Arch-Conspirator(9)

She was never a good actress.

“You know something you don’t want me to know,” I said.

Pacing again. “I don’t know anything. That’s the problem.”

Sighing, I caught her by the wrist and led her toward the bed.

“You can’t predict the future,” I said. “You can’t feel bad things coming, and you can’t make them come by feeling them.”

She nodded. She still looked frantic, and her color was off, but she sat on the edge of the mattress.

“Come on, let’s have a sleepover,” I said. “It’ll be easier to sleep that way.”

She frowned at me. Maybe she was remembering all the sleepovers we had as girls. We would pull the mattress off the bed—Father scolded us for this, since the floor was dirtier than the bed frame—and gather as many pillows as we could from the rest of the house, including the couch cushions, and hang a sheet over the whole nest of down so it felt like we were inside a cloud. Then we would try to stay up all night. Antigone never made it, but I did. I had no shortage of memories to keep me awake, even when both our parents were alive and we knew nothing about the world’s troubles yet.

Antigone liked to say we had been doomed from the start. We came from excess—our parents’ hedonistic desire to see themselves replicated without refinement, heedless of our souls. As a result, I carried too many of yesterday’s woes. Antigone carried too many of tomorrow’s. And Polyneikes carried too many of today’s.

Eteocles, well … Eti was a hard person to know.

This sleepover felt different than the ones in our youth. Heavy with dread. Antigone and I lay on top of the blankets, shoulder to shoulder, sharing the corners of the same pillow. I closed my eyes and tried to find something settled inside myself. But the monkshood was still on the desk, lush and purple, and the hum of anxiety was running down Antigone’s arm like an electric current. Her fingers hooked around mine. Her hands were tacky with sweat. So were mine.

We didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

I dropped off at some point—from sheer boredom, probably—and woke to a clatter.

Antigone was already at the edge of the bed, her hair loose around her shoulders and wild, her feet shoving into sandals. Before I could even say her name, she was throwing my door open and racing down the hallway, and I had no choice but to follow. I ran barefoot down the hall, the stone scraping my heels, and chased her down the stairs and around the bend to the courtyard. I heard distant screams. None of the guards were where they were supposed to be. Everything felt empty and strange, like the world had ended and we had slept through it.

We tumbled into the courtyard together, where ivy grew like fungus on the walls, and the stones were rougher, paler. They cut my feet. The doors to the street were wide open, the bar that usually held them closed lying in the dust. Men were tangled together in the courtyard itself, and everywhere was grunting and groaning and the sound of metal hitting metal. Screams of pain, screams of names, screams of last words intended to fill the night but instead fading into the din. And in the center of the courtyard, two bodies.

My mother once told me she knew me from a distance because of the way I walked. How do I walk? I asked her, full of adolescent insecurity. She only shrugged. Like my daughter, she replied.

It was in that way that I recognized the bodies in the middle of the courtyard as my brothers.

Antigone sprinted right into the middle of the fray, ducking under a swinging arm. She fell to her knees beside one of the bodies. The fight was already ending. There was no surrendering. No raised palms, no swords laid down, nothing but fleeing or dying.

“Get her away from him!”

Kreon’s voice rang out from one of the balconies. He stood there, his chest bare and scarred from his years in the military police, his shorn head reflecting moonlight. He extended a long arm and pointed at Antigone, who was sobbing over our brother’s body; I couldn’t tell which one, Polyneikes or Eteocles, though I knew they were both dead.

One of the guards grabbed her by the shoulders and lifted her like she was nothing. She squirmed and kicked, but she was small—smaller than me, even—and there was nothing she could do. The guard dragged her away flailing and undignified.

I stood under the fall of ivy. There were bodies all over the courtyard. Their blood looked black. I stepped over one, careful, and then another. My footprints left wet impressions on the stone. A guard held out an arm to stop me from going any closer to my brothers. I stopped just behind it, obedient.

My brothers wore identical wounds, just under their ribs. Clutched in their fists—Eteocles’ right and Polyneikes’ left—were identical weapons, short pistols from Kreon’s stores. Eteocles’, given to him by Kreon, a reward for his loyalty. Polyneikes’, likely stolen. There was no one near them. It seemed clear to me, based on how each of them had fallen, that they had fired at each other, one in opposition to our uncle and one in defense of him.

Doomed from the start, I found myself thinking. All of us.





6

Antigone




We didn’t have many pictures of us as children, but in the few we did have, I was indistinguishable from Polyneikes. Both born with a thick head of dark hair, a ready smile, a dimple in one cheek but not the other. He kept the smile. I kept the dimple. We called them “our” baby pictures because it was never certain who was who.