MEDUSA
Beyond all others she
was famed for beauty, and the envious hope
of many suitors. Words would fail to tell
the glory of her hair, most wonderful
of all her charms-A friend declared to me
he saw its lovely splendour. Fame declares
the Sovereign of the Sea attained her love
in chaste Minerva's temple. While enraged
she turned her head away and held her shield
before her eyes. To punish that great crime
Minerva changed the Gorgon's splendid hair
to serpents horrible. And now to strike
her foes with fear, she wears upon her breast
those awful vipers-creatures of her rage.
-Ovid, from Metamorphosis
MEDUSA
Toby had grown up watching Madeline believe in the existence of monsters. He had seen her look for the kind that grew from the shadows cast by her nightlight while her mother stood over her shoulder. Toby knew monsters didn't exist. They never had existed, not in the Bible or in the Hadalpelagic trenches of the Atlantic. At the age of nearly fifteen, any other way of looking at it was moronic.
By his logic, Madeline was incredibly moronic.
Her long fingers drifted through the pollen yellow of her hair. Madeline sat, comb in hand before her bedroom mirror. Toby's mind was put at ease. He stared at the beauty of her, far from his reach, her long regular stroking redundant for hair as fine and long as hers.
Toby had never spoken to her, although he had watched her for most of his life. He had never tried, had never wanted to. Madeline was a girl on a glossy poster, one of the actresses at the drive-in; she was far too beautiful to speak. Toby had never known of anyone at school able to approach her.
The possible exception was her mother. Toby could hear her shouting at Madeline through their thin walls while her mother's boyfriend sat in a different window of the house, drinking. Her mother detested the sight of her daughter combing her hair, and yelled that one of these days she was going to cut it off herself if Madeline wouldn't get it trimmed to a reasonable bob. Toby had thought it was obvious that no pair of scissors could dare cut through her mythic hair.
Madeline shook her head in answer to her mother's anger, and the length of hair shone with near phosphoresce. Again, she lifted her comb as she did every night before undressing for sleep, as she had every night Toby had watched from Madeline's neighbor's crabapple tree.
The tree grew three feet outside the fence of her yard. Soaked with precipitation, his clothing was presently clingy and damp but he was enlivened under the warmth of his jacket. Toby grinned to himself. Tomorrow he would ask someone, anyone, in his homeroom about a class, football, a party, and he would be a part of a conversation.
He would not be beaten up. His teachers would not throw jibes at his vocabulary in front of his peers.
Madeline put the comb back in its place on her table and as she did so bent over the side of her bed, staring into the darkness that came from beneath. As far as Toby had ever known, Madeline had never found anything to be frightened of.
Her back to the window, she let her denim shorts fall to the floor. Her legs tapered slightly; his eyes rose from her feet to her cotton undergarments. Madeline lifted her shirt, revealing bare skin before the window. She turned, and the twin curves of her breasts rose out of the lamplight before she closed the blinds. Madeline's window went dark, and Toby climbed down from the tree. He whistled the Star Wars theme to himself as he walked the four blocks home.
For all the optimism he armed himself with, Toby still went home with black eyes and bruises by the age of sixteen. At the dinner table, his mother would ask if he had fallen again and Toby would nod, while his father ate his words with mashed potatoes and green beans.
His parents never mentioned the boys who had moved into his school district, following an incident in the next county over. The Twins were simple and rash with identical bowl haircuts, but they were cool and played rugby on the school team. Toby was going to be friends with them. He could even tell them apart, and not even the girls they dated could do that.
Toby knew it only a matter of days before he was one of the guys, after all hazing can only last so long. The day before last they had thrown him in the dumpster behind the cafeteria; they had never done that to anyone else. A different observer might think they were attempting to get rid of him, but Toby knew better. The Twins were products of their environment. Toby would try again tomorrow.
And besides, the dumpster's refuse had provided its shares of glories. He kept them carefully organized on top of his dresser in his room, just to prove to himself the benefits that had already come from the Twins. There was an OVERDUE library stamp covered with blue ink, a hammer, a broken compass, a glass Pepsi bottle he had read hadn't been made since 1953, a Jewish dreidel, and a plastic prop sword.
He was proudest of the dumpster sword which he placed at the center of the collection. Toby was not as at home with myths and legends as he was with the scientific method, but he refused to let his mother throw it out. What boy can pull a sword from under heavy garbage bags and not think of King Arthur?
In the year since he had known the Twins, Toby had found himself climbing the crabapple tree more and more frequently. The evening after he had found the dumpster sword, Madeline's window was still dark. He waited until his body weight resting on his knees cut off circulation to his legs, and they hung limp in the tree. If his extremities hadn't responded to the time he waited, Toby would have counted no time before sounds carried through her open window.
The lights never did turn on in Madeline's bedroom.
First was the slamming of a door, loud and blunt against the darkness. Toby strained his eyes against it, to be certain who was there. Feet shuffled on the carpet and a voice, a male voice, snarled like a bulldog in a studded collar, "Don't you move now, don't you fucking move."
Where were the screams?
The only vehicle parked in Madeline's drive was a truck Toby had seen her mother's boyfriend drive. That drunken delinquent foul malignant oaf- Toby fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone, he would call the police and they would take Madeline's mother's boyfriend away. But then everything changed.
Toby caught an instant of unmistakable yellow hair behind the glass of her bedroom. It was Madeline. It was Madeline and her mother's boyfriend, whose thick hands must now be wrapped taught around her throat or plastered to her mouth.
He heard a body thrown onto the springs of the mattress. Toby had known the man in their house hadn't agreed with her mother when she had tried to cut off her daughter's hair. He had seen how her mother's boyfriend had looked at Madeline, how he saw her as the unapproachable, unattainable girl Toby saw.
Her hair was loose and the only object catching the dim light of the streetlamps as it hung over the edge of the bed. Madeline's hair glimmered in time with the grunting of Madeline's mother's boyfriend.
Toby sat in the tree, staring into the darkness beyond her window. He was the first to see the approach of her mother, as she silently let herself into the house. Toby was already two suburban blocks away when he heard the ballistic voice of Madeline's mother.
IN MY HOUSE?
Toby ran over fences and through yards until the door to his own bedroom had been safely shut. Then he counted the objects on his dresser: the bottle, the ink stained stamp, a dumb compass, the wood dreidel, the hammer, and the sword. His own mother knocked on his door, asking if he was alright and Toby told her he was fine.
Toby was fine. Although Madeline's hair was never quite as pollen yellow again.
He stayed away from the crabapple tree but watched at school as Madeline's hair began to grow sparse and her flesh became anemic and her body emaciated. In a month, she was left bald and her eyes became dark cavities in her bare skull. Her mother's only attempt to help her was to knit Madeline a hat made of deep green yarn. The yarn had been braided into thick strands which fell like doll's hair, "To keep the girl warm," her mother had said.
"The stupid girl's stone cold."
At seventeen she was no longer beautiful. The students who had before austerely kept away from her now whispered behind her back. Her presence in any hallway was enough to halt any laughter but she didn't seem to notice this. Madeline didn't seem to notice anything.
She had walked past him once; while the Twins were ripping apart the Biology extra credit Toby had spent hours piecing together. He had hidden it in his notebook and arrived at school a half hour early so he could be sure to avoid the Twins, but this hadn't been successful. The Twins had become adept at finding Toby.
Madeline's green cap was wild against her deadened eyes as she tried to move past them in the hall.
"Look at that thing. Mad Madeline looks like she got out on the wrong side of the bed this morning, don't it?" Toby listened as the twins generally berated her appearance.
Toby didn't know how a friend was supposed to act, but he knew this was different. The Twins were predatory, and their attention was nothing to be vied for. Toby was miserable, but it was entirely his fault. It was his fault none of his classmates found him interesting, and it was his fault the Twins had in the time since Madeline's madness descended seemed to latch onto him. It was his fault he wasn't a real son for his mother to drive to football practice. It was his fault that the hardest he could study wasn't hard enough for his father and his own fault that Toby would never have someone to talk to.
"She's hideous," Toby said back to the Twins, "Don't let her look at you, that Medusa bitch will castrate you with her eyes."
They laughed, and even punched him on the arm, a gesture he had noticed they normally saved for each other. That day Toby, who had never before been as much as two minutes late to class, skipped Biology. He hid in a stall of the men's room, trying to retain the sobbing that choked his throat in desperation.
Toby had stayed away from Madeline and her neighbor's crabapple tree in the year since he had witnessed her denaturation. He could barely stand to catch sight of one dropped green thread on the school linoleum, but when faced with the alternative of his father and rewriting his Biology extra credit, Toby began to walk towards her lit window.
The light in Madeline's bedroom was now always kept on.
Toby watched as her skeletal hands drifted through the chlorophyll colored yarn. Madeline sat, comb in hand before her bedroom mirror. Looking at her, he could no longer remember what she had looked like before. He stared at the misery of her, far from his reach, her hands making feeble efforts to untangle yarn that could never lie straight.
Her actions were the same as they ever were, but now Toby had to force himself to be still. Snow was on the ground and his teeth chattered with the cold he couldn't shake. He had worn his down jacket, mittens, and his snow boots, but they were newsprint over him. He had been shivering with the emptiness of cold for weeks.
Medusa stood up facing the window, her sunken eyes unfocused on the crabapple tree. She lifted the oversized shirt she was wearing over her head, revealing bare skin. He sat still in the cold and the meaninglessness of the crabapple tree. He felt nothing.
He went home and turned on the TV. It was something history something discovery, he couldn't pay attention to what the camouflaged person on the screen was telling him. Toby remembered it was his favorite channel so he stared at it for two hours before getting up. He opened the door to the refrigerator and felt no chill.
There was no less than a meatball sandwich, mustard, beet salad, bread, pie crust, sour cream, vanilla and strawberry yogurt, butter, milk, yams from the night before, two of his father's beers, turkey cold cuts, a few green apples, celery, an open can of tomato sauce, mayonnaise, honey mustard salad dressing, half an onion and orange juice in the refrigerator.
He shut the refrigerator door and went to sleep before his parents came home from work.
The next morning he slept through his 6:30 AM alarm and woke up late for school. He got out of bed, dressed himself, and picked up the dumpster sword before tying it to his belt loop. He walked the two miles to school before he remembered he wasn't wearing his jacket and that he hadn't walked to school since he had gotten his license. But remembering this didn't change anything.
The blacktop outside the high school seemed were no truant students smoking under the overhang or any of the burn-outs sitting around the old maypole.
It was worse than monsters, or pain, or the hope of again seeing her silken hair. It was worse than knowing that people like the Twins were real at face value and worse than believing they weren't. He saw her as her mother dropped her off in front of the school. Her mother appeared healthy if sullen in her own bright green self-knit sweater.
He had read about apoptosis in one of his textbooks; it was a process of programmed cellular death, brought on by signals triggering a wave of suicide proteins in the cell designed to die. He remembered how certain incurable viruses became active in human systems by the apoptosis of specific immune cells.
She sat at the old lunch table in middle of the blacktop, the hunch in her spine prominent as she bent over a book that was laid out before her.
He disregarded the seat opposite and sat down next to her, drawing the sword form his belt and laying it on the table before them as he did so. The plastic of the sword lay dull on the lunch table that had been vandalized with PENIS PENIS PENIS in bold sharpie and the deeper cut of KEITH + KIRA 4EVA.
She was paralyzed in front of her book, and they sat next to each other for two class periods before his cell phone beeped in his pocket. The Twins had texted Toby asking where he was. He ignored it.
"I used to look at you," he told her, "I used to watch you and I used to be able to believe that things were OK."
They were silent once more in the frost of the school yard. Then Medusa spoke.
"This is what happens to the most ardent of hopes, what will decay us all and leech our lives from our bodies-," She spoke and the tendrils of green yarn floated around her head.
"Death does not wait for us, will not release us-"
Toby picked up the sword by its hollow handle. He had to kill her.