October 2, 2024
Melanie Delbridge
Medusa Revisited
She is in the dark waiting for him. She has been in this cavern so long she feels the darkness as a familiar caress on her skin. She hears the tread of sandals and keeps her eyes closed, careful, lest her scales scrape the stone beneath her coiled body.
“If he thinks I am asleep, I may escape with a painless death,” she thinks. “I desire nothing, but an absence of pain.” Not exactly true, but she will allow herself this lie.
His sandals whisper against the stone as he draws nearer to her resting place.
“I am asleep. Believe it, son of Zeus,” she thinks as she keeps her breathing slow and steady and waits.
She has no anger at him for his desire to murder her. After all, is it not the gods’ desire?
“We are all punished for our crimes. No logic, reason, or balance, just the whim of the gods,” she thinks. “What were my crimes? I did not choose to be born beautiful. I chose the life of the devout,” she thinks bitterly.
She worshiped, hidden in Athena’s temple, cloistered from the advances of men, but what can one do when a god pursues?
When Poseidon came for her, she tried to flee. She ran to her one safe place, the temple. Still, he came. She tried to hide. Still, he found her. She tried to resist. Still, he flooded over and through her. Who can fight the sea? She was just a girl.
She expected vengeance when Athena discovered she had been sullied within the temple. When that vengeance changed her and not the waves which had stolen her innocence, she was as horrified as the expressions frozen forever on the men unlucky enough to see her now hideous countenance.
So she ran again, this time to her sisters in their cave. Her sisters had never known beauty. This world and these gods, who made them hideous from birth, feared their scaly skin, tusks, snakes, claws. The world and these gods never knew the tenderness of her sisters.
She feels her heart coil snakelike at the grief her death will cause. She remembers the terror on her sister Euryale’s hideous face as she recounted her vision. Euryale had the sight and her vision warned of Perseus’ murderous plans.
“A hero, they call him.” Euryale hissed.
Euryale begged her to run, to hide.
“No more,” she replied. “Punish me, kill me, I am finished. I no longer wish to be pursued, feared, reviled. Let him come.”
She rejoiced in Euryale’s vision which revealed her future revenge when Perseus took her head. Her blood spilled would rise as serpents to kill the sons of men.
“I will kill these toys of the gods. I will rejoice when my blood-children murder.”
The scent of sweat assails her nostrils and startles her from her reverie.
“What good is life if it is at the whim of a god?” she thinks, as she listens to his footfalls, furtive and frightened.
“Be afraid, son of Zeus. For I will have my revenge, just as surely as you will have my head.”
She hears the soft, whispering hiss of his sword leaving its sheath and she waits.
Mel Delbridge is a former actor and director who began writing out of necessity to create material for her independent theatre company Sugar High Theatricals. Currently, she is a senior at UW-Superior in the online Writing Program. Mel has published poetry, plays, and short fiction in Coil, the literary journal of Monmouth College, where she attended before transferring to UW-Superior in the summer of 2022. Mel has lived everywhere from Key West, Florida to Venice, California, but currently resides in Galesburg, Illinois with her husband, Fred and two cats, Finn and Aine.
The Nemadji Review 