Aristotle’s Daughter by Andrew Gretes

I called her Circe because animals followed her. Dogs, cats, goats, and the occasional pig. They accompanied her down to the harbor and into a cove, where she would sit in the sand, crack fertilized eggs, and trace the yellow genesis on scraps of papyrus, her animals circling and waiting permission to lick up the hatched puddle of fluid and feathers.

I knew who she was. I knew my tutor would wander down to the cove—loaded with scrolls, a compass, and a straightedge—and sit with the girl and pat her hair and scratch her scalp as if Circe was an animal. He dressed her like a boy: linen tunic with a belt around her waist, her hair cut short. It wasn’t convincing. Our bodies were beginning to betray us.

She knew who I was. I didn’t hide it. I’d tell her how I was going to conquer the world. Athens, Sparta, Sicily, Thrace, Persia. She’d look up from her research, hands smeared in the blood of scholars—carbon and gum and oil—and say, “I pity your mother.”

“Why?”

“You think you’re Hercules.”

“We’re related.”

“In the womb, you mistook the umbilical cord for a snake.”

She’d tell me about the fishermen who set out before dawn, boats equipped with lanterns, hulls glowing like aquatic stars, the men stabbing the water as the mackerel swim up, attracted by the resin flame of the pine torch. They watched her. The fishermen. The way one looks at something shimmying underneath the water and wonders if it’s old enough for the net.

One morning, she was dissecting a cuttlefish. She was crouched on the rocks of the cove, holding a chunk of sharpened obsidian, examining strips of translucent pink and gray. I had recently tamed a horse that was afraid of its own shadow, but I told no one the truth: that I too was afraid of the darkness that follows. I asked Circe if she would chop me into pieces, cook me in a cauldron, and pour me out whole, fearless, godlike. Like Medea did with Jason. She slid her hand down my neck, fingers coated in a cold mucus, and I felt what the tutor felt the day he made Circe with a port prostitute. A cat circled my legs. A dog sneered. Circe refused.

I pointed at the dissection and asked if she found what she was looking for.

She said cuttlefish defecate through a tube atop their head.

“Will you work your mother’s trade?”

She said nothing.

I said, “I’ll take you to find work in the palace of my father.”

“Do you know what he calls slaves?”

He was always the tutor. I said, “You’re not a slave.”

“Property that breathes.”

Circe threw a chunk of the cuttlefish into the sea. Her face was burnt, lips chapped, cheeks wet. She opened her mouth but couldn’t say she was more than respiring reproduction.

The last time I saw her, she was receding in the horizon. I came to give her a present: a bronze rod with a sight at both ends, a tool to measure the position of the stars. A fisherman was lying face down in the sand, holding Circe’s ripped tunic in his dead hands, a dog sitting over him, barking and panting blood. Between the dog’s paws was the sharpened obsidian, speckled red, like an arrowhead of Artemis. One of the pigs was testing the water, snorting out to sea. I watched and lost Circe in the distance. She rowed as if an island was straight ahead. And perhaps it was. Perhaps she would make her home there and draw an incision into the earth and discover a rib-cage of roots and even a heart underneath. I promised, when I conquered the world, I would leave one island free.

Andrew Gretes is the author of How to Dispose of Dead Elephants (Sandstone Press, 2014). His fiction has appeared in Witness, The Pinch, Passages North, and other journals. Currently, he is a doctoral student in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. His website is andrewgretes.com.