DAUGHTERS OF ADAM
I am alone in Sonia’s room, looking again for something she forgot. Today, her camera. Sonia waits downstairs, smoking on the stoop. Sonia’s lover Caroline, five foot six, cropped blonde, sits in the kitchen and scrolls on her phone. She is dog-like in her love for Sonia as a bully is to younger boys. Our Sonia is not kinder by much. Caroline, my new rival, has narrow shoulders and a thrumming stare which pounces to eat as pleases her. She stuffs herself with women, fresh transplants to Queens who don’t know better. Sonia writhes ecstatic in her heat, I’ve seen it. Often past midnight and lonely I wish Sonia desired me so sinfully. Her camera sits behind some philosophy opus. Caroline is hunched, tweeting. “Okay,” I say in the kitchen and we leave together.
Caroline’s lover Sonia, rich red hair, takes the camera from me without thanks and Caroline lights a cigarette. They talk in a husk of last week’s house party, bitterly about men and enviously about girls. They talk about utopia. I watch and wait. When the cigarettes are finished she and Caroline walk astride and I trail them down the subways stairs into the rotting train. Sonia is beautiful and tall. A man notices her, then returns to his phone. Sonia tenses, hands curling and shoulders shivering with anger and shame. She imagines men’s eyes tracing her with sex or revulsion or both. I think they are astonished by her without thought, as animals. That is something Caroline would say. I wonder if I believe it and I don’t, I don’t, I tell myself, I want to love and be loved without prejudice. Moreso I want to fuck Sonia again. The train rumbles. She watches Caroline with a calm glee. She glances behind at me. The train erupts in noise and light.
A world turns over in sudden sunlight, tumbling as a rock down a grassy slope. It’s too bright, pain in the head. The spinning stops and I leave my cheek in the soil until I hear coughing. “Sonia,” I heave in panic. Brushing yellow grass from my face I crawl on hands and knees until I see her, black coat and black jeans splayed in the meadow. She gasps, eyes rolling, then wakes slowly as I say her name over, over again. I take her face in my hands to trace freckles streaked with mud until she recognizes me. Caroline screams. Knocking me down, full-body, her attack is fast and heavy, pulling and pushing me. In the grass I roll her under me and force her jaw into the dirt for one long breath before standing, dizzy. She turns over and vomits into the grass. She wipes her mouth. There is dirt and someone’s blood in my fingernails. My vision focuses and in the distance I see a castle built of pearl, sitting on a hill like a mirage.
“Okay,” Caroline spits. I ignore her.
“What happened?” I ask, not daring to hope. Neither says anything. As seconds pass I recognize the lavender sky, the great forest to the east. We have entered another world. Between the pearl castle and us appears silhouetted a ruddy cassowary. A thrill drops into my stomach. I step once towards the bird.
“No,” says Sonia. “Please.” Her eyes reach the castle and she lets out a sob. The cassowary lilts down the hill in excitement, his voice calling out shrill and squawking.
“My long-lost queens!” he says, shaking himself clean. I feel tears on my face, washing away blood and dirt, and a joy fills me like finding a long-lost gift, a joy so sure it cannot be a dream, and I laugh.
“Please no,” Sonia mutters. The cassowary crows.
“Oh, by the lion’s grace, it is magic!” I embrace him, as old friends do.
We are coronated that evening. A giant on the parapet raises the portcullis by a great chain to crowds of bears and badgers and bees, streaming into the castle square. In the throne room we three queens are acquainted with the royal cassowary’s eldest son, now married. Caroline greets her new subjects beside me, fielding their endless questions, stern lips turned charming like when she leans toward the new girl at the bar, cocking her head, making her feel special. The people adore her. Sonia curtseys, silent, eyes cast to the side. She wears an old dress, green and silver, one she wore to meetings with merfolk and for the solstice ball. She hated that dress. When I remember those years, as I did often in the real world, I see her always in plain linen sitting behind a desk in the antechamber, firing taps into the mechanical calculator she designed, the sound of wooden beads colliding late into the night. In the morning I would wake to her mountains of paperwork; agricultural reforms and state bank constitutions and dark circles under her eyes. In New York she’d talked and talked about politics, about revolution, about Marx and whoever else. Now she was silent, and wrote. Any advisor who thanked her was greeted with a chilly nod. She was fading then, the last time I thought I knew her. In our separate years in New York since, like a cold divorce, her color had changed. I wish I knew her still. I am trying as hard I can. Three mice parade down the hall, each carrying a gold circlet on a pillow. I kneel. Caroline does the same without a look at me. Finally Sonia drops to her knees, shoulders sagging. The mouse cannot reach her head. She leans forward further still, and when she rises crowned again her mouth is twisted.
The great golden lion waits for us at the top of the astronomy tower, on the far side of a wide circular table. His paws are folded on white marble floor. Sonia screams, sprints to him, beats her fist on his soft fur, roars venomous into his warm chest. Caroline and I, made up like dolls, stand stupidly. Sonia weeps. Her camera and phone and cigarettes and sweater, all in her black tote, are rested against a table leg by a footman. I touch Sonia on the shoulder and she flinches.
“Don’t,” says Caroline. She sits and tips her chair, balancing on the back legs. Her ribbed white tank peeks through a robe parted to either side, unbuttoned. She clears her throat. “Can you tell me,” Caroline says, first to Sonia whose eyes are locked on her enemy the lion, then to me, “What happened? How we got here today—or the last time you two were here—I mean, I can see why you never told me—I think I’m sober but—Christ, I can’t believe it.”
I look to Sonia for help, who hits the lion weakly once more before sitting, no words but a hopeless glare. So I say, “It was years ago. We were on the train, same as today. Sonia and I had just met. The train vanished in a bang, and we appeared here in the meadow. We were made queens. A prophecy or something, and then a war against a witch and her worm that would eat the world. We won, of course, and then ruled. Seven years, or something like it. One day a strange ship appeared in the harbor, empty. The lion told us never to board it. But we sailed it to the ends of the earth. When we came back to the subway only seconds had passed. That’s it, really.”
Caroline tips her chair flat again. “That’s it?” she says.
The lion rises and speaks in a rasping baritone. “Listen, my dear daughters of Adam. Here are the conditions of your rule. You will be given a way home. A ship in the harbor, swift and slender. In time I will visit upon each of you, and ask if you will choose it.”
Sonia shakes her head. “You said the same thing last time.”
“And now you return to finish your queenly duty,” the lion breathes.
“I choose to leave again.”
The lion roars, white stones shaking their mortar loose. “I have not visited upon you, Queen Sonia. To choose before you are ready is to abandon your duty. I have brought you here to decide this and this alone, and when it is done you will be free.”
Then he leaves, monstrous in His divinity. That night I hear voices, quiet and sad, in Caroline’s chambers next to mine. I hear Sonia crying. I hear her, eventually, tire herself out. I hear Caroline snuff the fire. I stare at my ashlar walls.
✦
The truth is last time it began and ended badly. One night in New York, Sonia and I met in a sushi restaurant and she talked for hours about a series of Weimar leftists, barely making eye contact, drinking too much sake. I brought her home and she took three shots before letting me fuck her limply. In the morning we walked to the train in silence and my head spun with shame. I wanted so badly to speak, planned to open my mouth and apologize for something just out of reach. “Don’t,” she said. And what would I say? I am entranced by her ice still, trying with all the charm I can muster to melt it, but when her heat comes for me it is vindictive without passion, like a single stab in the thigh. Then the ground shook and we came to this world and were made queens. It was so many years, that first time, an age, and when we were dumped back out onto the stinking subway platform like old milk it was I who was angry. We had grieved our lives and found new ones, happy ones, only to be thrust back without ceremony into an unremarkable world. A woman in Uggs talked about a derailed train. After a moment cops stormed through. I reached for Sonia but she was gone, up the steps and disappearing into a crowd. The last light I remember was the blue New York winter sun.
I kept little company after that, Sonia least of all. Some friends asked what had changed as a sudden and overwhelming depression overcame me, and when I couldn’t answer eventually they assumed it was too awful to talk about. Maybe it was. The ones who stayed I pulled away from. It might have been a hallucination except for the memory of Sonia, every unanswered text an assurance that something terrible but real had bound us together. At least it was real. Two years passed like a bad hangover. Then I met Caroline, past midnight and drinking alone again. No one wanted me anywhere and I wanted to be nowhere, haunted by the queen I was in fantasy and the coward I was in reality.. Rain pelted cold in Brooklyn. I saw them while I waited in line for the bathroom, first Sonia for the first time in two years, rich red hair, her neck spotted and starting to bruise how she liked it. Envy like a spurned ex bruises me this way, sexual and needy. It is never sated. Caroline’s arm hung over her shoulders as they left the bathroom together. I had turned in line, drunk, desperate to be noticed. “People have to pee!” I said. Sonia’s mouth opened, recognition slow. Caroline’s eyes flicked to me, lizard ruthless. Before Sonia could speak Caroline said, “People have to fuck.” I stepped, and pushed her. She fell, sat stupid on the sticky floor. Sometimes I regret this but more often I feel again how the act warmed me, time slow from alcohol and hormones. Then she leapt, grasped my mouth as a rough examiner would. “Kitty,” Sonia said to her, soft through thin model lips. Caroline turned like a called dog. “Let’s go.” And they did, both of them, out the door. I remember still the dribble of my sterile pee into the bowl.
But afterwards she met me in a coffee shop, and that was enough to keep both of us alive. She looked terrible. We both did, I suppose. I went out with her and Caroline a few times, danced, apologized, drank too much with people I didn’t like, watched her and wanted her and hated Caroline. But now, by grace, we are here again. Now everything will be as it was before.
✦
When the morning sun arrives I see Sonia on the dock below my window, staring over the ocean. She is beautiful, hair drifting in the wind. It will ruin her beauty when I open my mouth. I descend the marble steps in a heavy dressing-gown and sit on the dock beside her, warm water on my bare feet.
“You can’t see it,” she says, “Can you?” She points into the harbor. “The ship, there, swift and slender. Only large enough for one.” I see only rippling waves.
I ask, “Do you want to go?” She nods. A loose crimson strand falls to the ground.
“When he first appeared to me, after our war with the witch and her worm that would eat the world,” Sonia says, “I was crying in the garden. Like many nights. He licked my face clean of tears.” I watch her now; her eyes are dry like stone. “Then he kept me here.” She closes her eyes. “How can you not be angry? You sit and listen and take it. He makes up rules, tells us we can’t leave until he bothers to come talk to us again. How long will it be? You were never angry. You’re so stupid, you know that?”
“We could just take it again. Sail home, like last time,” I say.
Sonia exhales. “And then he’d bring us back again. We’re condemned. Nothing to do but play-act revolutionaries. Reformers, rather.” She rubs her thumb against her palm, marking skin with a fingernail. “I wish they had ketamine here. But who does drugs in a utopia? Never mind.” She looks at me, kindly this time. “I’m glad you’re here. You were so happy. Maybe it’s good to see you as that woman again. I did miss her.” And she turns back to the castle. For a moment I almost see it in the harbor; a shadow, and a glimmer where there shouldn’t be, until I hear Sonia’s footsteps climbing the marble stair behind me in defeat.
Sonia takes a photograph of us at the masquerade ball that night. Her red hair is up, elaborate and woven with silver. There’s no way to develop the pictures, we all know, but she takes them anyway with her compact film camera. Caroline and I are sitting in competitive silence, me in a rainbow gown and her in white, stripped of our masks on a Victorian couch watching Sonia click the shutter. An elder badger offers his hand and she disappears into the crowd. I don’t see her again that night. I dance with the Great Hammer-Beast, with Doctor Whippoorwill, with long-lost friends and ex-lovers. I hear their accomplishments and see new lines in their cheeks. I have them too, I imagine. Later, alone in the royal garden, it is long past sunset and the oil lamps are lit.
“It is beautiful here,” Caroline says from the darkness. I startle. She is phantasmal in the purple evening, watching the sea crash against the cliffs below. I’ve never seen her so still and silent. “Beautiful like a venomous snake,” she says. “Colorful like a warning.” The train of my rainbow gown is stained with grass and spilled alcohol. She says, “Sonia told me what happened last time you were here. You thought you would never go back to the real world.” I notice how much I fear her, like a stranger’s dog. “Did you even try, those seven years?” she asks.
“I tried,” I say, “We took the ship eventually. But first we went back to the meadow, asked the lion—he said it wasn’t time—”
Caroline spins, sneers. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you at all, you miserable bitch. Sonia was trapped here alone. That’s what she told me.” She stoops to me, leans close so cropped blonde hair brushes my face. “One day, she’ll realize what you did to her here,” Caroline says.
“I know,” I say weakly.
“I hope you do,” Caroline says. She stares into my eyes, looking for something. After some time, she gives up. “Are you going to stay?” she asks me.
“It seems like we’ll have time to decide,” I say.
She shakes her head, appalled. “Do you care about what Sonia wants?”
“You know her better than I do,” I say.
She turns away. “If I had been you, with all those years, I’d have done something other than pine like a little princess. You’re a parasite.” The yellow light of the oil lamps drips down her gown. “She doesn’t love you,” she mutters to the sea, voice rich with envy. Then she leaves, dress billowing behind her. I close my eyes. On anxious nights I imagine telling Sonia how I love her, then wishing the illusion away. I imagine that she holds love for me where I just can’t see. I imagine her below me in ecstasy. I imagine her face obscured by a white veil. Every time she turns to look at me in a bathroom line or a sun-struck morning in her bed I imagine joy washing over her face, the revelation of love. But it is always Caroline that makes her flush like spring window-boxes. I will have her next time, next time, once I am braver.
I begin to take walks late at night through the castle town, sneaking out through a sewer tunnel. I had forgotten, back in the real world, how silent a city without machines is. I am alone with my loneliness. In the blacksmith’s quarter there is an iron bench overlooking the high street where I sit and watch the last of the drunkards stumble out of a tavern. I pretend I am not the queen, and wonder how I feel. One night I see a figure in a cloak just like my own tapping quickly on a basement door. A girl opens it, no older than twenty, and kisses the figure whose hood falls away. Caroline’s cropped blonde hair is caught in the wind. They disappear inside together. I sit and wait. The sun threatens to rise. Caroline and her lover reappear just as the lamp-lighters return to snuff each iron post. The girl’s hair is tousled now, giggling and clingy.
“My queen~” I hear, playfully echoing up the street.
“Stop, don’t,” floats up in Caroline’s irritated drawl. The door closes. Like a rat, Caroline scurries across the street to the tavern where she fishes in the dumpster. She finds a bottle of something and drains it. Then another, and the same. When she stumbles towards the sewer passageway I follow her, all the way through the castle to the throne room, abandoned late at night. Behind a corner I hear her apologize. Sonia’s voice is too quiet to discern. Caroline says, “Will I ever be enough?”
This time I hear Sonia’s response, “You will.”
✦
That last day in New York, before the three of us disappeared on the train, I had texted Sonia in lust and hunger. I met her at a bar. She was cocaine skinny, starving herself like city girls do, expensive clothes hanging like spare skin. Then in her apartment I laid on the bed while she vomited into the toilet. I spent a bitter night on a twin bed listening to her sleep, wondering if she would ever have sex with me again. I had pictured her so happy these last years away from me, arm in arm with Caroline, high and dancing in the dark, blowing pretty strangers in club bathrooms, coming home to her girlfriend making breakfast for her, the two of them tearing apart moments and ideologies and other people most of all. Villains commiserating on the inevitability of the hero’s victory. Sonia, our macguffin, was hazy and irritable in the morning. Before her girlfriend arrived I soothed her with a cup of coffee and a cigarette and two bites of an egg sandwich. The scraps were laid out like evidence of my conquest when Caroline sat at the table and tipped her chair on its back feet. I leaned against the counter, smug. Caroline hunched. She complained about a long night, name dropped a celebrity she didn’t really know. Her discomfort eased mine. I imagined Sonia irritated as I was by Caroline’s posturing, my memory of an unflattering impression she’d once done of Caroline a balm, but when I looked to her she was only nodding, sipping my coffee, complaining about the same things in their vocal fry. They laughed at the same unkind jokes, talked the same way about people they disliked, and yet they both smiled lovelier in conversation. The ice of their personalities seemed to insulate each other. Eventually we left, until Sonia halted on the stoop and said, “I forgot my camera.” Caroline and I went upstairs together. She sat and tweeted and I used the bathroom. On the toilet I read her tweets, prepared to lie and say I didn’t. She had said that she hates cowards. I flushed.
✦
The royal cassowary wakes me late one night. Sonia stands in the throne room in her dressing-gown, the mouse-guard around her in a frenzy. Caroline, dripping seawater, lies on the floor, her crown beside her in pieces, ragged cuts down her back. Water and blood pools beneath her. She sleeps in the infirmary for a day and a night. Past sunset, she wakes and I meet with her. She sits up against the pillows, bags under her eyes. She sends the nurse from the room.
“He visited upon me,” Caroline whispers. “The lion.” She heaves a deep breath. Her cropped blonde hair is crusty with dried salt. “He showed me the ship in the harbor. Told me it wasn’t for me. But I left—” she stumbles, “I crept away in the night. And a storm struck me, waves like black gold under the moon, and I sunk into the ocean. I saw him there at the bottom of the sea. He stripped me of my cloak and crown. I’m no longer a queen.”
She closes her eyes. “You know that I hate you? You must. Sonia’s unwanted pet. A dog who refuses to leave. Who wouldn’t fall in love with her? She’s magnificent. I still hate you for it, all the same. I want to be enough for her, so badly, and you don’t even try. She tells me she loves me and I don’t believe her.” She coughs, looks at me again. “How cruel is that? The lion showed me. I felt it, for the first time, how cruel it is. I think often how Sonia would be better off without me. I always said I’d do anything for her, except leave, and even that promise I broke. The lion told me the ship wasn’t for me and I left anyway.”
She begins to cry, pathetic and without shame. “But she chose me. Don’t you see? How cruel I’ve been, and still she chooses me. Sonia has been like a bone to me, chewed but never eaten. And I keep trying. But it’s time to stop, he said. I have so much. He showed me the chance I have to be something good to her. To choose her in return. To stay with her.” She closes her eyes again, exhausted. “I am so grateful. I am grateful beyond words.” For a while she’s quiet, and then the nurse returns and asks me to let her sleep. Her crown, in pieces, is never repaired.
One morning I hear low voices from her chambers. I don’t mean to, but I want to, so I listen. Sonia is speaking. She says, “Yes, I wanted it enough.”
Caroline says, “Was it good?” She’s not quite laughing.
Sonia says, “It was fine. It wasn’t bad. I wanted to, I guess, but nothing more than that. I was there already, you know? Sex is easy. And then afterwards she held me while I shook—you know—” A moment passes. “She held me while I shook. And then she looked at me in that way, like people do sometimes after they cum inside you. That feeling they think is love. And I pitied her while her dick went soft.” There is a long silence. “She got emotional, I remember. Told me about her mother leaving. All this stuff about how she and her dad were free for the first time, like ships setting sail. How she reveled in the power. I don’t want to, you know, but I do pity her.” They are both quiet for a while, and so I slither away.
After the war with the witch and her worm that would eat the world we stowed our spoils below the castle. Our swords, one strong and one cunning, lie on velvet. My horn split in twain, behind glass. I take a torch and wander there one night down narrow spiral stairs to find Sonia kneeling in its cold walls, holding a glass sphere with a worm inside.
“Careful,” I whisper. She startles. The sphere falls and shatters. The freed worm shrieks. I step back, take my sword from its pillow.
“Stop,” she says. “Let it eat.” I ignore her, strike hastily at the worm as it begins to gnaw grooves in the floor, growing. It eats the golden cups and chests of silver. It grows to the size of a dog. She says, “What if this is the way? Don’t you miss pain? The real world? Kitty and I and you—we’re dead here anyway.” The sound of my fruitless strikes, metal on stone, is cut only by the heaving of the worm. “The lion thinks he’s God. He said never to board the ship that took us home. Now he says we should. He whisks you away and you accept every bit of it, like a child who only eats cake. I don’t know how you can be happy without pain, I envy it, I wish I could. I write and legislate and try to be the queen these people deserve but it’s all playing in a sandbox. It’s a single hand clapping. It’s a dog catching a car.”
She begins to cry. “There’s only one way out. Aren’t you angry? Let it eat.” Down the narrow steps echo heavy footfalls. The worm grows to the size of a horse.
The great lion, old and tired, as large as the room itself, crushes it under his paw. It splatters on the floor. Sonia doesn’t wait. She grasps her sword from the velvet pillow and plunges it into the lion’s throat. In a dying breath he growls, “I visit upon you, Queen Sonia.” Sonia screams victorious in anger and drives the sword deeper. His golden blood flows down his neck and mixes with the purple guts of the worm. I shout, reach for her, but the lion collapses between us, a fallen giant. The only sound is the slowing beat of his heart like fading thunder. It takes a long time for him to die. Sonia stays.
✦
One night in the stinking New York summer Sonia forgot her keys in my kitchen, having left in a rush. I brought them to her that afternoon. At her apartment door she slipped outside and closed it quickly behind her. Someone was running water inside, though I knew she lived alone. “Here,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “I needed them.” She opened the door again in dismissal and an older woman, also red haired, nosed at the gap.
“Who are you?” she said.
I told her, “I’m a friend.” The woman summoned Sonia in, who obeyed. I assumed it was her mother; I might have been wrong. Sonia never talked about her mother to me.
“You never had much taste in friends,” she said as she closed the door, muffled.
Later, I walked by a bar and saw Caroline and Sonia sitting outside on the far side of the street, drinking. Caroline was focused, quiet, saying “It’s justified. You get to be angry.”
Sonia shook her head. “I am out of control,” she said.
“You feel out of control. But you choose how to act. Sonia, you—” Caroline searches for words. “You’re nobody’s object. Not mine, certainly not hers. You do this, you define yourself by suffering. I do it, too, because I never think I’m good enough, but Sonia I swear to God you need to understand that you don’t have to be out of control, same as you don’t have to suffer, just because it feels normal. Maybe it’s good to love and be loved. Maybe it’ll help you to be the subject, for once.”
I didn’t interrupt them. I went home and had sex with a girl I would never text again, whose name I’ve now forgotten, and it was as good as I’d ever felt.
✦
The autumn festival comes late this year. Caroline, now long abdicated, walks before her retainers in the parade. Sonia and I ride in the pumpkin carriage, waving diligently to buttered profiterole people and their milkmen lords, forks in hand. Flags flutter with love for us, cheers so loud we wear blueberry earplugs, the best chance I have to indulge in the love of our people. When fall came in New York I had missed these celebrations, the feasting people in their finest dubs. Sonia, always uncomfortable with the pleasures of power, had been reserved, and though she did more for the realm by any meaningful measure the cheers were loudest for me. But this year she stops the carriage at the top of the orange brick street. Caroline turns back to look, wondering if something is wrong. To the protestations of the royal cassowary and without a word to me, she opens the door. She climbs out. The crowd screams in ecstasy. She takes Caroline’s hand, unsteady at first but begins to smile and nod, hesitant steps with her consort through the street, eye to eye with the people for the first time. They adore her. I sit in the carriage, considering doing the same. But I stay and tap twice on the door. It lurches into motion again. I lean away, light and sound overwhelming, pull my hand back inside the carriage. When common people appear before me in the throne room, concerns singular enough or their travel arduous enough to garner sympathy with the royal cassowary, they often praise me for the decade of reform or for victory in war or for a generous and kind monarchy. On behalf of Queen Sonia, I say thank you, as she turns the gears of government in her unseen antechamber. The royal cassowary tells me that their warm sunlight of praise for me, arbiter of power, is justified. Sonia needs a buttress to hold her work in place. Beside me in the carriage, the cassowary watches Sonia smile and curtsey. Caroline bows. I count the minutes until we return to the lonely castle.
There is a ship in the harbor, swift and slender. I tell Sonia this when she sits beside me on the dock. She doesn’t see it anymore. She says, “It disappeared with the lion. And for Kitty, after he visited upon her. But you see it?” She sighs. “Maybe I’ll have to stay a little longer. We’re both here.” She doesn’t mean me. I want to chase her even as she sits beside me. I want to chase her forever into the sunset until I die. Isn’t that love?
“You see the ship,” she says. “You should go.” Her eyes have no bags under them now, I notice. She is fuller, gained weight during the last weeks. She’s learned to roll tobacco from an anteater. She dips her toes into the sea. “I envied you. Those years, being so happy, I never understood why you were. I suppose being a queen was enough for you. It disgusted me, you know. It still does.” When she pierces me with words I take it like a needle, brave in its face, certain it will make me stronger. It makes me love her all the more. I tell other friends that she is kind underneath, and hope I am not lying. I will say it again and again, until it is true.
Behind me, a great presence appears. “My daughter of Adam,” the lion intones between soft, dark lips. Sonia, unmoved, gazes at the water. I kneel. He licks my face with a wet tongue long missed. I feel tears. He looks to the ship in the harbor. “I will be alive for you as long as you need me. Until you board the ship, swift and slender.” I nod.
“It’s mine, isn’t it?”
He growls. “It always has been.”
I say, “I am afraid to leave. I don’t want to go.” He nods. “So I am visiting upon you,” he says.
I follow him down white marble steps and into the dungeons of the castle. Further, further, we go down, through cities made of gold and swamps reeking of pestilence and finally to a great still sea, misty and quiet, where trees wide as mountains hold up the world. The lion waits for me on the cool sand. He steps into the water and I follow him, shivering. The water does not part but flows through me like I am a ghost, up to my waist. The lion beckons. I sink to my knees, bow my head, and drop into the water. For a moment all I see is darkness, then light, then my nightgown drifting away and I am naked and alone in the depths of the world. Then I feel him: soft fur, warm paws, cradling me as I rise and break to surface to feel air like shattered glass on my skin, painful like iodine in the wound. But he holds me. He speaks in a rumble.
“Do you feel how it is to be loved?”
I whisper, “Yes, yes, father.”
He pulls from me and begins to sink into the sea. “And do you feel how it is to love in return?”
I hear his voice tremor in my body. He disappears under the surface. I dive, eyes unclouded, and watch him fall into the abyss. He screams. Bubbles channel up, his body twisting in pain as he sinks as if weighted. I choke on the water. He is beautiful, I think, and so could never suffer like this but he screams again. I dive. Small and fruitless, I grasp towards his mane, far below the surface now, desperate in the dark. He writhes and shakes. I wrap my arms around him. His body calms and I feel warmth between us. It’s easy to breathe again. It is as beautiful as being held myself, to have him in my arms. After a while, I can’t know who holds whom. Entwined I cry in fear and then relief until my words return and I whisper over and over, I never knew, I never knew love like this. He licks my face clean. Somehow I never knew love like this. Why did I ever think I did?
✦
Now I am back in the city. The ship, swift and slender, carries me to the same train station where only seconds have passed. I watch cops storm past. I sit in a park and eat a bagel. I have dinner with estranged friends, apologize, see them on weekends like I always promised. On my walk to work every day I look down the subway stairs, waiting to see Sonia emerge. She never does. One day, I receive a photograph in the mail. It’s fuzzy, amateurly developed, with no return address. I am startled by the image. Caroline and I sit on a white Victorian couch, masquerade masks on a table before us. Caroline wears a slight smile, watches her lover take a photo. I am sitting stiffly, staring also at Sonia, just out of sight. For the first time I see my eyes shadowed, hands clasped. For the first time I see cruelty in how I looked at her. I turn over the photograph in shame, to see writing on the back in quill and ink: With Love, Sonia.