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My father is home. It strikes me just now that he really is home, and the first true memory I have of him is of death and destruction. He unleashes arrows through necks, through chests. He is splattered in the blood of these suitors, boys just near to my own age, as he presses forward.
My father, Odysseus, paragon of “man,” everything I had dreamed of, shows himself here to me, bathed in violence and wielding a cape of impossible golden glory. From the moment his arrow flies toward Antinous I am forced into a haze, watching from my bubble, suspended underwater with salt stinging my eyes.
This is when I first understand that growing older means becoming a weapon.
In that odd sort of state I follow him, near mindless.
Athena tells me, breath as soft as new feathers:
You must not stick to childhood; you are no longer just a little boy.
Her words strike me in the heart, flame-hot irons against the beating chamber. I pretend to consider them, all the while wishing I could remain a little boy for the rest of my existence.
Zeus, strike me down now if you see how unworthy I am for a title such as man, I want to say, but the words will not leave my mouth. I find no matter how strongly I want to have courage I am still held back by the doubt that perhaps my prayer could come true. Would lightning strikes rattle my bones? Would they hurt, or would it just be an instant?
It sours me that my hesitation itself proves my own point.
Black death pours into my eyes, rotten and impure, faced with the image of desecration, Prometheus’s delicate work crushed into a clay-sodden bloodbath, the life pulled right back out of them by Athena herself who had first been the one to grant them it. It comes to me then that I can recognize individual faces within the mass of bodies, bodies I had slain, bodies I piled behind me as I followed my father through a blazing path. Eurymachus. Amphinomus. Euryades. I hate them. I hate that they lived. I hate that they died.
Blindness lifts from the cloud around my head as I imagine the rubbery cooling flesh of the suitors all around, eyes glass, throats and hearts and lungs splintering under bullseye arrowheads. Athena leans over my shoulder, her presence like birds’ claws digging into my shoulder. I turn slightly to pull her visage into my view.
You should be proud of yourself, she says, eyes bright and piercing. So much potential. You could grow to become the ideal man, just behind the greatest, no longer the same little boy who cowers in his room as suitors ravage the household. Be proud, Telemachus, and look at what you’ve done.
Her hand—something inhuman, cool and firm, it smells like iron—closes in a vise around my jaw and turns my head back to the bodies. I stare and stare and stare until my eyes prickle with dryness. When I blink, she is gone.
The maid girls do not deserve death, the little spark of hope within me says. The ever-dwindling angel over one shoulder cries out as its soul is snuffed out in an instant.
End them for the dishonor they have caused you, says Athena. The side of her helmet brushes the edges of my hair as she leans closer.
Let them feel pain, she whispers. She prods me as a shepherd pokes at a lamb, pushing the misguided youth in the direction of the herd.
I refuse to grant these girls a clean death, I say. My heart shrivels between my ribs. The hollow space within my chest crumples, something strained and squeezing. The image of their pained faces, slack necks, twitching fingers remains burned into the backs of my eyes even as I close them to go to sleep. Rest does not fall easy upon me. A part of me wonders if it is Athena who forces me to linger on the subject, an unwilling yet captive audience to the mob of obscene thoughts. A part of me wonders if it is the sense of justice within myself.
My head aches dully as the chariot of Selene creeps higher into the sky, a bright silver eye crowned by a halo of stars. My mouth pinches, dry.
My breaths only slow long after Selene reaches the peak of her arc across the night.
My father tells me stories of Neoptolemus, son of the great warrior Achilles, Aristos Achaion, hoping to spur me into action out of inspiration, out of admiration for the other boy, so unfazed by the reputation that precedes him. Unlike him—or perhaps just like him—the crushing weight of the name bears down upon me, Ὀδυσσεύς, Odysseus. I wonder if the taste of the name Achilles weighs heavy on Neoptolemus as the name Odysseus does for me, though it seems impossible to think of him as a human boy fighting wars at ages younger than I am now. Regardless, he is a hero who pushes past the burden despite the pressure it must force upon him.
I wish I were him. I wish it were me who waited inside the wooden horse, so desperate to go hurt the Trojans, sword and spear clutched tight.
I consider the idea of being a hero myself for just a moment, then discard it within an instant. My father, the hero, has already disappeared for twenty years. I, at least, must not disappear for twenty more. That is my excuse.
I could not be a hero.
Despite it I cannot rid the image from my mind. It plagues me as I spar with dummy swords. It pursues me in a foggy, suffocating cloud around my face as I pace the length of my room and pretend I have already reached glory. I lie in my bed and wonder what became of Neoptolemus—is he flourishing, becoming only stronger, only more wreathed in fame as he grows older?
I feel old—all too old and all too failed.
My dreams are filled with geese.
Geese without heads. Geese without legs. Geese with cracked beaks and blood-soaked wings and mangled, limping staggers. I taste their blood in my mouth. The cry of an eagle shrieks overhead.
My wings stretch, flutter above me. I should fly. I should—
But what happens if I do?
An eagle cries out again, bruising my rattled head, sending the geese into a panicked frenzy as they trip over each other and bleed out on the field. Green peeks through in patches, though most of it is brown, rust, dark red in patches.
It strikes me then, shockingly real. My father is home.