Sister Spit by Michelle Tea

Author:Michelle Tea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2012-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Pandora

Sara Seinberg

There was no weather then. It was the time before we even had a word for weather. There was just the day and the night, and a stray thunderbolt when Zeus threw a tantrum. Seasonal cold fronts and twisters and monsoons came later. This was before snow and drought and turmoil. Under a perfect sky we’d read about Orpheus in the bustling agora at the newsstand. He was just a small story then, in a new zine these girls from Crete were putting out. While most of the newsstand remained awash in the latest scandals of Zeus and Hera, Persephone and I scoured the back of the stands for journals and obscure quarterlies among the paper-wrapped porn, vomitorium guides and fantastically popular Orgy Advisor. The glossy covers of Ambrosia This Week and Zeus’ self-promoting Rolling Thunder served to vindicate my own godlessness. I wanted nothing to do with the roving clots of girls costumed in their various goddess-wannabe uniforms. The Athenas had their strong points, to be sure; the home team in Athens with their very own temple to frequent. Ladies with their Aphrordite poses were a flush of aesthetic bliss, but for me it was too much to strive for the impossible. And my inherent state of otherness didn’t allow for gang identification anyhow. Still so young at 128 years old, I had at least learned that.

But I suppose if it had to be someone it’d be Artemis. Her groupies had the best style, rippling arms and chests so muscular their breasts seemed to vanish. They went out in a pack to the forests at night like famished wolves, their shields at the ready, hauling quivers of hand-tooled arrows across their broad backs as if they weighed nothing. When the sun fell, the girls replaced their olive branch tiaras with hearty strips of leather cut from a group kill, tying back their ignored tresses. The boldest of the pack hacked off their own locks and roamed Greece in short hair that stood on end, a field of middle fingers toward Olympus, flipping Zeus off in his pursuit of any damsel, refusing to be the kind of woman any God would try to take down in a field of flowers.

It isn’t just her worshippers either. Artemis is always good to me in her visitations. She is patient, teaches me useful things for my strange life: tanning hides for long journeys into the tundra, moving through any landscape in relative silence, hand to hand combat, and of course, archery. She is never distracted by affairs of emotional entanglement, has a pure focus on survival and duty. Nothing like her twin Apollo, yet she understands him implicitly. When they visit together they never speak, but rather intuit the other’s language and come across as one voice.

Artemis never, NEVER, underestimates what a woman can accomplish. People say she’s a virgin, the goddess of the virgin. Unlike the other lady Gods who come calling on me while I sleep, I figure she’s too busy for men.

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