Echo

My voice keeps me safe from the old man. He terrifies me, but I am in his home at his invitation. He arranged meetings with his wife. He had heard of my talent, and he wanted to keep his wife “happy and occupied.” She delights in my stories. I speak endlessly to her. That’s why her husband doesn’t bother me. I distract her so that he can do his foul business.

She sits close to me and lets me whisper my stories to her. We spend hours this way until her husband is fast asleep. His days are spent hunting. The young girls in the Achaea don’t stand a chance against his powers. They never see it coming. They have no shields against his flattery and his power. He takes all that he can carry. They are like branches on a tree where the flowers have yet to bud. And he snaps them from the trunk and whips them through the air. He brandishes those girls, uses them, and when he's done they are kindling. They warm the very room where I sit with his wife. I could be kindling if it wasn’t for my voice. And the stories. So many stories. I never stop talking.

I tell her stories of magic and monsters and the magnificent mountain where she and her husband live. I tell her the stories of the other gods. She knows the stories, but loves the way I wrap them around her ears. She closes her eyes and lets my voice lead her. She imagines all of the enchanting things I say to her. I create a universe for my mistress, and she is too blind to see what is happening with her husband. Some nights she doesn’t open her eyes until long after I am finished. Even after I stand up to slip off to my bed, she is still entranced.

In truth, she is more dangerous than her husband. She is Hera, queen of the gods. The world knows the power of her husband, Zeus. He exerts his authority as king. We have all seen what he can do. My stories often focus on her husband. Zeus is at the center of so much of Achaean life.

I sit here with the only talent I have, and she laughs or cries as I speak of her family. Her ancestors. She commands me to retell stories many times. She closes her eyes and my voice becomes the narrator in her head. She tells me that she hears my voice in her dreams. I feel helpless with her.

Yesterday, I told her the story of Cronus, the father of both Zeus and Hera. She was swallowed by Cronus along with the rest of his children with one exception: Zeus. Their mother, Rhea, wrapped a stone in swaddling and fed it to Cronus. He swallowed it as he had swallowed each of the other babies. The prophets had foretold that Cronus would be challenged and defeated by one of his children. Cronus would be a fool to defy the prophecy. He believed that there would be no curse on him if he ate each child as soon as it was born. Of course Zeus challenged and defeated his father and freed his siblings from the tyrant’s body.

“Tell it again! Please. Tell me again how my husband (my brother) saved me and our siblings! Also, don’t stop. Add more details about the gruesome way Zeus slit a hole from my father’s belly up to his neck. And the blood. Talk about the blood. Oh, my little storyteller, you delight me so!”

She is the god of marriage after all. I keep my mind clear when we are together, but alone at night in my chamber I think about the giant space between her and her husband. She gets drunk when I tell her the tales while her husband is busy seducing and using the young human virgins who worship him as the king of all gods.

I came to the realization that this was why she closed her eyes when I spoke. She gets lost in my stories because she does not want to “see” what is happening in her own home.

One morning I woke and I could feel a trembling dryness in my throat. When I went to speak, there was nothing but scratches. I couldn’t get my voice to go much farther than my lips. The words crumpled and fell flat. I was terrified. I had been so long away from my enchanted woods that I was beginning to lose my powers. As a nymph, we gain health from the woods, but I had been trapped on this mountain for so long that I was now ill and losing my powers. How could I please both Hera, who loved my stories, and her husband, who used my story telling to rape and murder the young girls of Achea? And which god would smite me the worst if I couldn’t give each one what they expected of me?

I drank warm water. It does no good. I ate a lemon. All that came out of me sounded like a bad cough. I couldn’t clear my throat. My voice had turned to a collection of inaudible grunts. Not even a whisper could come out.

“Wake up, story teller! I am eager to get started.” I wasn’t asleep. I usually use this time to practice my stories. I open the door slowly, but she rushes in, nearly knocking me down. She tells me she dreamt of Zeus battling their father. “So proud of him!” She wants more. “How did he eat so many of his children? Well, leave it to Zeus! Outsmarted our father, yes? And never forget the wits of a woman! So smart of Rhea to trick Cronus with something so simple as a rock!" She stares at me, her eyes fluttering. “I want to turn the insides of my head into a canvas! Paint me with your gorgeous voice.”

I speak. I try. My voice is heavy. I try to enchant the goddess, but she cannot stand to hear my voice so broken and so dry. “What’s wrong with you! Why do you sound so awful? Speak to me!”

My mistress turns away. “How dare you entice a god with your stories and voice only to make me feel like a fool for letting you drug me. Yes. Drug me. Your voice slipped inside of me so easily: like a tonic. Or a poison. Poison it is. But why, girl? What magic allowed you to deceive me? Me! Queen of the gods. Your queen! Why did you wrap me up so tightly that all I wanted to know was your voice pouring over me? I felt like a child again. I felt safe. Was I?”

“Safe? Of course my lady.” I don’t think she could hear me.

“Tell me your true motive. Steal my powers? Steal my husband! Why did you come here?”

“Your husband.” I can barely squeak the words. Again, I doubt she can understand me.

“Oh, you are a foolish girl. To lie to a goddess!” She laughs.

Just as she falls into a bitter laugh, the door opens. Her husband comes in with another bundle of tortured young girls. “Zeus” she says without taking her eyes off of me. “This useless nymph has made a fool of me and you! I ask you husband, burn her before I beat her to death myse–” At that moment, she looks up to see Zeus and his “treasure.” She recognizes one of them…a very young human girl who is friends with her sons, Ares and Hephaestus. Hera’s mouth fell. She looks at me with wet eyes. The pieces fell into place.“The whole time…you were a trick.” I look down at the ground. “I was so blind. I never should have shut my eyes to your awful stories!” She is right. I was a tool to clog her ears and cover eyes while her husband traipsed the woods with his fever.

She looks at me, hurt. Her lips quiver, and her eyes trail from me to her husband and back to me. Her face falls when she looks at him, but he is not just her husband and her brother, but he is also her king. He hurt her, but she knows that her pride would be no match for him. She turns back to me. Her expression changes to rage. She grabs me by my unwashed hair and drags me to the open door.

“I will restore your voice and curse it. As you live a long life, you will only have the power to repeat whatever any one has spoken to you. You will be seen as the fool you are. Never again will your stories…” she pauses to catch the tears from her eyes and throws them at me. They burn my skin. “Never again will you tell another soul, living or dead, one of your horrid stories.” And with that, a tornado springs up and rips me from her home. It flings me down the mountain and into a thorny patch of blackberries.

Her rejection of me is two-fold: I lost my mistress and benefactor, and I lost my voice. No one will ever hear my stories if I can’t speak. No one will recognize my talents if all I can do is simply repeat what they have just said to me. I am doomed.

****

That was months ago, and she was right. I am alone. Unseen. I sit and listen to the people in the streets, quietly repeating their words. When others hear me, my living curse sets them off with anger. They call me “mad” or a”fool.” They think I am mocking them.

“Have you no thoughts of your own, wicked nymph?" Have you no thoughts of your own, wicked nymph? I can no longer speak freely, I am bound to the prison that she built for me. I try to avoid others. I sit under trees, straining to hear the common, the treacherous, the angry, the gossip that swirls around the tiny corners of the universe. I try to hide in those voices around me. I lie to myself and place myself in their conversations. But only in my mind. I only mouth the words. I pretend that their voices are mine. But I am a copy. I will never tell my own stories. I am nothing.

I am an echo.

****

I try to repeat the stories of others to myself even with my broken voice so that maybe one day the goddess will take me back and lift this curse and let me murmur stories in her ears again. I know her husband once ignored me for his bundles because I distracted her from seeing his foul desires, but the truth was that I enjoyed telling her my stories. I enjoyed my voice. I enjoyed the coziness of our relationship. I miss our tea with our feet so close to the fire… regardless of what (or who) was burning.

Repeating other people’s stories wears me out without the reward of an audience. I am unraveling. I age hard. My spine twists like a gnarled shepherd's staff. My skin is yellow and my mouth curls into itself. It is dry. I can barely move my lips, much less tell stories.

****

One day on a hunting spree, her husband looks me right in the eyes. He passes me. I no longer need protection from him. I wish he had taken me. To be mute was worse than death. Worse than losing my bloom.

****

One summer afternoon after years of living my nightmare, I see a bird perching at the edge of a lake. He stares into the water as if his reflection is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. I approach the bird, but I scare it with my withered arms and legs. The bird looks up at me and makes an awful noise which I can not resist but to repeat. It hurt my throat, but at least I have found a creature that sounds just as harsh as I. My voice scares the bird as if he didn’t know that he made the same sound. A bird’s voice. I was an answer to his screech.

So this is how it ends? Repeating the sounds of a bird?

It hops so that it is on the other side of the lake with its back to me. I stretch my neck to hear it, but I fall to my hands and knees. I tumble to the ground where my head hits a rock that cuts my skin. I stare at the blood on the rock, and I think about everything that I have lost. I think about the rock that Rhea wrapped in a blanket to fool her frightened husband. It is the end. It is my end. How dare this bird reject me? A bird? I thought, I am still a woodland nymph. Birds should still show me respect. Who is he to turn his back on me just so that he can stare at himself?

I pick up the rock that cut me, and I take careful aim. I launch it at the bird. He is so busy with his reflection that he does not hear nor see the rock hurtling through the air. When it hits him, he loses his footing. The blow dazes him and he is unable to tell up from down. He warbles something that I will never forget. His dying words. He falls into the water and sinks faster than the rock, down into the lake that had once been such a comfort to him.

I hope to never see or hear that ungrateful bird again. And when I look out past the lake, all I see is a field of flowers, yellow and white. No red. The blood’s been drained from their bodies. I turn my guilt into those flowers. Seeing them bloom so beautiful and young and alive, I am compelled to mouth the bird's last words, "You have killed us. Killed us both. My love! I come to you!" I echo those words over and over, the only story I will ever speak.