Tisiphone

Earthquakes. Torrential rains. The dizzying flash of distant lightning. The spectacle has passed. Fog now swims over the cell's mouth.

And quiet settles like pre-creation. Chained wrist to nape, you lose lifetimes, forgetting more than you ever learned.

Until a familiar figure arrives. Her black wings scrape the basalt, and she folds them tight to fit, wriggling for the last inch.

The crown of her head scrapes the ceiling. She hunches crookedly, spear level, drawing closer.

But just when she might skewer you, she slackens. The gleaming tip droops away from your heart.

"Prisoner. Did we meet once?" Her gold eyes take you in, unblinking. "Or is it twice again? This moment feels estranged from the last."

Four radial engines drone. You're 31,000 feet above the flat blue sheet of the Pacific. Little Boy waits in the belly of the B29.

Your copilot has one hand on the radio dial, switching through frequencies of static from Tinian island.

A faint ringing through your headset, and the plane suddenly dips. Outside, clouds are hurrying over the aluminum wing.

Black feathers shudder against a three-hundred-mile-per-hour slipstream. Undeterred, she perches on the aileron and crawls up to the cockpit.

She presses her palm to the icy glass. You can't hear much over roaring Duplex-Cyclones, but you can almost read the threat on her lips.

December. The chair is set in the center of the room. The girl bound there is made of moonlight. Cords bite into her wrists, pinning them to the slats behind her head. Her legs are splayed wide, ankles bound to keep her thighs spread.

Her eyes glaze over. Between the white ruin of her legs, the skin is raw, beat purple. Silver blood runs down her shins from a hundred hatched cuts.

You stand in a semi-circle. Soldiers breathe out clouds of steam. One laughs. One wipes a bayonet on his pants. Another is taking his turn, jabbing inside her inflamed gash. A match strikes. The flame flares yellow.

Then a shriek like a diving Zero. The men pause, muttering. Closer. Closer.

The roof explodes. Debris rains down, revealing grey winter sky. A woman lands half-crouched in front of you. Her wings shrink tight to her back.

Her spear darts. With a wet schlick, its edge parts the throat of the smoking man, arcing into the chest of the next. Bright arterial spray paints the virgin, the chair, and the man inside her.

Tisiphone flashes past you, whirling for another strike.

Interstate 70 bores through the Precambrian basement rock. The station wagon is a blue box bumping at seventy miles per hour down the Continental Divide. Out the backseat window, mountains pile up like laundry.

Father Zeus is driving. He wears aviator sunglasses and a lightning bolt pattern button-up that he bought at a gas station in Kansas City. He waves at the strata of the canyon walls. "Look at that uplift," he shouts over the wind. "That's primordial force. That's ambition." He loves force.

Mother Hera ignores him. She's fixing her lipstick in the vanity mirror, over and over, Nellie Cherry. She's thinking about all the miles they have left. She's thinking about the milkmaids in the valley. She snaps the mirror shut.

In the backseat, Tisiphone's knee knocks against yours. The hump of the driveshaft forces her legs up. Her wings are stuffed inside a puffy North Face jacket, but the black feathers poke through the nylon seams like stuffing. She shifts. Pinions scrape against the faux leather. Today she's sixteen and carsick.

She keeps her Discman balanced on her thighs. The CD spins, a silver blur. She plucks one headphone away from her ear.

"The anti-skip protection is a lie," she says. "It just pauses the time between skips."

She looks at the back of Father’s thick neck. You can see her mapping his vertebrae. She's imagining murder not for the first time today.

Then she crinkles the bag wedged between you. "Do you want a pretzel?"