Ariadne, in the Labyrinth of Her Own Making

Her shadow stretches, liquid, curling until it covers her entirely. Marble walls breathe against her skin. Somewhere the Minotaur sleeps, its breath a tide she mistook for love. Beauty paper-thin, paint flaking from the statue’s face, despair wrapped in gold leaf, thread red and wet, pulling her back toward the center. Each return finds her more broken, smiling at the bruise-makers as if their hands could give her worth, laying herself in strangers’ beds as an offering to the god of absence. She has forgotten how hands should fit, how one body accepts another. Always hard to hold. The sea’s mouth opens and closes. A black sail cuts the horizon. Salt rasps her throat and still she calls until bright lights flatten her into shadow. Gleaming, her mind becomes a maze no one will enter twice. Heavy horns scraping the walls. She kills the angel again and again and again, the pet, the friend, her parents’ last hope, until she is only lingering in broken memory, forever held by arms that have already let her go. The labyrinth closes, the Minotaur wakes.

Blood will not forget the thread burning through her palm, the air sick with salt wine and ivy.

Clytemnestra, in the Bed of Knives

She carried the knife like a bridal veil, like a sheet spread across the bed, like a throat pulled open to speak. The house reeked of sacrifice, of daughters bound, of ships set sailing on her blood. He returned – her husband, her king, the one who slit his child’s throat for the favor of winds. She welcomed him, unbraided her rage, let him step into the bath where the steam rose like ghosts, where the walls closed like ribs. The blade fell once, twice, and again, cutting into flesh that had feasted too long on her silence. His heart burst like a fruit, seed spilling, ribs collapsing into water. She wiped the knife across her breast, across her womb, across the memory of the child he offered to the sky. She lay beside him in the bed, bodies tangled, blood still warm, silence finally hers.

Blood will not forget knife pressed into steam, the bridal sheets red with blood.