Arch-Conspirator(11)

Haemon paused by the door.

“I’ll talk to him,” he said, and my sharp laugh followed him out.





7

Ismene




One of the servants walked me back to my room, and I tried not to be offended that they didn’t even think me troublesome enough to warrant a guard. She didn’t speak to me, though I was desperate to hear something normal, some chatter about breakfast or discussion of the weather, something, anything to make the world feel like it had before, even if it was just for a second.

I went straight to the bathroom and stood in the tub as it filled, the water turning pink from the blood on the soles of my feet. Staring down at my toes, I got the unsettling feeling that I had been here before, and I remembered the art project we did in school, the teacher painting our palms and our feet and instructing us to make shapes on a big piece of paper with our footprints and handprints. We each got a color, and mine was red.

I looked again at the pale pink water, and vomited.

I moved through the rest of the morning like something was chasing me, urging me to move faster. Emptied the tub and scrubbed my legs and feet until they were flushed with color. Braided my hair and chose a dress. Chose a different one when I remembered I was mourning. Laced my shoes tight around my ankles. Ate my breakfast in bits and pieces. Pinches of toast and bites of apple. Dry and sour and nauseating.

I heard the decree from there. Not the exact words, but the shapes of them, the timbre of Kreon’s voice recognizable even through the windowpanes and walls. There were horns throughout our district for announcements such as these. I had stood beneath them before, to hear warnings for storms, for fire, for high levels of radiation, for curfews.

It was the maid who brought my lunch who told me what he said.

Then Eurydice came, with all the quiet that usually attended her, her eyes red and the fine hair that framed her cheeks a little wet, as if she’d splashed water on her face.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

I was crying. It had been happening all day, tears just leaking out of my body, as passive as bleeding.

“What for?” I asked her, a touch of bitterness in my voice. “Have you done something I’m not aware of?” I tilted my head. “Or perhaps failed to do something?”

She pressed her mouth into a line.

“I came to ask you if you’d like to perform Eteocles’ Extraction,” she said.

I felt as if I’d drunk poison. Bitterness filled my mouth, my throat. Bitterness soured my stomach and dried up my tears. To offer this to me as if it was a mercy was the height of cruelty. Of course I would perform Eteocles’ Extraction. Of course Kreon would permit it—my brother had died defending him. Of course.

And Polyneikes would rot.

I followed her through the hallways to the courtyard. It was bright outside, the sky a white haze, and the rest of the bodies had been cleared from the courtyard. The bloodstains had been sprayed down and then covered with a fresh layer of dirt. The trampled plants had been removed by the root, the places they occupied packed down and smoothed over. And lying on his back under the cypress tree was Eteocles.

His skin was coated in dust. Blood had dried around his mouth. Someone had put his hands at his sides and straightened his legs, a posture he had never taken when alive, so he looked unlike himself—like a statue of my brother instead of the actual form of him. I stood at his feet for a few long moments.

Eteocles knew me, and I knew him. How he struggled to make sense of things, sometimes; how he found it easier to simply follow the rules. How he craved not praise but affirmation that he was doing what was expected of him. How he envied the lively energy of our twin siblings, and shared with me a desire to be like them, all edges, always on the verge of some kind of revelation. But we were not like them. We were like each other. Quiet and level. A cup of flour skimmed with the flat of a knife. A picture frame hanging just so on a wall. The click of a metronome.

Three elderwomen stepped out of the house. There were always three, waiting for the Extraction to be done. They would wrap the body in cloth and then carry it, two at the head and one at the feet. I looked over their rounded shoulders to the street beyond the courtyard, where a cart waited for Eteocles’ body. They would take it back to the mortuary, and burn it.

There would be only women there. No man would dare touch a body, fearing its emptiness. Empty things were hungry. They wanted to take. But women were different. Once we could no longer bear life, our sole responsibility was to attend the dead.

“Can I have some water,” I said to one of them. “And a cloth.”

I knelt at his head and waited. The oldest of them—or so it seemed, her face had the deepest lines—brought me a small bowl of water with a folded scrap of linen a few minutes later, and I began to clean his face. I scrubbed at the dried blood around his mouth. I ran the wet cloth along his cheeks and brow. I discovered my father anew in his crooked nose, my mother in his attached earlobes.

When I was finished, Eurydice handed me an Extractor. I lifted Eteocles’ shirt. There was a scar on his abdomen from an appendix removal. I touched four fingers to his cold stomach, below his belly button.

I was a woman, so this was my task, mine and Antigone’s. We had learned the right procedures from our mother, and she had learned them from hers. No one had asked us if we wanted to. No one had asked us if we could bear it.