Five thousand years into eternity, I'm still recovering my memories.
When Amun hits me, I hear my mother.
I hadn't really known her in my human life—I was sold off to repay my father's debts at five or six, at most—but when I fall to the floor of that hut in Athribis, when I feel the packed earth below my knees, I'm in the kitchen with her, kneading dough and gutting catfish. Well, she is. I'm on the floor, waiting her out, refusing to help prepare a feast for the other woman Father's brought home.
I want her to divorce him—to, at the very least, say that she won't put up with such treatment—but my mother is not one for action, just smiles. For the flowers, we water the thorns, she says again and again until I want to tear the words, her crutch, away from her.
Amun is coming to, retracting and releasing the fingers of his fists and even looking around the room, as if not sure where he may find me. When his eyes finally rest on my huddled form, they try to pin me with their apology, with their devotion, with that unspoken emotion between us I've always called love.
I know what comes next: the flowers.
"Sweet Kebi," he croons as he gets down on my level, and I'm not. I'm not sweet. I'm not compassionate.
I'm not smiling.
I'm running. I'm a snarling, spitting whirlwind of fury blowing across the savanna, and I don't turn when I sense an approach behind me. Amun's proven himself the dominant time and time again, so I push myself harder, fuel my legs with the terror, and run until his anger and desperation are only the hum of the sand and wind around me.
Until I'm alone.
I wish it could be for a longer period of time, but I can't stay on the open plains of desert, lest Amun track me down within the hour, so I follow the dense stench of human activity.
I quickly reach Beirut, a city I've never visited and only know as the source of the silks Amun brings home when he's been gone far too long for me to forgive. Even though it trades in opulence, the slums I immediately seek vary little in appearance from other urban centers, and its only once I've sequestered myself indoors that I stumble upon Beirut's other claim to grandeur: opium.
It's as good a hiding place as any, amongst the timid crop growers who dare not call me out and the smugglers who have been trained not to. They live in a constant haze of the drug, and I see them rationalizing my presence: she's an addict, with that sickly pallor to her skin; the boss's girlfriend, sent to keep us in check with those deadly eyes. I live in the dusky shadows, and when someone comes too close, intent on discovering my inhuman qualities, I pick them off.
No one cares. No one really takes any note of me, and that's what I need. I've never wanted to be a legend, a god. I can spend the rest of eternity right here, and I prepare to do so.
The first night is time spent analyzing the footfalls of every person in the neighborhood, straining to pick out the minute differences that identify our kind.
By midway through the second night, I've resumed breathing.
By the morning after, I can't even if I try.
His scent is fading from my clothes, from my skin. I claw at my hair, bring strands to my nostrils and inhale, knowing he should be there. And he is, but it's markedly less. He's evaporating. I'm evaporating, because I'm nothing without him.
The thought bullies its way in, and I shove it right out. I'm fine right here. He's obsessed with being someone again, with sainthood, with scaling Olympus. I've never needed any of that.
I only need him. His love.
But I've never had that either.
But I've never just taken it.
The thoughts are careening back and forth, and I become aware that they're doing so in my gut, that I'm actually in physical agony. I hunch forward and wrap my arms around my mid-section, the move instinctual even though I can't remember the last time I felt pain not dealt by the back of a hand.
I don't move.
On day six the ache behind my ribcage ceases, and instead there is burning. My skin. My eyes. My throat. There is no thirst, no need for blood, just the shrapnel coating the inside of my veins that begs me to balm them with him or else split my wrists open and set them aflame.
I wonder if stone teeth drawn against marble flesh might spark.
A girl comes in—I don't know or care what day it is—looking for either a hit or a lover lost to the trade. She finds me instead, and she gets so close I'm breathing in the salt of her breath, the iron evaporating up through her skin.
I let her live, and that is how Amun finds me: on the floor, clawing at the rash under my skin, pathetic, no goddess.
His lips are a salve.
The slap is an echo, the kick an ache behind my ribcage that's precursor to so much more if I don't let him kiss me again.
So I do.
Author's Notes: I'm late, sorry! Travelling and family and just life in general got the better of me. Still, I'll aim for next Wednesday again, if not sooner. Thanks for reading!