The Rottweiler waits in front of the alley. She pants in the humidity and drips saliva into a puddle that never dries. She is there to discourage onlookers from looking on, but no one would give the alley a second thought if not for her choke-chained vigil. She’s a ghastly attraction, a metaphor, and perhaps a wry soul: she rises to the tune of Cracker Jack and broods over a rotating jewelry tree hung with rhinestones and spikes before selecting the shiniest collar for the day’s intimidation. Then Logic, with her polished needle, pops the fancy. The Rottweiler is shackled to her task. She doesn’t mean to fail. It’s not her fault that a guard dog betrays something secret and valuable in the way that a lock evokes treasure; nor is it her fault that dogs these days draw attention. If in my youth dogs had had such popular and unquestioned support—not the dread of attack and unwelcome tidings, the bark before the storm—I might have been cursed with jackals. Or minks, dozens of them flashing their teeth in a glittering fringe like an Opryland starlet. But I am an ancient myth and should not know what that looks like.

Don’t you know myths are timeless? They live in the tellings. My name is Scylla. You remember me from high school. 

The Odyssey? Scylla and Charybdis?

Google me. I’ll wait.

That’s me on the pottery. The iron oxide gives an orange look, or you can add carotenemia to my list of defects. The digital drawings? Ignore those. Sea serpents, water worms, krakens, Ursula with her sharky grin—they lack fidelity to the source material. 

So do I.

I was born a monster. I could describe the reptilian features, excessive appendages—luggage, at this point, and to what evolutionary advantage?—and fatal reek, but I think DeviantArt has it covered. This is the archetype. Monster. The unresearched Scylla who can slither into any nightmare and make off with your sleep. Efficient, that one, if generic. Even the ancient bards thought so. Cowled, scabfooted bards. They didn’t know the power they wielded. In the chronology of bards, poets, students and beatniks who’ve handled my story and shaped me to whim, only a handful have understood the kineticism of storytelling. And what do they do with that power but blather on and on? But I digress (which is different from blathering).

So the bards. They grew bored, conceited, and in their one-upping each other in the halls of bored, conceited kings they smartened up my story. I don’t know which version of Scylla to believe, which to prefer, and whom to loathe as a result. All I know is I was a happy little horror in a cave all my own—because all monsters live in caves—until proto-romanticism flowered the verses and dropped me on a shadeless beach where the sea god Glaucus would paddle by and fall in love. I was, in this version, a nymph. 

I would have shared the attraction because Glaucus was born mortal and became immortal, and even though it was an herb and not a daring feat that made him a god, I admired his mobility as a sign of progress in a restrictive and gelid social hierarchy—nope. That would have been political of me. I was a sea nymph, too modest to hold opinions or withstand manly attention. The bards had scaled me, pared me down, to a slip of a woman whose inborn strength, if any remained, had sublimed to the skin: a living net of sunshine and salt crystals that like the mirrors of Archimedes could burn a man alive. Not that it did. I was supposed to be womanly. Soft, gentle, luster without substance. Stuck within the posy of fair, fainting heroines, I dissolved into seafoam whenever Glaucus reared his head over the waves. 

Foam into waves, all that sloshing around… Sounds rather immodest, but who am I to dispute poetic license? License, noun, the artsy sense: permission to deviate from the standard.

From which standard—maiden or monster—am I deviant?

How deviant, when choke-chained to the Classics?

Because I was a nymph, and thus beautiful, and therefore virtuous, a.k.a. virginal, I teased poor Glaucus’s sea-salty heart. He staggered with it to the witch Circe’s house and asked her for a potion to make me love him. He hardly realized that she had a heart, bleeding for him and prickly against any contenders for his affection. And she probably didn’t know how to make a love potion anyway, or else she would have used it on him, and then who would have hosted the Argives?

Who would have eaten them? 

She slipped her spiteful brew into my bathing pool, and as I waded in, my legs and belly began to itch. The skin distended, the bones cracked, and my body burst in a swarm of sentient appendages. Imagine the awkwardness: you expect to be cleansed and emerge from your bath with disfigurements so random as to dispute the sanity, let alone the sobriety, of the bard who sang them. Who defiled me. My skin, so soft you could feel me only by warmth, chipped once more into scales. I transformed from nymph to mongrel, extra as ever, with twelve tentacles, six snaky heads, and a girdle of baying dogs. Some bards gave me the benefit of a human torso, if only to tie everything together and sing a lyric or two on my tits. 

Hybridizing land and sea animals in one “voluptuous” being, they stationed Scylla 3.0 on a cliff overlooking the Straits of Messina. My snaky heads roved the vertical face over the churning waters, picking sailors off trespassing ships, and my lower half—or part of it, there were so many parts—secured me from the depths of a cave, the obligatory one, not the native one. I was a monster abroad! The rock walls were helpfully rough so the slime of my tentacles didn’t accidentally shoot me into the whirlpool, which may or may not have appreciated the company. Charybdis is a hard one to read. 

She hasn’t got much of a story because no one’s decided what to do with her. She is sometimes a whirlpool and sometimes the monster below it. When it’s her turn to scare the audience, Charybdis whips herself into a screaming tizzy. Any telling, she thinks, could be her big break. But no matter how hard she purées and pukes, she is always a diminished chord in the bard’s accelerando back to the hero. She allegedly helped her father Poseidon in a turf war against Zeus, submerging lands and peoples until the Almighty chained her to the bottom of the sea. He likes to chain maidens to things. But he didn’t like Charybdis, or he liked her until the next one, at which point he turned the fair rebel into a bladder with flippers. He also gave her a hankering for the sea. She sucks water into her membranous cavity, glutting on chum and dolphins and Argive galleys, and then belches it back out. All this she accomplishes three times a day. I tell the time by her bulimia. I think she would make a terse conversant, a health inspector in mustard yellow, if allowed to surface.

If. I forget myself. Wishful thinking is for the bards—they will beautify or vandalize by the mood of the audience—but wishful thinking on us, on the monsters, is self-flagellation. And we’re not in Church. Not yet.

Charybdis and I have smart talks. I play both parts because she speaks in roars and bubbles, and only the three times. We go something like this:

ME: Any masts on the horizon?

CHARYBDIS: I can’t see the horizon.

M: …Right. You’re not missing much, I swear. Cloudy as always.

C: Don’t patronize me.

M: Really! The environs of monsters have to be gloomy.

C: You think? I get these fish with lanterns on their heads that light up before they bite you. It’s nice. Like, the dark yet shines with stars. I bet the real thing is nice.

M: Yeah…

C: You have the real thing, right? You get stars, right?

M: Of course I get stars.

C: Did I say something?

M: I wish you wouldn’t eat them all. 

C: What are you talking about?

M: I don’t know, check your bowels.

C: Just bilge and bile. 

M: Because you upchucked them.

C: If this is about the sailors—

M: Why can’t you spare them? Just one of them?

C: Now wait a minute. I get them soggy and cold. You get them while they’re fresh and fighting. And they always steer your way.

M: Because you’re more formidable.

C: Well, that’s true.

M: Bitch.

M: Charybdis?

M: Don’t be like that.

M: Ryb?

Sometimes we get ambitious:

ME: Why do we tell stories?

CHARYBDIS: Because we have nothing to say of ourselves.

M: Isn’t that the point? To talk about ourselves?

C: I guess so.

M: Don’t agree if you don’t agree.

C: No, you’re usually right.

M: Spit it out. No offense.

C: What if stories are more than portraits?

M: …

C: Self- or otherwise. What if stories are a belief system?

M: What do you believe?

C: I favor Jainism—

M: Does it matter what you believe? Like, when you’re not allowed to speak for yourself, think for yourself, exist for yourself, when you’re a faceless spook in periphery, who wants your following? Who wants your love? Are you capable of it?

C: … I guess not.

M: Ryb, you old bladdergab, I completely agree, but I’m afraid it’s time for your afternoon ejaculation.

C: FfffffffffffffffffffffffffwahahahahahaFWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

The waters level when she finishes. A chunk of driftwood wobbles to the surface. It’s survived the flock of grebes that got vortexed into the faceless maw. Charybdis makes me grateful for sphincters, and tits, and beyond my diversion at her expense I would miss her silly ideas when the next epic poet, a Calvinist, transported me from Messina to a far dingier cleft of rock in a place called Hell.

***

What is a hell? Some say it’s a holding cell. A negative mindset. A mother-in-law. For me, it’s another cave.

The ambiance is ruddy and tricksterish from the radiation off the lake. It burns, which I feel is a promotion from regular water and regular caves. All this cave-dwelling was starting to make me feel stupid, though I never bought the metaphor of caves being primitive states. Caves nurse the purest secrets out there. How many times can I say ‘cave’? From the Latin cavere, ‘beware’, I wonder what here is the real danger. Or whom. That must be the secret.

The adjustment from Greek mythology to English poetry was okay. Milton respects the word of the ancient bards, although I’m not sure he respects me. To be fair, he’s entrusted me with the key to the front gates when he might have just slipped it under a doormat. 

I’m not sure he respects me. 

He’s named me Sin and assigned me a family. I thought that was nice of him until I saw the cast list: 

SIN: a.k.a. Hell’s doormat; a hideous monster who looks a lot like, but according to claims of originality that precede copyright law is not (but is) Scylla

SIN’S FATHER: Satan

SIN’S CONSORT: Satan

SIN’S SON: Death

The dogs are also my sons. They are English spaniels, and they gestate and burst forth in a matter of hours. I’ve adopted some of Charybdis’s rhythmic expulsions: the dogs teeth on my entrails, which openly dangle like a sea jelly’s skirt, then they ride the zoomies back up and inside me until they are expelled once more. It’s requital for my new namesake.

I used to be a maiden with an iron deficiency. Is it anti-feminist to miss that version? As Scylla 4.0, I can say that not all remodels are upgrades. Charybdis would know. I miss her drowned laughter. I miss our whirlpool, its spray like glass bits, and the superstitious jigs of sailors who tested us. Their fear as they rowed forth. The juice of their fear. Those were the days. 

This is why I don’t mind Circe. Call her witch. Call her bitch. Give her two versions, and she’ll cross them into a sailframe rigged in pigskin and rip across the sea, going her own way. Notwithstanding the potion that spoiled my girlish figure, she seemed to respect me. She let me commit horrors without becoming them. At Messina I ate men for nutriment, and only occasionally out of boredom, and in that way I was both animal and feeling. Hunger and heart. I was not merely a Scylla who scyllaed (verb, past tense: to eat men for nutriment and occasionally out of boredom). The actor was more than her reported acts. 

I might have forgiven the flatness of my hellish version, Sin who sins, except she doesn’t leave much room for goodwill. Moreover, Sin-who-sins is presumptuous. I’ve seen no account of my famous misdeeds, not in Milton’s epic or the primary text. The former says I am born and raped by my father; I go on to be endlessly prolific in dogs, death and dimwittedness; I am to prevent the damned from escaping, but I let out the first one to sweet-talk me (Father again). Maybe that’s the sin, stupidity. I too hate stupid women. 

But the English students shake their heads. “You’re an allegory,” they say, waving college-ruled flash cards like darts.

I don’t know what it means. “You’re the allegory,” I say.

“We’re AP Lit.”

It sounds militant. Wary of paper cuts, I resign to be allegory and steel myself against future escape artists.

I live in thresholds: the beach, the strait, the gates. Guarding the in-between, I see why I am both mammal and reptile, land and sea. My monstrosity lies in broken divisions and double valence. My sin is as much yours as it is mine. Yes, yours. But what do I know of you? We’ve only covered the Scyllas (Scyllae?). Let’s review: generic monster, nymph, Strait guardian, Sin. That’s how you and your predecessors have cast me over the years. If you could collapse me into a single version, what would I look like? How many tentacles? Let me collapse you. You’re a fan. Indignity! you cry. I am an intellectual. I have a satchel! However you costume yourself, it’s true. Listener or reader, ancient or antiquarian, you’re a fan in a continuum of fans who like my story and decide that that’s license to fuck with it. Take Sin. The dogs mean to frighten you against wicked living, but your sadism reproduces them in the Norton Anthology. You hate sin and adore Sin, a damsel in damnation because in that state I am more than the abstract, with my ugly agony. I am the ambergris to the moralist’s perfume. I am the non-exemplar, the deterrent, the fire and brimstone—to what end? Are we onto the next Scylla already? Let me finish. You never let me finish. You make all these Scyllas, pry their mouths open and pump me sick with metafiction, flippant and fun, as if attitude were empowerment. I can speak for myself. Or would that discomfit you? I know you’re a fan, you mean me no harm. But don’t you? Don’t we—Scylla and Charybdis, Sin and Death, gatekeeper and reaper—lend our misery to your sordid catharsis? Make me screech from a cliff, vomit a whirlpool, submit to violation in an alien underworld, because someone has to take all the evil. If I do, you’ll be free of it. Is that right?

Next time you tell a story, see what monsters you make and from what cave in your psyche they burst.

***

Let’s call a truce. This is Scylla 4.0. I’ve devised a new name for your kind. It’s vague enough and pretentious enough, so there’s room for everyone and his ego. It’s mythmaker. 

No? We can workshop it later. Something is about to happen.

The howls of the damned have unnerved me, so I shush them. Then I grow used to them and start waving my tentacles, directing the music. It’s not any good. The precise term is cacophony. I stop conducting. Stop caring. Hell isn’t a challenge. 

I go upstairs.

Satan must have anticipated a walk-in or two because he reclines on a paisley sofa in the atrium. Asshole. Despite his devil-may-care-wink-wink attitude, Satan offers himself like a tower on an open hill. I’m right here. Make the charge.

To the experienced cave-dweller, the open shine of the atrium seems wondrous. The glass walls and stainless fixtures bounce light here and there like a playful sea. Then you recall where you fit in the brilliance: you don’t. You’re the eel in the deep, the buoy’s barnacled underside. You’re not meant to surface, your shame exposed, forced to take space, focus, meaning. Charybdis has it good, chained to the ocean floor. Her ghastliness is unknown to her. She fancies herself the next Andromeda. I miss our gripe sessions, my words, her bubbles, thickening the mist so it gathered on my cheeks like the tears I refused to shed because what would crying accomplish? Charybdis thinks I’m too practical, too bent on outward acts and tangible things, but really I’m looking for proof of existence. Proof of will. I want to do something real, something myself.

I cross the atrium, sliming the white marble. Satan hears me coming and acts casual. He’s lying on his right side, left wing airing over the back of the sofa, while he squeezes a ball of kinetic sand into crude shapes. The sand is neon green. He looks up. “Scylla—” He clears his throat, grinning too wide. “AScylla the Hun! How goes it?”

I will not indulge him with a laugh. I will not be softened with for it is written and returned gently, helplessly, to pecking order. I scare him. That pinched grin he wears, attempting to show me he isn’t fazed, that he still has the poet’s favor, that my story won’t contaminate his—it gives me something to fight.

“I’m being underused,” I say, holding my key ring for him to see. It has the one key, small, more symbolic than useful. “Give me a real job or let me go.”

His pinions twitch. “I don’t make the rules.”

“You made me,” I say, “Dad.”

“This again.” He folds the open wing over himself, nestling under a blanket of feathers that muffle his voice. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“We all have parts to play,” I say.

“Righto. Yours is guarding the gates.”

“Who’s trying to get in?”

“Satanists and spelunkers. I have no idea. Just guard it.” His voice scrapes with ennui. I might have sympathized, but I don’t care for the dismissal. As if his suffering outstrips mine.

“I’m not your Rottweiler,” I say.

“That would be unlikely. Milton wasn’t from Rottweil.”

“Or Rome.” I can’t help myself. “The Romans used Rottweilers—before the name, of course—as herd dogs.”

“What makes you think I care?” He too is a myth. There’s nothing he can do for me or himself. We’ve chatted before. I come back because in the white between lines, in the breath between tellings, I have room for this small, silly mutiny.

Is that why he calls me Scylla, not SIN?

“Fine,” I say, extending the olive branch. I may be naive to reason with him, to think we might feel the same emptiness and distract each other from it, but until Scylla 5.0 what else do I have? The floor is getting slippery. I’ve stood and secreted for too long in one spot, and the dogs will emerge soon. The pressure builds in my belly. The skin itches and stripes. I refuse to look.

But Satan is curious. He peeks out from his wing like a crab under a sail. “Want some sand?”

“Next time.” I stretch my back tentacles for a bit of dry marble and start to shimmy on a slant (tentacles don’t backpedal well). I’m doing alright with my nose in the air, my focus outward, denying the well-lit spectacle of myself. So much squelching. “I’ll be back,” I say, scooching zig by zag toward the door.

“I’ll be here,” Satan says. He lowers his wing, tucks himself in. He doesn’t care to laugh at me. Why should I want him to? I don’t like being ridiculous. 

But, without ridicule, I am nothing. 

How easy for him to flatten me. Two can play. With a lash of one tentacle I can punch through those feathers and knock the moon sand from his chubby fingers. And what shape will it have? A star? A cow? A woman? It won’t matter when the sand hits the floor, pancake.

“Must be nice,” I mumble, wiping the sweat from my forehead.

“What?”

To have something to work on. To be worked without knowing it. The dogs rumble within me. “To be the same,” I say. “To be untouched. Even in downfall, you’re beautiful.”

He gives a high, kettlish shriek. “Why do people love wings so much? Try sleeping with them. Something always gets crushed. And the preening glands! Anything leather becomes a slip n’ slide, so you have to do fabric until the oil shows, and then half your expenses go to reupholstery. By the way, thoughts on the paisley?”

“It’s stupid.”

“It won’t keep,” he says. “Nor will we. The story goes on. People can’t seem to end things, and when the story goes on and on, where will we find ourselves?” The wing shakes. He’s laughing. “Ourselves. That’s one more stupidity. Our selves!”

The dogs thrash for release. I double in pain and see everything. Pale swells. Limbs like intestines. Scales that host tiny, white mites. I pick one and eat it. Let him hear the vile crunch. His suffering gets painted in carmine and gold. The manly smolder. The uncompromised musculature. Defy not, warn the frescoes, and don’t skip leg day. All that noblesse for a traitor, supposedly, and what crime have I committed? Tell me.

Tell me so I can grow spikes.

The atrium rattles. I’m not the only one transformed. Satan’s feathers have petrified. His laughter shakes them like sticks, and in the slivers between their knocking about, I see something dark. A blackened form with rolling eyes. A skull riven with screws. He screams. “Ourselves!”

My sweat turns cold. “We are nothing but what they can exploit.”

“Scyll-Lo-Green,” he gasps, “I thought you were being underused.”

“That’s not what I—” 

The dogs rush out. I shudder, dropping them in bloody balls that array themselves about my deflating abdomen. Their eyes wheel, their jaws snap, as the six of them jockey for optimal placement. Each wants a hip joint, slightly higher than the navel and out of my direct eyeline so they are less likely to get bopped on the head for misbehavior. When they settle into a squirming belt, I bop them all for the terrible timing. They bark in protest.

Satan’s lip curls. “What are you trying to salvage? The part of you that’s ‘untouched’? That’s fiction. Guard something real.”

“Fuck you,” I say, but the dogs bark over me.

“Not again.” His laughter rises like a flight of pigeons. “Please!”

He hasn’t seen me angry. He thinks I’m a device for him to practice authority on. I cannot know his degree of suffering; I’m not as important, as reviled, as the disgraced archangel whose name gutters and snaps according to the latest gothic trend. Mine, if anyone knows it, repulses. But it’s steady in periphery, relentless as a fetal heart. I show Satan my ugliness with a grin of my own. Count my teeth. They’re still human, dull enough to bruise while they bleed you.

 It splits my face like a crocodile’s cutter. I am delirious with potential that will never bear consequence. I could pin him to the sofa that’s uglier than the pair of us and have my way with him as he did with me. As it is written. To shake the uncontrol, one need only transfer it. Because misery goes when and where bidden. Because it’s the knife, not the sensitivity. Idiots. What will you mythmakers do with us? 

You’ll side with Satan. Upgrade him to the next version, a martyr baptized in ink. Your ink, my slime, dazzling black our co-authorship. I’ll be one of you. I’ll be damned. 

I’ll meet myself at the gates.

I cackle. 

Satan isn’t fazed. His garnet eye carries its own designs upon the mythmakers, who eventually die and partake of the tortures they’ve poetized. He’s patient, more so than I. “Tell me, Scylla. You want to be let alone?”

The answer palpitates between us. I want… It sounds stupid. It’s not radical enough. 

Satan measures me in my ballgown of agony. “No. You want a better story.”

***

The pigs hunt for scraps. Pushing their snouts through the mud, they seek the cabbage and fish bones that their mistress allows them and turn up anything but: rubber balls, pencils, Barbie dolls. A few pigs, the youngest Argives, gnaw on the dolls for something to put in their mouths. They think to mitigate the hunger. They think survival will save them.

My dogs strain for fresh meat. I slither toward the sty, which looks warm and inviting in the candleglow from the banquet hall. 

“Control your mutts!” 

I look up. Circe’s crouched on the roof. She wears a hardhat and toolbelt over a fuchsia pantsuit. Her hammer strikes the shingles with finality itself. “I’m remodeling,” she says before I can ask. “It had to be done.” She moves toward the ladder, slipping the hammer into her belt. The leather is pink with gray spots. As she moves to the roof’s edge, her shadow lengthens over the sty. The pigs run. The suck of their hooves sounds like me on a Sunday stroll. It reminds me why I’ve come. If anyone has the power to better her story, or wiggle around in it, it’s Circe. She changed me once; she can teach me to master my form and be what monster, maiden, or titless blob I please despite your clamor for grotesquerie. 

Don’t think I’ve forgotten you. You just stay there and watch. Your time is winding down.

“What’s eating you?” Circe asks, hopping off the last rung. Her landing excites a cloud of dust, revealing a crudely carved name on the ground. She walks over the epitaph and stops before me. “You look worse than usual. And you’ve been gone from your post.”

“I have a new one,” I say. 

“Says who?”

“Milton.”

“Who… I don’t care. What brings you back?” She takes off the hardhat.

Her head is shaved. She looks like an Egyptian queen, or the queen’s flat-eyed cat. Either way, she carries her power in her face, not her trappings, and the intensity of her features electrifies. It’s no wonder she gets her way. I tell her what I want.

“I wish it were up to me,” she says. “But I’m the Sorceress.”

“Exactly! Take me on as your pupil.”

She rolls her shoulders, betraying underneath the magenta, the careful hairlessness, the home improvement, exhaustion. “Walk away, Scylla.”

“You took my legs.”

She rubs the red between her eyes. “If I fix you a tonic to grow them back, will you leave?”

I don’t understand. I’m not the antagonist. I’m only a guard dog. And Circe, despite the poisons and trysts that spangle her narrative, is a woman too tired for camaraderie.

She shifts the hardhat from one hand to the other. “Look, I have a quota. A characterization. I bring out the worst in people. I charm men into monsters and gyrate in the night in the name of camp witchcraft. I can’t restore your body or spare a cup of sugar because I’m a bitch. Our enmity is inscribed. There’s no avoiding the narrative, no outrunning it. Did you know I make decoupage? Nobody ever mentions the decoupage. It’s not bitchy enough. I once covered my dresser in paper flowers so it looked like the Rock of Punishment, and the next morning it was all gone and the dresser–” She sputters like a horse against the bit– “was freshly waxed! The insolence. I thought Odysseus had done it in defense of the woodworking, but he didn’t notice one way or the other. It’s not the dresser that keeps him from his wife.” She bites her lip, watching me for rebuke. Circe thinks, after wronging us, that the wife and I are friends. Victims on one side, villain on the other. 

“Ha,” I say, obsequious octopus. “Too much hair.”

She rubs the top of her head. Already a fuzz tickles her palm. She scowls. “It doesn’t stick. Nothing does. Whatever I do, in and around poisoning dinner guests, is just a slipknot in time. The decoupage. The crossfit. My cameo on The Great British Baking Show.”

“How’d that go?”

“I made pastelli, but no one ate it.” 

“I wonder why.”

“Xenophobes.” She cracks her neck and watches the pigs in their mire. How different was the beach where they fought the Trojans? Ten years of bloodletting must have thickened the sand to a martian crust. Now, in unsung filth, the Argives feel damned. As if Circe cares, or has the power, to damn. She’s got her vendetta against you mythmakers, making curly-tailed POWs of your favorite heroes, and as the sty teems she thinks she’s winning. She doesn’t see that her gains are yours. Beckon and trick, doth the Sorceress. All that badasserie from a trope. Her poisoning me wasn’t a crime of revenge; it was compliance to the narrative. I’m sorry I came. Even this meeting, strange and unlikely by the assumption of our antagonism, proceeds from her volatility, my messiness. Our mutiny is inscribed. How many heads have I to grow before understanding that true volition is not physique? It’s a fantasy. 

Let the pigs grunt, Circe. You fill their troughs. You rake their filth. Their subjection is all you have in the way of power. Besides the crafting, which hardly counts. But I am curious about the old hall.

“It was too comfortable,” Circe says. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to settle down but I’m too restless.” She says ‘restless’ in a dreamy gust, as if sipping wine from a grotto in the clouds. The dogs growl. I bop them quiet.

“I’m sure you have little projects,” she says. I doubt she wants a demonstration, but here I go anyway, curling my two o’clock tentacle into a loop. The suction cups hold for one, two, three seconds before the secretion overcomes the grip. The tentacle loosens and in an instant shoots free, slapping the dirt like timber. The pigs scream. 

I’ve been working on that one awhile.

Circe looks grudgingly interested. “Bowline or noose?” 

“It’s for storage,” I say. To loop my key. Speaking of, I expect Hell to recall me any minute. With the sun loosing red ribbons over the sea, I can expect the next beatnik to transplant and torture me within the hour. I start to shimmy away.

“Where are you going?”

“To Hell.”

“Oh.” Circe nods slowly. “Is it nice there?”

I prop a tentacle under my chin and have a think. “You know when you go somewhere, and the place is okay but the people suck? What do you call that?”

“Life.”

I laugh. The sound, bright and nymphish, surprises me. “Yes. Hell is a hot spring for bad people and bird-people.”

“Wait a minute.” She swings the hardhat back onto her head and marches off. Does she want me to follow? The scissor-clip of her stride demands it. 

I find her behind the hall, in a clearing of stumps. She raises her arms over the fledgling yard as if casting a spell. Instead, she makes a frame of her thumbs and index fingers and asks me about a jacuzzi. “Over there. You’ve inspired me.”

My expertise is in fear and distaste, not backyard construction. I’m touched.

“You wouldn’t fit,” she says quickly.

“And the wet dog smell.”

She grins under her polyethylene visor. “I knew I liked you.”

We have dinner. Of the profusion on Circe’s table, I stick to fish and let my dogs lick the bones. They slaver on the floor, but Circe doesn’t mind. Her hair has grown into a chic mullet, and the encroachment of curls over her ears infuriates her to savagery. She rolls her sleeves up and hunches like a miner over a lunch pail, talking around the food so that her cheeks jut and words garble. She’s low-key disgusting. The liking is mutual.

“Can I ask,” I say when she takes a fistful of olives, “why am I like this?”

She halts midbite. She’s never been asked. Her other victims don’t have the power of speech. There must be a reason for my hybridity. For dogs and tentacles instead of hooves. What was she thinking when she poured her contaminant in my pool? Curse her canine enthusiasm and saltwater sense of humor. Let her feel wretchedness and strike it in others by the pale sludge of her body, its grumble and squelch, its offense against goodness. No one will love her. She must kill them, devour them, for warmth. 

Circe chews for a while. She doesn’t answer until she’s swallowed. Her words are crisp. “No idea.”

My gut tightens. Of course. She’s as cardboard as I am. 

I laugh it out. Nothing sticks. Nothing matters. I laugh until my eyes run, wipe them with my napkin and toss it over my shoulder. Want a better story, Scylla? Conspire with the witch. She has no idea, only a quota. She makes good branzino.

“Here.” Circe wipes her hands on her pants and pulls something from her blazer. It’s a snuffbox. Done over in French wallpaper, it shows a blue gentleman with a picnic basket. He holds the hand of a blue lady, and together they walk in a blue pasture. The scene, the craftsmanship, the uncensored anachronism in Circe’s possession, makes me ache. I reach for the box. Circe pockets it fast. “No one knows,” she says, lowering her voice. “No one’s noticed. I’ve had it for years.”

I gawk. “How?”

“I keep it on me. Anything on me seems to stay.” She giggles into her wine. “The decoupage wins.”

I raise my goblet. “You really are a sorceress.”

We drink.

“With your tentacle trick,” she says, “think how much you can keep. I’m envious.”

And my next version, Scylla 5.0, will be the goddess of shoplifters. I shake my head. “What do I have to keep? I don’t craft.”

Circe looks baffled. “You can collect rocks from your various caves.”

“I have no passion for souvenirs.”

“Well,” she says, “what do you like?”

The question, the fact of the question, mortifies me. 

“What do you do in your free time?”

Do I have free time? I’m usually guarding something or other, but in the lull between trespassers, I do the Scylla-and-Charybdis bit. It’s silly, hardly a hobby, but Circe’s stare wrings it out of me. “I like improv.”

She shudders.

“I mean, it’s more like devising. I devise scenes for me and my friend.”

“And in these scenes, you…” Circe waves her fingers, indicating mystery or tentacles.

“I play both parts. I’m also the director. And sometimes the Music Supervisor.” I flush under Circe’s scrutiny. “It’s whatever.”

“You’re a bard,” she says.

She might as well have chucked salt at me. “That’s offensive.”

“Don’t you tell stories?” 

I finish my wine, as if that will tame the flush in my cheeks. “Nothing comes of them.”
“How can you be sure?” She leans forward. Her elbows dig into the table. Her attention darkens the hall. The mood of conspiracy crackles in my diaphragm. More than adrenaline, I feel potential. Something is about to happen. I’m done waiting.

I tell her a story.

***

Here’s the story.

The top-performing bards, poets, and academics take a cruise through Messina. It is Mythmakers Incorporated’s annual retreat. Everyone drinks too much ouzo, and the boat lists my way. It skirts the whirlpool and brings the storytellers to my side.

I gobble them all. Bits of paper and tweed stick in my gums. Bastardize me now.

I call to Charybdis.

ME: I’m back!

CHARYBDIS: Goody.

M: Come on, Ryb. For old times’ sake.

C, sighing: How you been?  

M: I saw Glaucus and turned into a tidepool, starfish and everything. Then I came here and nabbed a half dozen sailors. Then I birthed a litter of hellhounds and took down a cruise. The mythmakers think they can make us up, make us over, however they like. They don’t know a thing about us. It’s you and me against the world, right Ryb? …Ryb?

ME falls silent. Scylla has imagined CHARYBDIS saying, “Tell me more,” but cannot decide which of the following interpretations will prevail:

Tell me more: encouragement for ME to go on about the mythmakers.

Tell ME more: a trippy imperative in which CHARYBDIS, voiced by Scylla, prompts ME (also Scylla) to either tell herself (ME/Scylla/ALL) more on the current subject or to demand more of herself (as in, Tell ME “More!”).

Tell me ‘More’: an invitation for Scylla to feed CHARYBDIS the line, ‘More.’

ME: Help me out, Ryb. What’s it going to be?

M: It’s just you and me, Ryb. You’ve got to say something.

M: Ryb?

The surface is still. Charybdis takes her time. She’s undecided. She’s ignoring me. 

She is me.

The dogs bark. Their noise scares off the silence and their thrashing jerks me, testing my balance over the whirlpool. My tentacles tighten against the resounding vibrations. I’m absorbed, almost rallied, by the uncontrol. If I fall headfirst, will the impact of the surface break me like an egg? Will Charybdis drink my spillage when I’m too dead to make her? Will she die too?

Will she start living?

We’re not equals. The Strait needs one monster; the other is a sidekick, a dependent, a byproduct for symmetry’s sake. If I am the Rottweiler guarding against trespassers, Charybdis reflects me from the puddle below: all muzzle, hint of eyes, horrible by the horrible angle. She has no choice. I’ve spoken her into flat, futile existence. 

I am one of you. 

As the dogs calm again to sporadic growling, I wonder whether they act on instinct, benevolence, or compliance to the narrative. Their saliva rains down the cliff, scumming the waters between the strait and, beyond it, Circe’s isle. On clear days, her trees hang in blue shards and her shore crawls with hunched forms, men turned to pigs. Their noises fold into mine. She has taken their humanness and left the humanity, just a hint of it in their brittle cries, just enough to humor them. As for you mythmakers, she may indeed have a love potion. She’s talked herself into a chair at your table. Quite the storyteller, once I showed her how it goes. Now she rests her elbows on the oaken round and pitches my next cave to a council of intellectuals who hum and nod over coffee that tastes of wood stirrers. I mutate in the meeting notes, this petri dish, and hunger for finality. What am I? Are you sure? Are we done here? 

I trace the walls of my cave. Algae crumbs like wet wallpaper, like a secret marred by its own hoarding. I have only language, this movement up and down, vicious as sea air as it burns my windpipe with what is said and what is unspeakable. Charybdis. Ryb. I want to play. 

But she is not an outlet for my need. Might she appear on her own? The waves push without breaking like rams in stampede. I wait. The waiting skins me alive. Charybdis is a figment until I command her to flesh. It will be the last time. I say, “Come to me.”

The strait erupts in a screaming white tent. When the water falls back in diamond spray, there’s a woman at the bottom of a great nothingness. She unfolds. On two feet, dripping brine, she walks toward me. Her silence spreads, black and pungent as buzzards’ wings. My throat tightens against it. I expect to choke out and wake with only my bones for company.

“Go on, Ryb,” I say, and watch her glide into the horizon. Out there, in that pale band between wounded clouds and fitful sea, I hope she’ll go on without me. 

As for you, Mythmaker, I leave you off. You know more of me now than most. Don’t spend it all in one breath. If you must, start with the worst. Get your piece out of the way so I can put on my spiked collar and guard what part of me might pulse on its own. 

[Katherine P. F. Holmes is an English teacher and writer. Her work has been published in Litbreak Magazine, Capulet Magazine, CauldronAnthology, and Illinois’s Emerging Writers. She lives in Boston.]