By Sara Davis
Imagine a story you know, but this version begins with a man embracing a tree.
The tree is a laurel tree, slight and smooth-barked, shuddering as if wracked by a solitary storm in the silent wood. Its branches swing like the arms of a runner, exuding a perfume of agitation from its glossy leaves. The man is the son and the sun of Olympus. He is new to immortal life, and in love with the tragedy of his god-sized passions.
Then the slow crawl of tree sap runs hot under Apollo’s palms, and he drops his hands by his sides. The laurel tree retreats, distorts into the form of a woman incandescent with rage. The leaves of the sun god’s victory crown tear from his brow and fly toward the outstretched hands of Daphne; they become the vicious tips of her feral fingers.
When these children of gods break into their inevitable sprint, this time she is chasing him.
Apollo the archer finds his taunts flung back into his throat, all those coarse barbs about his shaft and arrows now hard to swallow. His heels pound the leaf-littered earth as he bolts in the confusion of a predator struck by its prey. Daphne pursues with a swift and tireless lope. She is a disciple of Apollo’s sure-footed sister; she has run down creatures greater than gods for sport. She gives chase until, exhausted by love and fear, Apollo peels off. He flees the forest and grovels to the petty god who set this plot in motion.
Daphne keeps on running. For the pleasure of it or the power of it, she runs long after his footfalls fade. She races deer and outsprints the stream where she so briefly rooted. Forever fleet and untouchable: isn’t that the metamorphosis the huntress would choose?
***
Beyond that antediluvian forest, a man and his wife dwell in a sun-dazzled city favored by the goddess of love. The man is an artist, renowned for sculpting the female form truer to life than life. He is also known as a misanthrope—but I repeat myself.
The wife is a wife; she was not made to be anything else.
On the festival day claimed by the goddess of love, the artist bends toward his wife. Her blood runs cold. Beneath his seeking palms, her luminous skin shimmers with a tracery of fine veins—not unlike the sunlit marble of their blessed city. She is brittle and insensate by the time his mouth finds hers.
Her husband, the artist, removes the festival clothes from her body. He unthreads the pearls from her ears, unwinds the amber beads from her neck. He sets her jewels in a carved wooden box which he will bring to the temple of Venus, who loves common flesh and precious stones with equal abandon.
In the hands of the sculptor, her husband, her ivory is as soft and yielding as butter. He unchisels his wife’s still body into a slab of bone. When Pygmalion is finished, he dwells with the enormous curving tusk of an extinct giant, and no wife.
Galatea sinks into the tranquility of uncarved potential, perhaps finding it kinder to be the plinth than the masterpiece.
***
Priestesses, virgins, queens, and wives on both sides of the Aegean successfully fight off animal attacks. They return to their lives a little mauled, but entire. Hard gold coins bounce up from Danae’s soft belly and drift back into the sky realm of Zeus, who must now keep his filthy lucre to himself.
***
In a sheltered valley, one early spring flower grows beside a pond. On a breezeless day, the pond’s glassy surface reflects the flower in solicitous detail: two bowed heads, two golden cups, nodding at one another in unwavering approval. In the valley, there is also a twin for every murmur and rustle: any fallen branch, any passing shepherd caroling, any raindrop pocking the pond is sounded and resounded.
The flower that arches toward a reflected sun, the voice that can neither speak nor stay silent—how long could they have stayed so before time drew back its relentless tide?
The flower remains as it appears to be, even when a man’s fine features emerge from the corona of petals and the slender stalks fill out into shapely limbs. Transformed, Narcissus remains at the pond’s edge. He is still nodding, still kneeling at the altar of his own beauty.
Not so simple for the incorporeal gossip of the valley. Snatched from her weightless work ferrying around the words of others, Echo is flung screaming back into her physical form. Reinhabited, her body burns with the unrequited longing that she remembers. It sparks with a pinwheel of other pains and hungers she had forgotten.
In this version of the story, there is still a time when Echo loves Narcissus and he loves himself. But the wild racket of tangible sensation ignites her curiosity. She gropes her way out of that haunted valley. She relearns how to speak. She asks, how will I live now? The cacophony of potential answers nearly deafens her.
***
Run backwards, some stories look the same. The clever wife is always weaving and unweaving her shroud. The unlucky bride is always descending into hell.
Could they coax the cosmic spinners to unravel their yarn, loosing the threads that tie them to a hero’s disfiguring love?
No—it makes me furious, but the gods were right. To love something is to change its form. I cannot blame you for stilling my swiftness, embodying your ambitions, or unbodying my desire. I cannot forgive you, either.
Fates, wind back the thread. The bell unrung, the backward glance uncast: let me return to what I was before you.
~~~~~
Sara Davis is a marketing writer and environmental steward who lives in Philadelphia. Her PhD in American literature is from Temple University. She has published fiction and nonfiction in magazines including Cleaver, Okay Donkey, and CRAFT, and she blogs about books and climate change at literarysara.net.