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Penelope never slept anymore. When she did sleep, she had the oddest of dreams. Terrible dreams. Dreams filled with dead birds piled upon the floor and bloody handprints on the walls. Sometimes she would hear wailing and crying from somewhere in the palace, and no matter how much she searched and searched, she could not find the source of it. Her dreams were the sort of thing a priest would find quite alarming, a sign of impending doom from the gods. The dreams weren’t why Penelope did not sleep. Penelope did not sleep because she feared, one day, when she opened her eyes, 108 men would be staring down at her. Gaping and hungry.
So Queen Penelope of Ithaca did not sleep.
She sat at her loom instead. Always the loom. And she worked, but never could she make any progress, as progress meant their eyes turned to her once more, gaping open and hungry. You are finished yet? Will you choose a husband now? So she wove, and she unwove, and she wove, and she unwove, and then she wove again. She unwove every time.
“That doesn’t seem very productive, does it?”
He moved just like he did in life, just as Penelope remembered him. Head curiously tilted, face grinning wolfishly.
She really hadn’t slept in far, far too long. And when Penelope didn’t sleep, she feared her clever mind got away from her.
“I mean, the weaving, the unweaving, the weaving, the unweaving…” The memory, the shimmering glimmer of the past, slunk from the shadows and stopped behind her to lean over her shoulder. He admired her work. He had always admired her work. “It’s a shame, when you make such pretty things, to destroy them. Isn’t it?”
Penelope did not look at him. She focused on her fingers, pale and so numb she was surprised she could still move them. Her mind really got away from her when she didn’t sleep. Penelope thought she was going mad sometimes. It seemed impossible, but then she remembered lots of people went mad. The gods were not stingy in handing out madness.
“I hate when you ignore me, you know…I hate when anyone ignores me, but you most of all.”
Penelope did not know what it was, this shining image that visited her. A ghost, she was tempted to say. But that was impossible. The mirage gleamed too brightly to be a ghost, and Odysseus was not dead. Odysseus was too clever to be dead.
He sighed.
“Penelope, please.”
Penelope. He said it just like Odysseus would. If it were not a ghost, or a product of her madness, what else was he? Penelope had another idea. He was a shimmering fragment of something Odysseus had forgotten to take with him. Something he had left behind. Intangible as flickering torchlight.
“I hate it when you ignore me.” He groaned again, drifting from her weaving stool to wander about in aimless strides. She caught flashes of him from the corner of her eye; the dull brown of his hair, his mismatched eyes, his broad, farmer’s shoulders. A memory. This was not the husband who fought through a war. This was the man she fell in love with in Sparta. The cleverest of Helen’s suitors. The boy who boasted loud stories in the hall of her father until she could look nowhere else but at him.
Penelope really, really needed more sleep.
She kept weaving.
~~~
Odysseus was sure he was going mad in some capacity. He had faked it before, studied all the mannerisms of a madman to try and dodge the war. He dared not craft a lie if it were not a good one. And it was good, but it had failed still. Then, as it goes, off he went, Ithaca behind him.
It was not a lie anymore, he suspected.
Odysseus was sure he had gone at least a little mad. Who wouldn’t? Ajax was mad. Heracles was mad. He had faced damn more than either of them if he were the judge.
Athena, salvage my mind, if you have any love left to give me. It was always my best part.
Odysseus couldn’t bear to stay in Calypso’s home, however nice it was. The burning hearth felt like fire. The fragrance of cleft cedar and juniper was suffocating. Her bed made his skin itch. She may have forced him there at night, but during the day, he fled to the cliffs overlooking the shore instead.
Her voice carried wherever he went, humming constantly in sickeningly sweet timbre, but at least here was an illusion of solitude.
Odysseus could think quite clearly still, as clearly as ever. He could work around the island with ease. He could think of clever plots to deceive Calypso, and he was lucid enough to know that none of them would work. All of those things pointed to sanity, but Odysseus suspected he was going mad for one simple reason.
“The ocean is churning today. Did you notice that? I’d say a storm is coming.”
She sat on the cliffside. One pale, gangly leg swinging over the side in simple contemplation. She was just as observant as his Spartan princess, just as clever, just as…everything. Everything was just the same. Long, dark hair like a river’s current. Blue dresses with long sleeves. Scalloped-edged ears. Pearls. Moles on her cheek. Long, pale fingers. Lanky limbs all folded into each other. The girl he had fallen in love with in Sparta, with the duckish laugh and the quick wit and the flickering, nervous eyes like river agates.
“The sea birds, too. If you look at the seagulls, they’re all tucking in along the rocks and the coves…does it even storm here? If I were a goddess, and I had my own island, I don’t think it would storm there. I would just make it so it wouldn’t.”
She turned her face to him now. Odysseus didn’t look. He was sure that if he did, he would crumble completely and fall into pitiful pieces.
“Why, you’re quiet. And you’re never quiet.” Penelope gave him a thoughtful sort of look; furrowed brows, her lips pressed together in a tight, pale line. “...you’re not mad at me, are you? Have I done something?”
She was a trick. She had to be. A damned Calypso trick. She was made of light, or starshine, or ocean foam. Not real. Impossible. His Penelope was on Ithaca. His Penelope was as old as he was. His Penelope was waiting. Not here talking about seabirds, on this damned, inescapable, poisonous shit-hole.
“You are mad at me?” She frowned now. When Penelope thought someone was upset with her, she always thought even harder, trying to find the reason. Odysseus couldn’t remember a time when he had been upset with her. Not once. It was like trying to grow upset with a well-meaning duck.
“You’re a trick,” he practically spat it. The sea was churning. It very rarely stormed on Ogygia; Calypso was usually more in control than that. She must have been distracted, daydreaming about dragging him back to her bed. Daydreaming about forcing him to play husband.
“Odysseus, if I were a trick, you wouldn’t know it.”
She said it just like Penelope would, when she was annoyed. As a boy in Sparta, he found it the most amusing thing in the world. A flicker of sharpness in one usually so composed, albeit awkward as she was, was a rare amusement. And that wit, sharp enough to cut you, always made his stomach jump. And the way she said his name, Odysseus, with that hard click of her tongue on the “d”.
Oh, gods. He loved her. Even a trick of hers, he loved.
“Odysseus!”
Calypso called from her cave, her voice as thick and sweet as overly fermented wine. It made him sick. It made his skin crawl. He hated how she said it. She drew out the last “s” like a snake.
“I hate that woman,” Penelope confessed, in that low whisper they always conversed in. Gossip was always her favorite thing in the world, and he would indulge her endlessly. “I hate how she smiles. It’s too wide. Like Charybdis opening her mouth. Have you noticed that?” Penelope leaned back on her pale, lanky arms. He almost laughed.
He had not slept soundly in quite a while, not with Calypso hanging off his arm, pressing into his side. Perhaps that was it. She was a waking dream.
“Odysseus! Come here, darling!” Calypso called again, this time with a touch of impatience. She hated having to call after him more than once.
Odysseus did as she said.
Charybdis, hm? He had not thought of that one.
~~~
“Gods, they’re all quite ugly, aren’t they?”
This time, he was sitting on his throne. Not at all in the right way, though. He had thrown his short legs over the armrest and had stretched his back out along the other side. The young King of Ithaca always had that sort of air about him, then. Before the Trojan War. Boyish carelessness and Hermes-esque mischief. Gods, no wonder Penelope’s father had despised him so much. That one? You want that one?
Penelope sat in her corner, and she wove. The suitors laughed and drank and stumbled over themselves, drinking stolen wine and eating stolen food. Telemachus had gone to sleep, complaining of a headache. Penelope’s maids walked about, occasionally jumping as a stray suitor’s hand slipped up their skirts.
“You’d think at least one would be handsome. Even out of Helen’s suitors, there were a few lookers! But right now, Ithaca boasts the most foul creatures I’ve ever looked at…” His head lolled over to look at her. “You’ve noticed that, Penelope?”
She had tried to sleep the night before. Penelope had dreamed she was standing on a cliffside, overlooking the churning ocean. When she turned, a man was behind her. She couldn’t remember which suitor it was, be it Ctessippus or Elatus, Peisander or Antinous. They all ran together in her mind, however clever it was. Snarling, hungry faces, amplified by 108.
“ What are you doing? ” She had asked carefully. The man then pushed, with all the force of his arms, and down Penelope went. Down, down, down, as helpless as the day her father had thrown her from that Spartan cliff. Except this time, she had no ducks to swoop down and save her.
“Penelope, my love, I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me.”
Those sorts of little pet names always flowed easily from Odysseus’ silver tongue. Once he had first started using them, jokingly and perched beneath a Spartan olive tree, he had never stopped. Though his favorite name for her had always just been her own. His loves and my dears slipped out when he was especially desperate.
Penelope kept weaving. She used purple thread tonight. Tomorrow she might use red, or green, or rich yellow. It never mattered. It never stayed.
“Are you mad ?” He tilted his head all around, like a curious sort of wolf. He always had a wolfish kind of quality to him. It was achingly charming. “I think I’d die of grief if you were mad at me. I hate when you ignore me, Penelope. It makes me feel like the unluckiest man in the world. Now tell me what I’ve done so I can fix it. Please ?”
He never pleaded for anyone else. Odysseus hated the inherent vulnerability that came with begging for anything. Begging didn’t make him look very smart or clever, and Odysseus’ goal in every interaction was always to look very smart and clever.
“I’m working,” Penelope finally murmured, a breath of silent air from her lips. Not that the suitors would notice if she spoke, or even if she screamed. They were too drunk to know their own names.
“I would kill for you to look at me, you know.” He sighed wistfully. “I feel like I haven’t seen your eyes in an eternity. A lifetime .”
Nineteen years, Penelope wanted to correct him.
“They’re beautiful eyes,” he mused. Charm dripped from his words. He was trying to lure her in. It always worked, back in Sparta. It was impossible not to look at him when he spoke. He was a born storyteller, a word weaver of the highest degree. “Brown and lovely. Everyone always went on and on about Helen’s, how they looked like pieces taken from the sky, but I like brown eyes. I like intelligent eyes, with sparks of cleverness around the pupils…”
She felt his eyes, ever insistent. One brown like the Earth, the other an intelligent sort of light blue. Penelope, since the suitors had begun trickling in, had heard a million compliments. She had been the subject of a million sonnets, her name had been drenched in honey and sweetness more times than she could count. Compared to her clever Odysseus, the suitors sounded like stuttering children.
“My Penelope has the cleverest eyes. I say it to anyone who will listen.”
Her fingers became tangled in the thread, a beginner sort of mistake she had not made in years. Many times, in the Spartan hall, on nights when Odysseus told his stories, she would look down and find thread wrapped around her fingers.
“I see you smiling!” The mirage accused, and he smiled so wide that Penelope thought his face would split open. “That is a lovely sight in a field of drunken fools…” Odysseus bit his lip faintly before his eyes drifted back to them. They were as thoughtless and pack following as wild animals, roaring with laughter every time Antinous so much as opened his mouth. “...You’re not going to marry one, are you, Penelope?” He asked.
Penelope unstrung her fingers, but was left with the most persistent of knots.
“No,” she murmured beneath her veil. He asked it just as he would have in Sparta. Masking true feelings beneath arrogant smiles and quickness. “No. I’m not. I wouldn’t.”
“Good.” His head nodded simply, an understanding sort of nod. Even as a flash of light, Penelope could read relief on him. “Good, good…I don’t think you’d like any of them. They would bore you to death. Don’t you think? They’re too dumb to make good company. Not like me.”
She barely smiled. He loved such questions, ‘ don’t you think?’ and ‘ wouldn’t you say ?’ because they always had the same answer.
“I think so, too,” she agreed. “Not like you at all.”
~~~
“Is that nice, love?”
“Hm?” Odysseus could not focus on a word Calypso said. Not a single word.
“I said, isn’t it lovely?”
He still had not heard what she said before. He simply nodded. Most of the time, a nod was all he had to do for her to be grinning and pacified that he was focused on her. Odysseus never was. She was beautiful, sure, lustrous even, but never could he focus on her.
“Oh, you’re restless .” Her skirt swayed as she walked over to him, slumped on some cave wall. She crouched down to meet his eye, smiling ever pleasantly like a statue. Her smile was tight, well-trained, showing all her perfect white teeth. Charybdis, he thought for a moment. Odysseus almost laughed again, a madman sort of laugh.
“Darling…” She lured him back to that place, with her, with the brush of a perfect hand against the high of his cheek. Calypso was short and lovely, shaped as Aphrodite was, with wide eyes and flushed red cheeks. She was as much a tropical paradise as the island she boasted. She had no lanky limbs. She had no nervous fingers. Her brow never creased when she thought. “I know what will help you. I will set loose a boar in my woods, and you might go to hunt it. How about that? A fun game? You love hunting!”
“That sounds fine,” Odysseus said blankly. It was all a dull blur, Calypso sending him on his way, combing through his rough, uncut hair with her fingers. The spear she gave him was sharp, but not too sharp. The kind of thing you gave a boy while he was training, the sort of tool he has missed watching Telemachus fumble about with.
When he was alone, the mirage came back.
“How are you going to kill a boar with that, Odysseus? It looks like a shepherd’s stick.”
Calypso was the same height as him, perhaps slightly shorter, whereas Penelope always had to tilt her head down to look at him. He always thought their proportions were quite funny. He was short, broad-shouldered, with big hands and fingers. She was tall and lanky as a stalk, with slender fingers always off, tugging or fiddling with something. She walked at his side.
“...I don’t know,” he answered carefully. He still did not know what to make of the mirage, whether it trick or a figment of his mind. He tried to be cautious, but sometimes a man is too tired for cautious, and an image is far too lovely to ignore.
Penelope glanced around as they walked, carefully stepping over fallen trees or patches of flowers.
“I don’t believe that,” she confessed.
“Why?”
“You very rarely don’t know something. And if you don’t, you just figure it out.”
His eyes, mismatched and worn, scanned the trees. Sometimes it was all so bright it made his eyes hurt. He longed for the shaded wood of Ithaca, the smell of wet goat cashmere and rain.
Odysseus, as he often did, thought a moment.
“...Why do you look like that?” He finally asked.
“Like what?” Penelope looked down at herself. Her dress was seafoam green today, a wedding present his mother had given her the first day they arrived back in Ithaca. Her hair was done up in dark braids, though Penelope’s hair was so slick it never held a style for long. She couldn’t have been older than 23.
“It’s been 20 years, almost. You can’t possibly still look like that.”
“You’re right,” she said. “Though you don’t know what I look like now, do you? This is what you left behind.”
Penelope was right. She usually was. When Odysseus closed his eyes, tried to conjure her in his mind, the image was always the same. He could only imagine her the way she was, the way he had grown to know her. Cunning, gossip whispering, clever-minded Penelope of Sparta turned young Queen of Ithaca.
“You look very different,” she continued. “Tired.” Her hands reached up curiously towards the vines hanging from the trees, but she did not touch.
He chuckled to himself, though it was hardly funny.
“I am tired,” he confessed.
“Tired men should rest.”
“All I’ve done for 6 years is rest here. I hate it.”
“You never liked sitting still,” she mused. “If you weren’t off doing your Kingly duties, you were always plowing your field. You’re a busy man, Odysseus of Ithaca.”
His footsteps made the grass and fallen leaves crunch softly underneath him. Her feet left no print, like some weary ghost he had seen in the Underworld.
“What are you?” Odysseus finally asked.
“Me? I’m your wife…and your gossip partner, the one who helps you plot your best schemes, don’t you forget. Many of your ideas were mine first.” Penelope smiled jokingly. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
“No, I mean, what are you really? My Penelope is at home. On Ithaca. With my son. You’re a ghost. Though I know you aren’t a ghost, because Penelope isn’t dead .” His fist clenched tightly. She wasn’t. If he came home to find her so, to see that she had gone to the Underworld without him…Odysseus wasn’t sure what he would do. Plunge fully into madness, he assumed. Have his mind burn down like the city of Troy. Start plowing his fields with salt all over again. “Since I see you as you were, I assume you’re part of my imagination. My mind has finally run away from me.”
“You’re not mad, Odyssseus.”
“I feel mad.”
The rustle of brush nearby caught his attention. What would be the point in killing the boar? Calypso conjured all the food they would ever need anyway. There was no danger in being hurt, as Calypso would never allow him to be. It would not be difficult, either. She never made his life difficult. It was all easy, easy, easy.
“If you were, my love, I’d be the first to tell you.”
Pet names never rolled off her tongue, not as easily as Calypso’s. When they did, they were exceptionally lovely. Shy, careful. Penelope spoke like flowing water.
The boar disappeared into the brush, but he hardly cared. Let it disappear.
“...I fear you won’t feel that way,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“If I ever returned.” Odysseus turned the spear carefully in his hand. “I fear…when I get back, if I get back, you won’t like what I am now.” He peered through the trees to the shore, the rolling ocean. Odysseus walked that way, as it always drew him in. “I am a very different man now. From the one you knew. The boy in Sparta, the one you loved. That is not me.”
It is a hard thing to grapple with, a loss of self. Odysseus couldn’t recall when exactly he lost it; he just knew that he did. He had not lost 600 men. He had lost 601.
Penelope kept up with him easily; she always did, with those long, lanky legs.
“If? If” Penelope asked him incredulously.
“She won’t let me go.”
“I won’t let you go either.” Penelope reached for his hand, and for a moment he swore he felt the coolness of her fingers. It was just the breeze. “And who are you to say what I like and what I don’t? You’re clever, Odysseus, but you are not clever enough to think for me.”
Odysseus stopped to look over the ocean again. Bright and dazzling in the twilight, wine-dark and wretched as it had always been.
“Don’t give up on me now,” she said softly.
“I don’t know what else to do. I…I just don’t know.”
“You’ll find something. You always do…look at me, please.”
Odysseus turned his head, looked at her from behind the shaggy locks of his uncut, greying hair.
“ Do not give up,” Penelope said carefully, slowly. She looked as serious as a Queen. “Do not give up now. You are not resigned yet, Odysseus. I am here to tell you that. Always .”
That is what she was. That is what Penelope had been since the beginning. That voice in his head that cut through the doubt.
“...She won’t let me go easily,” Odysseus repeated. It was barely words. Calypso flashed through his head. Her grinning face, eager hands tugging at his tunic, words whispered in his ear. Calypso did not let go. She held until you couldn’t breathe.
“Then let it not be easy,” Penelope whispered. “Let it be difficult. But you have mastered the difficult, Odysseus.”
~~~
“You lying bitch!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. ”
“Oh, you do know, ” Eupeithes had all but spat in the Queen of Ithaca’s face. The fathers of the suitors were just as vile. Rotten fathers raise rotten sons, and so on.
“You can’t prove anything .” He couldn’t. Penelope was careful like that. She walked away even as he still hurled insults, insults he would never dare say if there were a king on the throne.
“Spartan trash! Whore just like your whore cousins! Despicable trickster spinster! You are plotting something, I know it! Come back here, you despicable wench! You need to choose, you hear me?! CHOOSE!”
Penelope was used to such outrage by now. Her name may have once been drenched in seductive honey by the suitors, but the second she kept them waiting too long, all they spat was venom.
So it goes. Rotten sons. Rotten fathers.
Penelope closed the doors of her chambers and bolted them as had become second nature. The mirage lounged, this time, on her wedding bed.
“I must say, I really outdid myself with this one….I started this long before I met you, you know. I left to marry Helen, and it wasn’t quite finished. I’ll finish it when I get home, I told myself. You distracted me so much that I nearly forgot. Did I ever tell you that?”
He had. Dozens of times.
Penelope was used to being screamed at by now, yet it always conjured a ball of heat in her throat, the kind that made her eyes prickle with tears. It was not their words that upset her; she didn’t give a damn what they thought. She was not a young Queen anymore, not the Spartan outsider they had eyed with suspicion. She was an old Queen, and Ithaca was as much her home as anyone else’s. It was just…the frustration of it all. The fear. The worry.
“No,” she lied. She did that sometimes. Just to see his eyes light up at the idea of telling her something new. Penelope was too exhausted to change from her dress, too exhausted to take down her hair. She collapsed onto her side of the olive tree bed.
“Have I told you?”
“Told me what?” Her head had started to pound. Thud, thud, thud. An inescapable nuisance.
“This,” he nodded towards her hair. She had gone grey, but just in one spot along the front of her head. A long, pale streak like ice in a river. “I quite like it, you know. It’s very dignified and queenly.”
That was enough. Penelope started to cry.
“What’s wrong?!” Odysseus sat up immediately, though the bed did not shift with him. Just as she thought. Intangible. A glimmer.
“If you’re dead, just tell me,” she choked out from between tears, hot, pitiful tears she should have left in girlhood, “don’t let me go on like this anymore.”
“Penelope,” he frowned. “You think I would do something that foolish? That I would do something so stupid as to die?”
Penelope could not answer. She felt all at once the same as she did in Sparta. Crying always made her feel like a child. She cried like a nymph, and nymph tears always ran like rain.
“I hate them,” she managed between choking gasps. Gods, get yourself together, Penelope. You had a kingdom to run, suitors to outsmart.
“...I know, dear.”
“I wish they would just… disappear. All of them. If I must live with them another day, I will go mad! If I haven’t already.”
“You’re not mad, Penelope,” he said, laced with tenderness.
“I feel mad,” Penelope bit out. She buried her face in the pillows, letting their coolness envelop her hot, teary face. Penelope was sure she had gone at least a little mad. Who wouldn’t, if they were left as she was?
Odysseus did not speak for a while. Penelope thought he had disappeared again, evaporated into the light.
“Oh, don’t you give up on me now, Penelope...we are so very similar, you and I,” he finally said. “I’ve always thought so…though, if I were you, I think those suitors would be dead already. Xenia be damned. But you are far better than I ever was. More patient. More strong, I’d say. Far stronger than anyone would give you credit for. You do not let hard things conquer you.”
“It’s been 19 years of patience,” Penelope said, “all I feel is conquered… and if you ever come back, you will see me old, and worn, and tired of the world. A spinster at her limit. What then?”
“What then ?” Odysseus mused. She would have done anything to feel his weight beside her. But his voice, even if it was just his voice, eased that hot, angry tension in her throat just a bit. “I’d drop to my knees in sheer, utter relief. I always had a fondness for old spinsters, you know…now, don’t you give up on me. 19 years is nothing, really. Not in the grand scheme of things. And I know you love grand schemes.”
A laugh worked its way out. Gods, Odysseus. Clever Odysseus. He could make her laugh when the world was ending. It’s what he always did when she cried.
When Penelope lifted her head, he was gone…no. Not gone. What he made her feel was real. What he was, the things he said, were real.
Penelope closed her eyes to sleep. She dreamed of nothing that night. Sweet, comforting nothing.