper, of ashes. She kept moving. When Mercury returned with orders to restore her to her place in the sky, he could not find her.
She never was returned to her place in the heavens. She moved from one delight to another, never lingering. Astonished, then gone.
When we gaze into the red depths of a canyon or across an expanse of rusting steel, she sees the same blade of tender grass that we see. She may be watching the smoke curl from a cigarette or listening as a key rasps in the lock. Where white blossoms open or a poisoned animal lies down to die, her sighs mingle with the breeze. She is always here. She is always already gone.
Periwinkles
“HERE’S A PARABLE.”
“Tell me a riddle instead. Your parables never make sense.”
“They do if you listen carefully not just to what I say but to what I don’t say.”
“That’s a poor excuse. What is this parable about?”
“Good and evil.”
“All right, I’ll listen.”
“Once there was a man who was good. And when he died—”
“Wait a minute! What do you mean by good? Was he pious?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then how was he good? What was his moral foundation?”
“His goodness might have had a philosophical basis rather than a religious one.”
“What did he do that was good?”
“He was generous. Where he saw people in need, he gave what he could afford.”
“Ha! I know people who give nothing at all because they believe they can’t afford it.”
“Well, he also forgave injuries when it was reasonable to forgive them.”
“So turn the other cheek, but only when it’s reasonable.”
“If a stranger is stabbing your child, do you say at once, ‘I forgive you’? Do you offer up your other child?”
“Of course not!”
“Goodness isn’t simple. But he was good. When he died, he happened to die alone in a forest.”
“Wait. If he was good, why didn’t he die in the company of those who loved him?”
“It didn’t happen that way. He died alone beneath a tree, and his body lay undiscovered.”
“They would have looked for him.”
“They didn’t find him. Fallen leaves hid his remains. Moth and maggot transformed his clothes into soil. Mice gnawed at his skeleton. In time, periwinkles sprouted. From the earth that had once been this good man there arose a hundred blue flowers.”
“A traveler would come across that place and feel at peace.”
“Perhaps. Now at about the same time there was a man who was evil, and when he died—”
“Evil how?”
“The opposite of the first.”
“Greedy.”
“Yes.”
“But evil. I suppose he might have been a rapist.”
“Whose parable is this?”
“I want specifics.”
“He was evil. And he happened to die alone in a forest.”
“The same forest?”
“Yes.”
“How did he die? Was he stoned to death?”
“Alone, I said.”
“He should have been executed.”
“It didn’t happen that way. He died alone and his body lay undiscovered.”
“You can bet that no one went looking for him.”
“The worst tyrants have their admirers. In any case, no one found him. In time the earth reclaimed him. Periwinkles sprouted.”
“Not periwinkles. It should be thistles.”
“It wasn’t. It was periwinkles again.”
“This place wouldn’t feel the same though. A traveler would come across this carpet of flowers and feel foreboding.”
“He might. Or he might feel at peace.”
“But it shouldn’t be the same flowers, the same mood in both places!”
“Can you stand over a grave and know the character of the stranger whose name is on the stone?”
“Of course not. But this is a parable! It’s supposed to illustrate something.”
“It does.”
Sea Anemones
IN A LITTLE CHURCH BY the sea, long after the old gods had begun to sleep, there was a preacher of the Christian gospel who earnestly worried for the souls of his congregants. He wanted every one of them to one day arrive safe in the Father God’s heaven, so he harangued and exhorted them about all the temptations that might lead them astray. He was particularly worried about the sorts of love and lust that Father God had condemned.
He had a strong voice and chose his words well. His predecessor, though no less earnest, had been a stoop-shouldered, colorless little man. For listeners in the last pews, this previous preacher’s drone from the pulpit was sometimes lost in the sound of waves crashing against the rocky shore. Old people dozed. So did some who were not so old.
This current preacher, though, belted out his verses and his warnings loud enough to wake any sleeper. “Men,” he cried, “can you imagine lying with another man, receiving him as you would have your wives receive you? Women, can you imagine kissing and embracing another woman as you would your husband?” There were other kinds of love prohibited by the Father God, but the preacher often dwelt on these particular sins, his voice thick with a disgust that his listeners could not help but feel themselves. No, they could not, dared not imagine the sort of passion that the Father God had prohibited. “Unnatural acts. Ungodly, and unnatural acts!”
These words, carried on a thunderous voice, vibrated in the ear of Cupid, who woke from that slumber that the old gods had been sleeping these many centuries. The son of Venus felt provoked by what he heard.
As Apollo learned long ago, it is dangerous to provoke Cupid. The sun god, boasting about the sky python he had killed with an arrow, said that it was the shoulder that made the archer. He compared his massive arms to Cupid’s and concluded that while Cupid might carry a bow, it was but a toy compared to the charioteer’s. Cupid replied that a hunter is known by his prey, and that if he felled Apollo, didn’t that make him the greater archer? He sent a golden arrow into Apollo’s heart and a leaden one into the daughter of Peneus. Apollo could think of nothing else but this girl who suddenly despised all thoughts of men or marriage, and he never did win her.
Not only slander, but subtler things might provoke Cupid. He felt irked by his mother’s constant demands. “Shoot Neptune, my son! Let’s rouse the cool sea god to feverish passion. Oh, there’s Ceres, trying to keep her tasty daughter a virgin forever. Put an arrow into Pluto, my boy, and show that even Mister Gloom can’t resist us.” She picked mortal targets for him, too, as if she forgot whose arrows these were. So one day when she embraced him fondly, as a mother will do, he let a golden arrow graze her breast. A mere scratch, he gave her. She did not even notice the injury, but she did noti
ce the mortal Adonis, a hunter. They made an unlikely pair, for Venus thought that traipsing through the woods and stabbing animals was the sort of work best left to servants or cold-hearted Diana, who never cared how she looked before men, anyway, with her troupe of girls who admired the huntress for her skill and wit more than her beauty. But Venus! Hunting! She would never have imagined herself doing anything of the sort.
That was a sight, then, the goddess of love in her filmy gowns getting twigs in her hair and dirt on her sandaled feet, following Adonis from one bloody scene to another.
So Cupid went to this church by the sea, offended. He would shoot where he pleased, and how dare any mortal express such disgust at some of the results? He sat in the rafters, rubbing centuries of sleep from his eyes, and listened. When the preacher said again, “Just imagine…” Cupid smiled.
His arrows never were his only weapon, merely the most selective. Cupid’s quiver also held stoppered bottles, and one of these he uncorked to pour a golden mist over the congregation. For the first time, in all the times the preacher had said, “Just imagine,” they could. “Just imagine, men, accepting another man as your lover.” And the men imagined their hearts full of longing for another man. “Women, just imagine that you would have another woman standing in the place where God has given you your husbands.” And the women imagined their lips burning for another woman’s kiss.
As the mist was not selective, neither was its effect. The men felt the lure of no particular man; the women lusted for no particular woman. The embraces they imagined were general, universal, and joyous. Even the preacher felt the effect of the mist, though it reached him last. He paused, thinking a pleasant thought about his hand closing tenderly around…
But, no, he would fight this thought. This was wrong, and he would summon the will to be disgusted, though there was a fire in his blood now. The congregation sat stiff, in more ways than one, not daring to move, willing themselves to stop thinking what they could not cease to think.
These were pious people. They had been schooled all their lives to revile the sin of indiscriminate love. Their mortal souls were at stake.
Cupid didn’t care. He poured it on, unstopping another vial of his funky mist, and then another. What the congregation began to feel was beyond sin, as everything in that spare sanctuary seemed to undulate and wink and promise. The wood grain of the pulpit swirled and twined with breathtaking beauty. The virginal white walls seemed made for caressing. The hard pews pressed so lovingly against back and buttocks that one woman groaned aloud with pleasure.
With that groan went the last of their resistance, except for one tiny gasp from the preacher and his one word, “No.” Then they were all gazing in rapture at the room around them, at each other. They tasted the perfume of ordinary air, wanted to embrace the earth itself. They felt the tender caresses of their clothes for the first time, the erotic whisper of cloth against their skin.
They might have fallen upon one another, men on women on women on men on men, but the desire they felt was not merely for each other, but for everything. A breath coming in was a lover arriving. A breath going out was a lover’s momentary, aching departure.
They spilled out of the church, wanting the rough or smooth bark of the trees, the bright lovesong of birds, the sensations of grass and sky and sand. They wanted everything all at once, and could not choose among their many lovers until someone, it may even have been the preacher himself, said, “The sea!”
The sea was a lover that would embrace each body everywhere at once. The sea was a lover vast enough to receive them. They ran, hearts pounding with lust and joy. Across the tide pools they ran, scattering seagulls that they loved, glimpsing starfish that they loved, thinking tenderly of the limpet’s embrace of the thoroughly embraceable rocks, but not pausing for any of these. They ran, feet splashing into the sea.
Some fell and cut their hands and knees on the jagged barnacles that they loved. They got up. They kept going, wading out to let the sea embrace their knees, to soak through their clothes to their loins, to accept them up to their chests, their shoulders, their ears. They tasted the salt of this lover who could be, for a moment at least, all lovers. Their mouths filled with the sea’s kisses.
Cupid would have let them drown.
Their splashing and tasting, the thrusting of their hips in the water, their answering undulations to the waves…all of this roused Neptune. Is it any wonder? Who would not be roused from sleep by that?
The sea god looked into their hearts and saw what they wanted. He touched them with his weedy fingers, and their feet held firm to the sea floor. They shrank beneath the waves, softening, yielding, their mouths puckering for a kiss. With another touch, Neptune removed from them any memory of what they had been before, male or female, and made each a bit of both.
They are there to this day, clinging to the bottom of the sea, loving the water, loving the rocks beneath them, loving the fish that they hug with their tentacles in an embrace that ends with digestion, for they kept the aching effects of Cupid’s spell. No one but the archer himself can undo that.
Desire is always with them. It overcomes them on nights of the full moon when the water grows cloudy with their sperm and starry with their eggs.
Gold
“HERE’S ANOTHER PARABLE.”
“Wait. Before you go on, I want you to say what this story is going to be about.”
“You should listen first and then decide.”
“Are you afraid of speaking plainly?”
“I tell these stories as plainly as you will allow. Now, there was a man who was always in pain.”
“Why? What ailed him?”
“He had a crooked back, let’s say.”
“Was he born that way?”
“Possibly. I think so. Yes.”
“It sounds as if you’re making this up as you go along.”
“I make stories as I make my life.”
“So life is like a story. That’s what you’re saying.”
“No. What I’m saying is that there was a man who was always in pain. And he endured. No man, woman, or child ever heard him complain.”
“Does that mean he never complained?”
“It means what I said.”
“So who does that leave? He might have muttered when no one could hear him. He might have complained to God. What was the man’s religion?”
“That’s not part of the story.”
“It would be if I were telling it. And if this man never complained, how did anyone know that he was in pain?”
“I didn’t say yet that anyone knew of it. But they did. They could see it in his eyes. Sometimes in his sleep, he groaned.”
“Ha! That’s a sort of complaint!”
“In his sleep, I said. The thing that pained him most in his waking hours was labor.”
“What kind of work?”
“He was a wood cutter.”
“Not very suitable work for a man with a crooked back if you ask me.”
“It was the path open to him. He provided for his wife, his son, and his daughter.”
“If he had complained some, they might have been more help to him.”
“It was a hard enough life for all of them. They already helped as they could.”
“But he was in pain. He should have said so.”
“Suppose someone gives you a gift and then complains of what it cost.”
“I see. That’s the clearest you have ever been. Thank you.”
“Now when the man died, the family dug a grave for him and tried to carry him to it. He was too heavy.”
“You should have said at the beginning that he was a big man.”
“He wasn’t. He had grown very heavy in death. The son gathered distant neighbors, and six men staggered beneath the weight of the corpse. Before they reached the graveside, they dropped him. His back broke open like a purse, and out spilled what might have been nuggets of gold.”
“Gold. How would people so poor know
gold when they saw it?”
“It might have been gold. It shone. It was heavy.”
“So they were rich?”
“The son insisted that the gold, if gold it was, must be buried with his father. And this was done.”
“If these people were so poor, they wouldn’t act that way around gold. Didn’t someone pocket a nugget or two?”
“The family was grieving. The neighbors didn’t dare.”
“This was their big chance! They sound like idiots.”
“Later, some thieves heard the story and tried to rob the grave. They found no gold, nor even bones.”
“So they were digging in the wrong spot.”
“The family went on as before. The son took his father’s place. In their modest way, they prospered.”
“Aha! So they had dug up the gold!”
“I mean only that the daughter married, that the son found a wife and cared for his mother in her old age. They were never anything but poor.”
“Maybe it wasn’t gold, then.”
“Perhaps not.”
Rag Monster
LET’S NOT BOTHER WITH THE details of how she started saving scraps of cloth. It might have been that she was poor and such scraps were the only thing at the orphanage that she could call her own. It might have been that she was wealthy and began saving scraps of cloth when, as a student at an elite private college, she had stained a favorite dress with Cabernet and had cut out squares of material before she threw the rest away. It doesn’t matter exactly who she was or how she began.
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