Xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, page 1
PENGUIN BOOKS
KATE BERNHEIMER is the editor of the World Fantasy Award–winning anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, as well as Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales and Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales. She is also the author of the story collection Horse, Flower, Bird, the novels The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, and The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold, and several children’s books. The founder and editor of the literary journal Fairy Tale Review, she has spoken on fairy tales at the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard University, and the 92nd Street Y. She teaches at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband, the writer Brent Hendricks, and their daughter.
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First published in Penguin Books 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Kate Bernheimer
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Bernheimer, Kate.
xo Orpheus : fifty new myths / Kate Bernheimer.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-14-312242-5
ISBN 978-0-698-13626-7
1. Mythology, Greek—Fiction. 2. Greece—History—Fiction. 3. Fantasy fiction.
PS3602.E76.X6 2013
813'.608037—dc23
2013020128
These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction by KATE BERNHEIMER
In the modern characterization of Orpheus, culled from diverging stories of antiquity, Orpheus is the best musician of all time—let’s make that the greatest artist. Orpheus could play the lyre so well that animals, rocks, and trees danced to his songs; he was so good at his chosen instrument that he even charmed Hades into letting his bride, who had died after falling into a pit of vipers, return to the world of the living. But Orpheus made one little mistake.
ANTHROPOGENESIS AND NORSE CREATION MYTH
Laura van den Berg
Anthropogenesis
Or: How to Make a Family
The city was their home. Top floor of a narrow brownstone, no elevator, hallways as dark as caves. They lived near a train yard, where the tracks intersected like arteries. Twice a day, the passing trains shook their tiny apartment like a toy. It was not an extraordinary place, but extraordinary things would happen there.
ARGOS
Joy Williams
Argos
Perhaps you’ve read of me. I am the hound old Argos. I once belonged to the hero Odysseus some twenty-seven, twenty-eight hundred years ago. Homer granted me a few lines in his epic. He presented me then in a pathetic light.
BACCHANTES
Sabina Murray
The Sisters
From the start, it was a mistake. Carson Bakely was an earnest student, but he possessed a mediocre intellect, and, frankly, I wasn’t sure what to do with him. He showed up during office hours one sunny afternoon when I had been left to my book—all the other graduate students were no doubt filling the outdoor seats at the Cambridge bars—looking freshly scrubbed and ready for some assignment.
BAUCIS AND PHILEMON
Edward Carey
Sawdust
I remember them, though I was only a child. They would always be together. If you looked out for them you might see them on a street corner, or you would come across them at dusk leaned up against a tree, heaving and muttering.
BROWNIES
Maile Chapman
Friend Robin
I knew well that my mother had been wanting to move closer to me for some time, so when she took a fall on the sidewalk outside her senior apartment complex back east I broke her lease and brought her to Nevada.
THE CALIPH OF ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS
Text and Illustrations by David B.
The Veiled Prophet
CANDAULES AND GYGES, AS TOLD BY HERODOTUS
Elanor Dymott
Henry and Booboo
It would be eight years before he told her he’d killed them. Or at least, before he told her he held himself responsible for their deaths, which at the time were put down to natural causes: dehydration, the heat of the sun, overexertion.
COYOTE MYTHS
Shane Jones
Modern Coyote
After the doctor gave them the choice, they took their baby home.
“He’s here,” said Ben, into the phone. “They let us leave.”
CRONOS
Aimee Bender
Devourings
The ogre’s wife was a good woman. She was not an ogre, but she was ugly, by human standards, and she had married the ogre because he was strong and productive, and together they had made six small ogre children. The children all took after their father.
DAEDALUS
Ron Currie, Jr.
Labyrinth
Once there was a boy whose father built a labyrinth.
This is a different story from the one you know. This father didn’t build the labyrinth to imprison a half-man, half-bovine monster. He didn’t build it to appease a king. No one’s going to fashion wings out of feathers and wax, and no one will plummet into the ocean to demonstrate the price of hubris.
DAEDALUS
Anthony Marra
The Last Flight of Daedalus
The villagers watched as he touched down on sand. Shoulder-sore, sun-pink, his arms caged in wooden shelves of feathers, he was not the harpy, not the geryon they had feared. He wore his beard in the style of Minos.
DAPHNE
Dawn Raffel
Daphne
And so it came to pass that Daphne grew weary of being a tree. For centuries, Daphne had been grateful for her wooden status, and had even come to quietly enjoy Apollo’s visits, during which he swore abiding adoration.
DEMETER
Maile Meloy
Demeter
When they divided up the year, Demeter had chosen, for her own, the months when the days start getting longer. It was easier that way. It meant that she delivered her daughter back to her ex-husband in the late, bright Montana summer and she could handle it then, most of the time, with a little pharmaceutical help.
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
Willy Vlautin
Kid Collins
Walt Collins is at the Fitzgerald playing blackjack when his sister, Lorna, waves to him from across the table. She has her five-year-old daughter Cora with her. She also has a black eye and a dried line of mascara down her cheek.
ERIS
Gina Ochsner
Sleeping Beauty
She might have been considered pretty. The other girls in Yakutsk Children’s Home #5 told Lena that she was. Full lips, dark flashing eyes, violet like a storm gathering over the ice. Lena would be prettier if she wasn’t so angry, Director Laskaya said to the girl from time to time.
GALATEA AND PYGMALION
Madeline Miller
Galatea
It was almost sweet the way they worried about me.
“You’re so pale,” the nurse said. “You must keep quiet until your color returns.”
GOD AND SATAN
Manuel Muñoz
The Hand
The town held twenty churches, large and small, north and south, east and west, on both sides of the railroad tracks. The Baptists and the Mennonites had dark glass doors and triangular arches, the walls of polished stones. The First Christian, a marble and cement façade made yellow by the rains. The Episcopalians, a tiny one-room with a red door glimmering through the winter fog.
GOLEM AND PYGMALION
Benjamin Percy
The Dummy
She was pretty enough for a man. That’s what people said about her. Short feathery hair. Shovel of a jaw. Eyes that seemed to squint with no sun.
HADES
Kate Bernheimer
The Girl with the Talking Shadow
My shadow learned to walk when I learned to walk, and her first word was also my own. When I lost my teeth, she lost her teeth too. The Tooth Fairy left me a quarter; my
HUMAN PENTACHROMATS
Edith Pearlman
Wait and See
Lyle stares at a lemon.
How does the lemon appear to Lyle? The rough skin is what he has been taught to call yellow, and he knows many modifiers of that word—pale, bright, dull; he knows also metaphoric substitutes: gold, butter, dandelion, even lemon.
ICARUS
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud
An Occasional Icarus
Don’t think I write to be believed. At this point in my life, I couldn’t care less. Besides, there’s no chance anyone would buy my tale. If someone tried to lay it on me, I’d just shrug. Shrug all you want, then. What follows is true down to the very last word.
KILLCROP
Victor LaValle
Killcrop
Someone in the apartment was screaming. Had been screaming for a while now. Was it him? No. He didn’t think so. How could he scream underwater? Underwater was how he felt. Sunk. Waterlogged. Drowned.
THE KRAKEN
Ben Loory
The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun
Once there was a squid who fell in love with the sun. He’d been a strange squid ever since he was born—one of his eyes pointed off in an odd direction, and one of his tentacles was a little deformed.
LAMIA/CHILD-EATING DEMON, GREEK
Elizabeth McCracken
Birdsong from the Radio
“Long ago,” Leonora told her children, and the telling was long ago, too, “I was just ordinary.” Of course they didn’t believe her. She was taller than other mothers, with a mouthful of nibbling, nuzzling teeth, and an affectionate chin she used as a lever. Her hair was roan, her eyes taurine.
THE LOTUS EATERS
Aurelie Sheehan
The Lotus Eaters
Artesia jumped the fence into the broken-down-to-crap miniature golf course, and then came Pog, and then Pete and the other girl. The world was a gorgeous chocolate brown, a gleaming purring soft color that also glittered.
THE MAENADS AND SINBAD THE SAILOR
Elizabeth Evans
Slaves
We lived in caves, on battlefields, in fortresses, schoolhouses, Hollywood, meadows, the Old West, cabins, huts, boxcars, castles. We knew our aptitude for gathering berries, being orphans, starring in movies, disarming witches, fleeing armies, teaching school, working in offices with typewriters and carbon paper, nursing soldiers, tending bar, building with twigs and bigger sticks.
MAHABHARATA
Max Gladstone
Drona’s Death
War rages on, and Drona is its heart.
Some songs tell of good wars, kind wars, wars where, when the fighting’s over, you sit alone in the woods and breathe and think, this was good, this thing I’ve done.
MONSTERS
Sheila Heti
So Many-Headed Gates
Soon, all the trains fell apart. Then all the planes did. Then all the plants did. When the planes and plants and trains had been destroyed, it was time for him and I to show ourselves to each other in our true colors. After all, there was no natural beauty to distract us from each other now.
EDITH HAMILTON’S MYTHOLOGY
Kelly Braffet and Owen King
The Status of Myth
The day he was born, the Steelers won the Super Bowl. And that’s why, every year, our hero eats a football-shaped cake at his Super Bowl party. For many years, his mother made the cake; then, for a few years, the task fell to assorted girlfriends and other designated female intercessionaries.
NARCISSUS
Zachary Mason
Narcissus
Beautiful rooms full of light and fire and everyone pretending not to look at me. I was much desired, by rich boys with their hearts breathily on their sleeves, rich men’s wives d’une age certain in rather a lot of kohl, urbane and athletic Athenians who spoke of friendship and excellence, spendthrifty wine-factors whose chins trembled when I breathed on them.
ODYSSEUS
Michael Jeffrey Lee
Back to Blandon
I was given a very warm welcome when I returned home after my trip abroad. In fact, as my ship pulled in, a small crowd gathered right there on the dock, waving their hands and handkerchiefs, crying excitedly, and smiling in my direction.
ODYSSEUS
Davis Schneiderman
The Story I Am Speaking to You Now
These are the first words of the story I am speaking to you now: —Once, in the beginning of robots—
OEDIPUS
Imad Rahman
The Brigadier-General Takes His Final Stand, by James Butt
The Brigadier-General wears a frayed bathrobe in a mildewed, smoky nonsmoking hotel room, someplace Midwestern, perhaps Ohio, someplace cheap, perhaps Econo Lodge. To get here you drive through the series of pocketed communities that fray the outskirts of these usual someplaces, someplaces that are like industrial cities that were once more industrious cities.
ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE
Heidi Julavits
DARK RESORT
Let’s assume there’s a man on a beach because there is. Let’s assume he is a husband because he’s wearing a wedding ring. Let’s assume he’s just been married because he fiddles with this ring perpetually, and as he’s on a beach, let’s assume he’s made the terrible mistake of going on a honeymoon.
PARADISE
Karen Tei Yamashita
Mystery Spot: 95065
Santa Cruz is someone’s paradise. Funny thing for a Brazilian to say. Don’t those handsome naked bronzed people from the Southern Hemisphere live in Paradise? What about their paradise? And what about the Surfer Dude and the Lighthouse, beacons guarding our looking-glass world, long ago left to us by the Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku. Our looking-glass paradise. Paradise Lost.
PERSEPHONE
Emma Straub and Peter Straub
Lost Lake
Eudora Hale spent the warm months in Fairlady with her mother, and the cold months in Lost Lake with her father. That’s how it seemed, at least. Now that she was old enough—nearly thirteen—Eudora knew that whatever the time of year the sun would never reach Lost Lake the way it did Fairlady. Some parts of the world were difficult to find, even for beams of light.
PHAETON, FROM OVID’S METAMORPHOSES
Kevin Wilson
What Wants My Son
I got to choose the meeting place, so I picked the mall. I tried to think of the one location my dad would most hate, and this was all I could come up with. It made me so mad, as I sat there in the food court, not eating because I wanted him to pay for it, because it hit me that the worst place actually would have been the apartment where Mom and I live.
POSEIDON
Laird Hunt
Thousand
One town got a god who carried another town inside of him which locals were sometimes allowed to enter, never to return. Another town got a god shaped like a loaded pincushion who had to be placed on a shelf out of reach of adults and long-armed children because what looked like pins were not pins and what looked like cushion would bubble the skin and boil the eyes and make the bones burn.
POST-APOCALYPSE
Manuela Draeger
Belle-Medusa
The other night, someone knocked on the door.
It was late. It was very dark and very cold. Throughout the entire evening, I had listened to the silences and the noises reverberating above the city, in the towers and the crumbling houses, in the empty streets.
