“Did you raise me only so that you could trade me in for the best offer you could get? A wealthy husband? Influential children? A wind to push you across the sea?
“Mother, why didn’t you take me to the hills? Helen went! Helen ran away! Why didn’t we follow Helen?”
You uttered a command. The soldiers took my elbow. I forgot how to speak.
Your soldiers escorted me through the camp to the temple. Achilles found me on the way. “You’re as beautiful as your aunt,” he said.
The wind of my forgetfulness battered against him. Effortlessly, Achilles buffeted against its strength.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “It takes courage to walk calmly to your death. I wouldn’t mind marrying you. Talk to me. I only need a little persuasion. Tell me why I should save your life.”
Voiceless, I marched onward.
I forgot you.
They washed and perfumed me and decked me with the things that smell sweet. You came before me.
“My sweet Iphigenia,” you said. “If there was anything I could do to stop it, I would, but I can’t. Don’t you see?”
You brushed your fingers along my cheek. I watched them, no longer certain what they were.
“Iphigenia, I have no right, but I’ve come to ask for your pardon. Can you forgive me for what I’ve done?”
I stared at you with empty eyes, my brows furrowed, my body cleansed and prepared. Who are you? asked my flesh.
They led me into Artemis’s sacred space. Wild things clustered, lush and pungent, around the courtyard. The leaves tossed as I passed them, shuddering in my wind. Sunlight glinted off of the armor of a dozen men who were gathered to see the beginning of their war. Iamas was there, too, weeping as he watched.
Calchas pushed his way toward me as if he were approaching through a gale, his garment billowing around him. I recognized the red ribbons on his headband, his indigo eyes, his taut and joyless smile.
“You would have been beautiful one day, too,” she said.
Not as beautiful as you.
“No one is as beautiful as I.”
His breath stank with rotting fish, unless that was other men, another time. He held a jeweled twig in his hand — but I knew it would be your hand that killed me. Calchas was only an instrument, like Helen, like the twig.
He lifted the jeweled twig to catch the sun. I didn’t move. He drew it across my throat.
My body forgot to be a body. I disappeared.
Artemis held me like a child holds a dandelion. With a single breath, she blew the wind in my body out of my girl’s shape.
I died.
Feel me now. I tumble through your camp, upturning tents as a child knocks over his toys. Beneath me, the sea rumbles. Enormous waves whip across the water, powerful enough to drown you all.
“Too strong!” shouts Menelaus.
Achilles claps him on the back. “It’ll be a son of a bitch, but it’ll get us there faster!”
Mother lies by the remnants of the tent and refuses to move. Iamas tugs on her garment, trying to stir her. She cries and cries, and I taste her tears. They become salt on my wind.
Orestes wails for mother’s attention. He puts his mouth to her breasts, but she cannot give him the comfort of suckling. I ruffle his hair and blow a chill embrace around him. His eyes grow big and frightened. I love him, but I can only hug him harder, for I am a wind.
Achilles stands at the prow of one of the ships, boasting of what he’ll do to the citizens of Troy. Menelaus jabs his sword into my breeze and laughs. “I’ll ram Paris like he’s done to Helen,” he brags. Odysseus laughs.
I see you now, my father, standing away from the others, your face turned toward Troy. I blow and scream and whisper.
You smile at first, and turn to Calchas. “It’s my daughter!”
The priest looks up from cleaning his bloody dagger. “What did you say?”
I whip cold fury between your ears. Your face goes pale, and you clap your hands to the sides of your head, but my voice is the sound of the wind. It is undeniable.
Do you still want forgiveness, father?
“Set sail!” you shout. “It’s time to get out of this harbor!”
I am vast and undeniable. I will crush you all with my strength and whirl your boats to the bottom of the sea. I’ll spin your corpses through the air and dash them against the cliffs.
But no, I am helpless again, always and ever a hostage to someone else’s desires. With ease, Artemis imposes her will on my wild fury. I feel the tension of her hands drawing me back like a bowstring. With one strong, smooth motion, she aims me at your fleet. Fiercely, implacably, I blow you to Troy.
Rachel Swirsky is on Destination Two of her bad-weather tour of the United States — Bakersfield, California, where the summer days regularly heat up to one hundred and fifteen degrees of desert sun.
Before moving west, she lived in Iowa City, where ice storms and blizzards provided a chilly background to her MFA studies at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Who knows where her next destination will be? Lava fields? The center of a black hole? An Alaskan shanty? She will sit, wrapped in synthetics and faux fur, shivering while she bangs out stories that appear in Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine, Weird Tales, and other venues, including year’s best collections from Strahan, Horton, and the VanderMeers. A slim volume of her fiction and poetry, Through the Drowsy Dark, was published by Aqueduct Press in May and her second collection, How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future, is forthcoming from Subterranean Press.
NEBULA AWARD WINNER »»
SINNER, BAKER, FABULIST, PRIEST; RED MASK, BLACK MASK, GENTLEMAN, BEAST
Eugie Foster
FROM THE AUTHOR: Like every writer, I’m keenly interested to hear readers’ responses to my work, and “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” has garnered quite a bit of commentary online. I find it fascinating, the different impressions and messages that people have come away with from it, and I’ve been tempted more than once to chime in at various forums or blogs to say, “I meant to show this when I wrote this passage”; or, “It’s not gratuitous! I was foreshadowing that when I included scene X”; or, “no, no, the point I meant to convey was this.” But I’ve refrained because I’ve always held that once a story is published, it must resonate with, captivate, and provoke thought (or fail to) on its own merits, without me hovering over it like some anxious helicopter parent. Now that I’ve been invited to discuss “Sinner” on a public platform, I find myself trying to find and keep to that line between authorial autocracy and abstruse rambling. No illusions that I’ll succeed, but just wanted to let y’all know where I was coming from.
Some of my all-time most formative books — the ones that I read when I was in middle school and high school that made a lasting impression on me — are dystopias: George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. But “Sinner” is the first dystopian story I’ve written, and it didn’t come about from some poignant sociological or societal message that I wanted to convey, but rather from a wish to explore the more personal themes of identity and self. While I do regard the dystopian setting as integral, I consider the true theme to revolve around an examination of identity: the choices we make or don’t make, how our actions exemplify who we are against a backdrop of cultural roles and societal expectations, and the daily decisions that comprise our fundamental sense of self, as well as the external and internal influences that affect these decisions.