Arch-Conspirator(8)

“I can’t stay,” I said. “I have to go back.”

“Is someone counting down the minutes?”

I couldn’t explain it to her. That would require admitting who I was, which inevitably led back to what I was: a jug without water to fill it, a shell without a nut, a lantern with no flame. I had given her a name that wasn’t mine, a name that wasn’t anyone’s. It was easier than risking her disgust.

Below, the street was crowded with food stalls. The smell of smoke and cooked corn and fried bread wafted up through the curtains.

Instead of answering, I turned in her arms and ran my fingers along her collarbone. Her skin was sticky with sweat. I touched my lips to hers.

“I have to go,” I said again, and she sighed.

I slipped on my sandals and left. Once on the street below, I didn’t look back to see if she was watching me go. Our time was at an end. I wouldn’t see her again. That was what happened when I started to feel like there was a string connecting me to another at the sternum, when my refusals were no longer sufficient for either of us.

It wasn’t built to last anyway. My path was set.



* * *



I tugged the bars out of place on the cellar window and stuck my feet in. With a glance down the alley to the left and to the right to make sure no one was watching, I shimmied through the small opening and dropped down on flat feet into the storage room, between two sacks of grain. I stood on my tiptoes to put the bars back in place, and then picked up an empty bottle from one of the shelves near the door, as if I had merely come here for a new water jug. It was a plausible enough explanation. Household staff didn’t like to talk to us if they could avoid it, so they didn’t ask many questions.

I made it all the way back to our wing of the house before I saw anyone. Eti stood at my door, his fist raised to knock, a flower in his hand. He smiled at me in greeting, but the smile faded too quickly.

“Where were you?” he said. “You look flushed.”

I held up the empty bottle. “I broke mine. Decided to fetch myself another.”

“That’s the second bottle you’ve broken in a week,” he said. “Who is she?”

I took the flower from him and opened my door with my shoulder. “Did you clip this from Kreon’s greenhouse?”

It was just the end of a stem, but it had a few blooms on it, big draping purple things. I put it in the glass of water on my bedside table and carried it to the window. That way the sun would shine through the petals in the morning.

“It’s monkshood,” he said. “So don’t eat it. It’s poison.”

“Is that its only purpose?” I said. All flowers had to have purpose, now, or they wouldn’t be taking up space in a greenhouse.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe so.”

“What a shame,” I said. “It’s so pretty. Thank you.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“She’s no one,” I said. “It was nothing. You don’t need to worry.”

“Others are allowed to have nothings. Not us.”

I didn’t correct him, but he was wrong. He was allowed certain liberties: stolen moments with a lover, an older woman who could no longer bear, anyone who was outside of a man’s protection. But until I was married, I was Kreon’s to guard, and not to be touched. If I didn’t let myself have nothings, I would have nothing.

“Eti,” I said. “Let it go.”

“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

I still felt her arms around my waist. I watched my brother go, and in his absence, I could believe that I really was empty, as the mystics said.

Later that night, all I could see was the flower’s outline against the window. The moon was bright as daylight. I kept fading in and out of sleep and thinking about why Kreon kept poison in the greenhouse next to the potatoes and the wheat. I wiped my palms on my pillowcase and got up to move the flower away from the windowsill. A breeze wafted in, pressing my nightgown tight to my body. Then I heard a knock.

It was Antigone’s knock, four sharp taps. I pulled the stopper from beneath the door—wedged there to keep unwanted people out as I slept—and opened to my sister’s worried eyes. She wore her robe cinched tightly around her waist and sandals on her feet.

“Can I come in?” she said.

I stepped back to let her in, then looked down the hallway in both directions to make sure no one was watching. The hallway was quiet and still, but even that was no guarantee. There was always someone following Antigone in this house. But there was nothing too interesting about sisters seeking comfort with each other.

“Are you all right?” I said to her. She paced toward the middle of my room, where a worn rug covered the stone floor, and then back to me. She was picking at her fingernails like she was plucking guitar strings.

“I have a bad feeling,” she said.

Antigone had bad feelings about everything lately. Her life seemed to be weighed down by dread. Dread of Haemon, dread of a child—as if the more attachments she formed, the more she would wither away. But that wasn’t how it had to work. I had as many obligations as she, and half her misery.

“A bad feeling about what?”

She looked away.

“There’s just something in the air,” she said.