Author's Note: this piece, inspired by the first
half of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, won 2nd place in the
HarperCollins/Inkpop Weekly Writer's Challenge #10: It's All Greek to Me. The
girl who beat me did a steampunk adaptation about Circe called "All Men
Are Pigs." It was actually pretty incredible. I loved it a lot, actually.
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Once there was a king in the Grecian city of Thrace,
son of Calliope, goddess of music and poetry, and he they called Orpheus.
But the name Orpheus can never stand alone, for with that name, the
story of Eurydice is forever entwined. Eurydice was everything to the king of
Thrace—lover, wife, companion, and daughter.
Not his daughter in flesh, for that would be a grave evil. But it was
Orpheus's song that called forth the nymph Eurydice from her tree, giving her
true life.
That is how it happened to a king of the ancient days. And this is how
it happens to a boy with a musician's heart...in our time...
§
Orpheus stared at his room, seeing the glossy rock
gods on the walls. He drank in the vision of the people on his music posters.
He looked at his poster of Jimmy Hendrix, in skinny
jeans and leather jacket; the Viking guitarist from Nightwish with his braided
beard and the lion's mane of gold dreadlocks; the lead singer of Queen of Night
in her ragged, green velvet dress and brown leather jacket, her leaf-green
boots and fingerless gloves.
He wanted to be them. He hated being himself.
Somewhere outside his room, glass shattered.
Orpheus jumped. Sighed. His mother. She'd either tripped and dropped her glass,
or thrown it at Oeugrus.
Someone roared. His mother, Calliope, threw another
glass at his father.
Orpheus got up and grabbed his guitar from where
he'd left it, leaning against his bedside table, carrying it into the bathroom.
He often sang in the bathtub – great acoustics, but no chance his parents would
hear him. The walls were too thick.
The
sixteen-year-old settled into the white marble tub and draped the guitar across
his chest, cradled by his legs. He deliberately pulled his hair in front of his
face. The boy wore it slicked back in public because his father wanted it that
way, but he despised it. He wanted it in his face, hiding his expression from everyone
who always stared at him because he was so pale and thin, practically albino
with his white hair and colorless, washed-out eyes. He felt like a puddle, or
an almost-empty glass of water.
The black slacks and white button-down shirt his
father forced him to wear didn't lend themselves to the punk-rocker image, but
that wasn't really what he wanted, and he could make do with what he had.
Damn it. His head was hurting again.
Plastic
hit nylon. The strings twanged. Notes hit the walls, bounced around like happy
children, tugging at his hands. Where had he been? Why had he stayed away so
long? That's what the music wanted to know.
He
ignored it, and played, just let his fingers wander along the strings. After
awhile, he began to sing, toying with lyrics he'd been working on the night
before.
“Like nothing burns in front of a cold sun,
Wanna go round and round, round and round.
Fighting through empty spaces and we're done.
Just wanna go round and round, round and round
Can't hear through tinkling chimes of glass breaking,
As we go around and round, always around.
Can't see past the masks everyone keeps faking,
As they go round and round, round and round...”
Something
wet touched Orpheus's hand, but he ignored it. Another wet thing splashed his
wrist, wetting the skin over his pulse. It was transparent as glass, and hotter
than blood. His head was pounding. He wished it would rain, so he could go
outside and walk in it, instead of the sun beating down like it did in the
summer, baking the sand and pavement until your sneakers melted to everything.
But wishes weren't horses,
and beggars didn't ride. So the boy ignored the weather. Instead, he kept
mumbling half-lyrics, adjusting here, tweaking there, listening to his heart
hurting in his chest.
His fingers danced, and he
tried to ignore the sound of breaking dishes, his father roaring, his mother
shrieking. Orpheus wished he were older, just by a few months. Wished that it
was later in the year, closer to August. Then he'd just leave for real, back to
school, instead of only leaving in his mind.
Leave for real... he'd get to
that point, one day very, very soon.
§
In fact, he reached it the
next day. As soon as he heard Calliope spew a rapid stream of obscenities, he
picked up his guitar, stuffed his shoes on his feet, and left.
Through the dust of the
desert, he walked until his house was lost amidst a tiny suburban sea at the
base of the mountain. Higher and higher he climbed. Cholla and paddle cactus
thorns snagged his jeans. Scorpions and tarantulas scurried out of the way,
terrified of being crushed under the thick soles of his boots.
And when he reached the top
of the hill at the base of the Catalina Mountains, he sat on one of the
near-searing red stones, under a Joshua tree. Orpheus set his guitar on his
lap, and played.
He lost himself in the hum of
nylon strings, the melancholy song that seemed to pour out of him. He played
the sun beating down on his skin, burning him raw. He plucked out the rapid-fire
chitter of cicadas, the leaping song of coyotes as the sun begins to sink, the
chirping of cactus wrens and the rustling of pack rats in their tumbleweed
nests.
Orpheus played it all: the
music of the desert, the soul of the world.
Then the girl sneezed. His
fingers stilled. Whirling around, he saw her standing behind him, eyes wide in
her dusty face.
Fairy, his
mind whispered.
It was her eyes; eyes so
bright, they held the late autumn sun. That's what Orpheus saw at first,
because somehow he hadn't noticed the girl until she was right on him. Her
hair, sun-streaked brown and tipped green, streamed down her back and out like
a banner, catching and playing with the light. Blue jeans with rips in the
knees, a thin green sweater so worn it was almost gray and had thready holes in
the elbows showed off her spiky bones. She wore brown Vans with green and no
socks. Her ankles were just as spiky as the rest of her.
Now Orpheus understood why
he'd first thought fairy. She was as close to one as humanly possible, this
green-eyed girl.
He slowly rose to his feet,
never taking his eyes off her face.
"W-w-what's...what's
your name?" He whispered. Shyness suddenly surged up through him, and he
ducked his head, hiding behind his silvery hair. His face burned.
"Dice," she
murmured. Her voice was the tawny wind after a dust storm through the branches
of green mesquite, warm as baking creosote in spring. "My name...Dice."
"Where did you come
from?" He asked, because he had no idea. Somehow she had simply appeared,
a desert mirage.
Her sunshine eyes flickered
to the Joshua tree, then back to him. She bit her lip and gestured almost
helplessly to his guitar. "You call me," she said, "from...from
Joshua tree. You...you need me. Orpheus. You...Orpheus. You need me." Confusion
clouded her features. "Why? Why do you need me?"
Something sharp and hot
lanced his chest when her eyes finally found his. His mouth went dry. He did,
he realized dazedly, eyes stinging. He didn’t even know this girl, and he
needed her. Orpheus could see an answering need in her eyes, eyes as green as
sahauro, in the expression on her slender face.
And not only did he need her,
but somehow, without understanding how, without ever having met her before, he
knew her.
As soon as he understood the
fierce yearning for this too-familiar girl, he ran. Oh, how he ran.
Heart thundering, his ribs
spasmed; lungs burned and legs ached. Still, he ran, on and on and on, skidding
down the hillside, oblivious to thorns and stones and rattler holes. The thin,
whippy branches of mesquite trees cut his face, tried to drag him back, force
him to return to that girl watching his dust and calling his name.
Eyes streaming with tears,
every step rattling his bones, the sobs burst from him. All around him, the
desert yipped and chattered and howled, calling to him, Coward. Coward. Coward.
Orpheus would've clapped his
hands to his ears, but if he did, he would pitch forward and fall. But he
didn't want to hear. He couldn't let himself hear the voices of the mesquite
and the Joshua trees. They accused him. They rebuked him.
He kept running. Overhead,
the sky split open on the heels of a crack of thunder and the first drops of
monsoon rain began plunging towards the earth.
Orpheus ran away from that
girl, ran from her familiar, hungry eyes like the sun on the green blood of the
sahauro, putting the sheeting rain between them. He hadn't meant to look into
her eyes and see the sunshine behind her face. As soon as their eyes locked,
his chest had begun to burn with an overwhelming sadness.
Tears poured like rain as he
booked it down the path through the raging monsoon rains. The trail back to
Houghton Road was only a river of mud now. Orpheus slipped in it, fell, soaking
his jeans. He tasted grit in his mouth. Lunging to his feet, the running went
on.
When he got home, drenched
and mud-streaked, crying tears that tasted of acid, he realized he'd left his
guitar on the hill.
§
She picked up the guitar,
clutched it to her chest as she huddled under the spiky branches of her tree.
The rain pelted down, soaking her to the skin. Dice didn’t mind.
She understood why Orpheus
had run. She knew about freedom, about chains, about needing and depending on
something so violent and furious as what had arced between them when their eyes
met. She wasn’t angry.
Leaning against the rigid
skin of the Joshua tree, she drew in a breath that carried the scent of wet
earth and green life. Then she faded into the tree.
Dice could wait.
§
That night, he dreamed of
her, dreamed of cool water and hot desert sand, the shimmer of blistering
summer air and a heart that beat in time with his. He woke in a sweat, the
sheets so hot they stuck to his skin like melted wax. Her name was heat and
raindrops on his lips.
"Dice...."
He got up, threw on a pair of
worn jeans and his thick hiking boots. In the hallway, he glanced towards the
door of his parents' bedroom. His father's snores nearly rattled the windows.
Smiling a little, Orpheus walked out of his house and into the moonlit night
without looking back.
He made it to the hill at the
foot of the Santa Rita Mountains, where the lone Joshua tree stood by the flat,
red stone where he'd sat earlier that day. Leaning against the skin of the
tree, gleaming in the light of the full, white moon, was his guitar.
Orpheus lifted it, strummed
the strings experimentally to make sure it was in tune. With the monsoon, you
just never knew. Sometimes the humidity soaked into the strings and the wood,
fattening them up until they could only screech. But each of his string
thrummed beautifully, and the wood wasn't even damp. So he bent his head,
mentally crossed his fingers, and began to play.
Everything he'd ever dreamed
or thought or hoped for or needed flowed into his song.
Dragons and roses, ocean
waves, ships and stars, stories told by the hum of nylon string over varnished
wood: princesses in towers, boys with wings who fell and boys with wings who
flew, fairies dancing, a girl riding on the back of a reindeer, two children in
a cradle like a little boat, a woman with snakes for hair in the arms of a
lion-faced man.
Girls who rode on fish, boys
in towers made of ice, cities melting into oceans and skyscrapers turning into
mountains, skeletons and dresses like cakes: he played everything, calling to
her, calling to Dice, calling to the girl in the Joshua tree. He played until
his fingers bled, and then a cool hand was pulling his from the strings.
"Orpheus," she
said, softly, her head tilted to the side. She looked so modern, in her jeans and
sweater, her spiked hair and her electric green makeup. She hadn’t been wearing
makeup before, but she looked beautiful either way.
"Dice. You... you're a—"
"Nymph."
"A
nymph. They're Greek, right? Aren't you supposed to...I dunno...be in a toga or
something?" He asked, feeling foolish. Her rich laugh made him smile.
"Toga?"
She whispered, and blinked once. The sweater and hip huggers melted into a
shimmering drape of silk the color of clouded jade and dark honey. She shook
her head and the short, spiked hair suddenly tumbled down around her shoulders
like a cascade of thick, viridian curls. "Like this?"
His
brain shut down when she tilted her head and the moonlight touched on the
shadow of her body beneath the silk. He drew in a breath, choked on his own
saliva. Coughing, clearing his throat, he fought his blush. Could a guy trip
over his own feet when he wasn't moving? He almost managed it.
"You
like?" Her voice was the night wind.
"Um...um...yes.
No! Maybe...yes! Yes? Definitely..."
She
tilted her head the other way, curiosity dancing across her face in the
moonlight. Pale silver light brushed against the column of her throat, the
slope of her skin where it touched bronze silk.
"Jeans
are fine," he practically yelped, trying to focus on her eyes, on the safe
warmth flowing from her gaze, and not stare at the skin washed silver. He
swallowed hard. "I like jeans."
She laughed, but her voice was cool as spring water
and soothed the burning in his face. He closed his eyes, counted to five,
peeked. Dice was once again in holey sweater and jeans.
"Better?"
She asked. He nodded, blushing hot.
"Are you... are you a goddess or something?"
"No,"
she said. "I am nymph... but not common nymph." Her words were slow
as time and halting, but he could have listened to her voice forever. "Not
epimeliad, or hamadryad, or meliae or leuce—"
"Well,
good,” he said, trying to smooth away the distress in her eyes. “'Cause I don't
know what any of those things are. It's all Greek to me, dude."
She
laughed again, put her hand on his arm. Smiling with her autumn sunshine eyes,
she leaned in and whispered, "Orpheus." Her breath was the heat of
high summer on red stone and desert sand, but sweet as the cool breezes of
monsoon.
And
then she kissed him, and it was like the music of the desert.
