Alcestis by Katharine Beutner

Author:Katharine Beutner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2010-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

10

I LEFT MY grandmother in the deep vale and walked along the rocky bank of the Phlegethon. I felt dizzy, but I didn’t spread my arms for balance. What did it matter if I fell? My body would not break.

I climbed out of the valley, where the river fell in a strange bright stream from the plain above, and found a smooth boulder near the top of the cliff. I pulled myself up onto it and sat, folding my legs before me and peering down into the vale. From this height I couldn’t recognize my grandmother among the gray forms on the bank. I could pretend, at least for a moment, that no one here knew me. I still felt naked, though I wasn’t cold. The atmosphere was windless, the air perfectly neutral in temperature. It was not late fall here; this place was perpetual and without seasons.

I rested my temple on my knee and closed my thin eyelids. I wished for the warmth of my husband’s hands on my shoulders. There had been a morning once, not long after we were wed, when he had awakened me with a series of dry kisses along my shoulders and trailed his hands along the furrow of my spine. I had been smiling before I opened my eyes, and it was only when I rolled over to kiss his mouth that I had seen the look of uneasy determination on his face. I had kissed his cheek and stroked the silky skin between his shoulder blades until he lay warm and quiet against me, and the slave girls had given me envious looks when they attended me late in the morning.

It was one of the better memories I had of Admetus.

If what I had seen of the underworld was true, that memory would vanish. I could clasp my recollections to me as tightly as I was able and still they would slip from my mind as the feeling of touch was slipping from my fingers. I wouldn’t remember the savor of his skin or the rough tangles of Hippothoe’s hair, how it had snagged on my fingernails and made my face itch as I slept. Already I found it difficult to keep him, or Hippothoe, in mind without effort. If I tried to conjure them up, I saw Persephone’s face.

I slid off of the boulder and picked my way down the rocky hill into the asphodel fields, unsure where to go. It was hard not to feel that my freedom to roam the underworld must be some kind of test—that if I toured obediently through its dark regions, I would be rewarded with Hippothoe.

Eventually I entered a dark cypress wood. The forest felt empty, no leaves on the ground, no broken twigs. No calling birds. I plucked at a branch, bending a feathery leaf between my fingers, and it sprang back to its original shape with no mark on it. I’d been in a forest only once, not long after Hippothoe died,

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