Minotaur

by J. A. Rock

  Rollins glanced up. “Tamna is married. She lives in town with her husband.”

  This, for some reason, hit me as hard as the news of Denson’s death. I could not banish the memory of Tamna grabbing fistfuls of her skirt that day in the kitchen, moaning and lost somewhere. And then I thought of weddings and of kicked turkeys, and I considered visiting my sister.

  I did visit her, but I waited a couple of weeks. The visit with Rachel was more satisfying than my trip to Rock Point. She praised me over and over for my bravery and said she always knew I was courageous. Seeing Marc was odd—I was neither angry nor afraid. He opened a bottle of wine and asked me questions about the labyrinth, which I hated, because I had to edit so much of the story for the sake of my own modesty. Had to leave out kisses and phantoms. And that was when I realized I was the one who would keep the truth locked away. I would tell the story, and I would censor it, and soon people would be telling one another the easiest version.

  There must have been so much more to the legend of the Minotaur than a cast-off daughter and her doomed child. More than a curse, more than a contest, more than a wooden bull. And yet if a girl is going to whisper that story to you while you pick apart clovers, it needs to be simple and it needs to be gruesome.

  Alle had no family to visit, so she took to seeing Kenna regularly. They became closer in that first year after the labyrinth than they ever had been at Rock Point. I sometimes went along on these visits.

  “Do you remember . . .?” Kenna asked us last time, her voice brittle, whirring, liked a dead leaf caught in the windshield of a moving car. She was propped at the table in her small, dirty kitchen, a shabby nurse named Mr. Himbrel cleaning a plate at the sink. “That time I was turned into a doll?” She chuckled. “I was all stitched together.”

  Neither Alle nor I knew what to say.

  Kenna laughed again, and it sounded like she was guzzling lint, but it was a tremendous thing to see her smile. To remember that at Rock Point, she had smiled at cruelties, yes, but also at Christmas.

  When I think now of the friends I have lost, when I think of what loneliness means, I feel like a fraud. Asteria told me that there is no loneliness so long as one has eyes. But I sometimes think it is what I see that makes me loneliest of all. Like shopping for clothes in a high-end store and finding everything you pull off the rack well beyond what you can afford—life seems a display of things that are yours to crave and dream on, but not to wrap yourself in.

  This is all so maudlin, compared to what I thought when I was eighteen. My feelings then were mostly variations on rage. Everybody, it seemed, was a bullring clown, jabbing me, inciting me, and I charged until I was weak. I learned things in the labyrinth, yet I have remained much the same—a selfish girl with an open heart people toss spare change into like a beggar’s hat. Epiphanies do not make me a better person. Seeing the light does not mean I will turn toward it. I can learn things in the whole maze and mess of myself and still make the most foolish choices.

  Three months after my visit to Rock Point, I collected my inheritance. Alle and I moved into the cottage in Rock Hill, the cottage Denson had meant to share with her daughter, and we lived there and clung to each other fiercely, and we grew up.

  The ball was loud. I wanted to leave at once, but I remembered my promise. One hour. I walked up a set of wide steps and between two fluted pillars and stepped into the grand hallway. Like most of Rock Hill, it was of an understated grandness. Blocky and open, with murals on the ceiling of trumpeting centaurs and thick-cheeked suns and moons. A long banquet table was loaded with food, and the mayor took my elbow as soon as he saw me and escorted me through the room. Introduced me to people who faded at once from my mind. Went on and on about the goose.

  I stared at the goose as I loaded my plate with grapes, and I thought about kicking it.

  An older man with combed-back silver hair approached me. He gripped his lapel with one hand. “May I have this dance?” He made a kissy noise.

  I didn’t turn away. I stared into his gray eyes in their slumping sockets. “No,” I told him. “Not for anything in this world.”

  One thing I’ve found as I grow older is that untidiness has become distasteful to me. It used to be that anything raw and bad and filthy was exciting. Now I simply turn away, as though if I refuse to look at the world’s ugliness, it doesn't exist. Or at least I can shield myself from it, like wearing rubber gloves or staying indoors. I miss the girl who stepped into the labyrinth. I miss the fool who welcomed brutality.

  I search for her night after night, and sometimes I find her. I find her when Alle and I are together, when our legs are tangled, our fists in each other’s hair, when I know she is more than a story. She has, over the years, unraveled her mysteries slowly. Trusted me with some of her secrets. She has told me about her experience in the labyrinth. She says she stood at the entrance for hours unspooling the thread. Occasionally she saw shadows, heard strange sounds. She could not always tell whether she was awake or asleep. When she felt the thread was no longer attached to me, she became frightened.

  And then Aaron McInroe came to her. She followed him through the labyrinth, but always he was just out of reach. As she searched for her phantom, she realized there was only one way out, only one thing that mattered: to find me, if I still lived, and help me. It was her sacrifice that saved us both.

  I still worry sometimes that I love an idea of her. That I’ll never get far enough under her skin to satisfy my curiosity. But the truth grows upward from the seed of a fantasy. It is the magic beanstalk, towering madly and impossibly, so brilliant and absurd that it shields the listener from the knowledge that this is not a tale of magic but of greed. The truth is right there, tall and ugly but wrapped in enchantment.

  Our story is very simple.

  A girl who was scared loved one who was brave. A girl fool enough to try to play hero saw the underlying hornlessness of monsters. And in a sweet shock of ruin, two women found forgiveness, and they held each other in the wreckage left by one for whom forgiveness meant nothing. That is a tale ornery in its rejection of heroes, in its changeable villain, in its unwillingness to yield to invention.

  Perhaps the broadest of all imaginations is the mind that truly sees what’s in front of it.

  There was a speech by the mayor, and a cavalcade of gowns in muted tones—even in the years since the Minotaur’s disappearance, Rock Hill has not lost its love of gray. I heard so much laughter that evening. So many people came up to me to express gratitude for my bravery. I was asked again and again where Allendara was. I began again to get that feeling I’d gotten as a child—that there were secrets waiting for me just out of sight, that the here and now was going to drive me toward danger if it didn’t stop being so dull and incomprehensible.

  I picked at a plate of hors d’oeuvres and watched a dance that made me dizzy. And finally, I set the plate at a statue’s stone feet and ran from the hall. I burst out the front entrance and down the steps and bolted toward the sea. I did not hear anyone calling after me. I arrived breathless at the hillside and stared down.

  A crash like a falling clock, booming across the cliffs and the sea. I might have found a home in that prison. Or perhaps I was destined to explore the wider world, to find ravaged, cast-off places. To carve a path through those rich and bleeding lands mugged for their gifts, then left alone.

  Instead I had a home in a town whose scars held it together like stitches. And I had someone to go home to. I sat on a cool patch of grass, and I watched the waves. I imagined commanding them, but was glad when I could not.

  “Thera?”

  I turned. Alle was walking toward me. The shock of seeing her gave way to gladness. She wore a dark-blue dress, and her hair was pinned up. She was not dressed for a ball, but she was tidy. I wished suddenly for another chance at our childhood. I would have taken her far beyond the gates of Rock Point. I would have looked out for her, and I would have healed her.

  She sat beside me, tugging her dres
s over her knees. We watched the sea together. “How’s the ball?” she asked.

  “Crowded.”

  “I’m sorry I let you face it alone. I’ve been sitting at home thinking how selfish I am. I just hate this so much. These celebrations.”

  I nuzzled her shoulder. “You’re not selfish.”

  “So you’re less than enchanted with the festivities?”

  “I just don’t . . .” I gestured behind us toward the hall, “understand any of this.”

  She kissed my cheek. “Would you like to escape?”

  “More than anything.”

  We stood and walked away from the glowing hall and its leaking music and drove home. We opened the door and stepped into the shadows of our cottage. I got myself a glass of water in the kitchen. She tilted her head at me. “Are you coming upstairs?”

  “In a moment.”

  She smiled. “Don’t be too long.”

  I wasn’t sure how long I stayed in the kitchen, sipping water and listening to the house rasp and groan. Eventually I went upstairs and shed my ill-fitting dress outside the bedroom.

  She was asleep, facing the door. One arm was draped over my pillow, and she was snoring softly. I crossed the room, careful of the creaking floorboards, and sat on the edge of the bed.

  We think we know beauty when we see it. In a woman’s face, in the curves of her body. In the sun sinking beyond the ocean or the flowers that pry themselves out of the softening ground each spring. But real beauty is a mystery. The minnows that dart away just before you glance into the shallows. The lightning that flashes in a desert somewhere across the world and destroys nothing—a victimless display of power. It’s whatever makes us wish for happiness, even as the world offers us tragedy upon tragedy. It’s not just in a woman’s face, but in what she touches and how. The way the air and earth respond to her. It is in her fear as well as her courage. Courage without fear is simply recklessness.

  I climbed under the covers, and as I did, Alle stirred and awoke. She rubbed the heel of her hand in circles on her forehead and yawned. “You’re still awake.” Her eyes drifted closed again.

  “I can’t sleep.” I leaned in and kissed her cheek.

  Her forehead furrowed slightly. She didn’t open her eyes. “I missed you,” she murmured, and tucked her head closer to my chest. After a moment her breathing deepened, and she was asleep once more. I shifted, cataloging the room’s shadows.

  “Violence starts as a discovery—of power, of ambition. Of a force that rests with its head against your heart.”

  I had, I hoped, chosen kindness over violence. Most of the time.

  I heard a sound like skittering in the walls, and at once I was fully alert, my heart pounding.

  This happens sometimes. I’m awakened by a persistent bird outside my window, singing out of tune. Or I’m in the kitchen and a mouse darts along the baseboard. I wonder if I am being haunted or watched over.

  The beast and I, we are still dreaming.

  Dear Reader,

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  Thanks to Del for being such a sharp, hilarious editor. And to my family and friends, for all the stories we’ve shared and for your continued love and support.

  Playing the Fool series, with Lisa Henry

  The Two Gentlemen of Altona

  The Merchant of Death

  Tempest

  With Lisa Henry

  When All the World Sleeps

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  The Naughty Boy (The Boy #1.5)

  The Boy Who Belonged (The Boy #2)

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  Brandon Mills Versus the V-Card (Prescott College #2)

  Another Man’s Treasure

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  By His Rules

  Wacky Wednesday (Wacky Wednesday #1)

  The Brat-tastic Jayk Parker (Wacky Wednesday #2)

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  Take the Long Way Home

  The Grand Ballast

  J.A. Rock is the author of queer romance and suspense novels, including By His Rules, Take the Long Way Home, and, with Lisa Henry, The Good Boy and When All the World Sleeps. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama and a BA in theater from Case Western Reserve University. J.A. also writes queer fiction and essays under the name Jill Smith. Raised in Ohio and West Virginia, she now lives in Chicago with her dog, Professor Anne Studebaker.

  Website: jarockauthor.com

  Blog: jarockauthor.blogspot.com

  Twitter: twitter.com/jarockauthor

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