Fracture Mechanics

Pilots don’t talk.

Pilots only yell.

ROGER TOWER CLEAR TO OPTION OVER – NEGATIVE CONTACT ON VISUAL – SKYHAWK ONE NINER FOXTROT CHARLIE TANGO ON APPROACH

A full year of Saturdays spent in the air, and this is what the girl has learned. (Not that she hadn’t heard yelling before.)

But maybe if the pilot wasn’t wearing an enormous headset. Maybe if she wasn’t wearing earplugs. Maybe if the airplane’s single front propeller wasn’t so loud it makes her tummy queasy and even the drugs her mom makes her swallow each time before takeoff don’t stop the airsickness so finally she starts wearing earplugs as the only thing that lets her fly without vomiting into a bag.

Maybe if the pilot wasn’t her dad.

Or if she had chosen to be here, or could choose to leave.

Even if she could just understand what lesson this weekly punishment with the plane and the shouting and the long silences is meant to teach her—or at least when it will stop, when she will finally be seen as having learned her lesson enough to go home—maybe then she might be learning something more than shouting.

SKYHAWK ONE NINER FOXTROT CHARLIE TANGO

CLEAR

But, she thinks, also maybe not.

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When Oedipus Was a Woman

Don’t tell me I’ve got my facts wrong.
Or fall to the fallacy of Freud, imagining only sons
can threaten a father’s throne, or evoke a mother’s passion.
I know a hero’s plotline when I’m born into one.

The Sphinx first tipped me off.
I had come with a riddle of my own: What is happening
to the babies? My princely brothers each disappearing
as suddenly as he arrived, my mother’s arms empty
as her belly again flat.
“Oracles can be misheard,” the Sphinx said, with a shrug
and rustle of her wings, “or misbelieved. Daughter, son, child who shall—“
She bent to sniff my offering: half a lunchtime pb-and-j
and a handful of goldfish crackers, then lipped one cracker
and crunched it, open-mouthed. “What oracles don’t?
Is misspeak. Gotta listen with the same precision.”

I left her growling happily over my sandwich,
lion’s tail curled around her paws like a housecat.
Considered carefully her words. Came to a decision.
Plotted my next moves. A culmination
years in the making.

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Iphigenia’s Apology

“He loves power. A terrible love.”
—Euripedes, Iphigenia at Aulis

The day the great king sacrificed his child for favorable winds
in recompense for some gravid deer killed in a sacred grove;
—or perhaps the clean calculus of men with swords already thirsty, still a long voyage to Troy
and wasn’t it her aunt who started this whole mess in the first place
bitch Helen with her dimpled thighs so easily and so widely hinged;

those clustered close at the scaffold’s base would later swear: with dying breath
came not the feared but looked-for curse. Her only words, “I’m sorry.”

Dutiful, claimed royal hangers-on long accustomed to the eldest girl’s
guilty proclamations. Her contrition for being too loud, too soft
too much, too little
too argumentative, too acquiescent
too beautiful, too plain.
For the unset place when guests arrived unannounced.
For the household’s every unexpressed desire left untended-to.

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Shorn

Medieval tower with turret in front of blue sky with clouds

There is no prince. Know that first.

The tower, you’ll recognize. The witch, too; an inevitability.

A curse of sorts, petty and grousing, with just enough malice to sour the milk from your neighbor’s cow or rot a field of daffodil bulbs before they blanket the spring in yellow. Not the showstopper enchantment needed to freeze a kingdom, of course, or put entire villages to sleep for a year. A small spell. Not enough to make a husband and wife gift away their newborn son—but a girlchild? For that, sure.

Girls are cheap.

Only takes a mingy spell to get you one of those.

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Medea Before the Argonauts

Somewhere in a story, not yet knowing Jason’s name, Medea dreams of floating away across the wine-dark sea into adventure. Her brother’s dismemberment yet awaits her, and the scattering of his parts upon the ocean like torn bread tossed to ducks. Dragon-teeth remain unplanted, a father’s treasures unravished. Many years and many tales not-yet-told lay between her in this moment and the slaughtering of rivals with sartorial poison, the kebab’ing of sons on barbeque skewers to serve at their father’s remarriage feast.

Do you believe for one moment she dreams unbloodied?

Even before the evils, back when her smiles were still Glenda-the-good-witch charming, Medea caught the mind’s eye. More than Jason ever could, that milquetoast memorable for theft and desertion, and capturing the love of a woman so far beyond him that only rankest misogyny stifling to stillborn our daughters’ horizons explains it.

I would be Medea, if I could. Even in the before, yes. And in the after, a thousand thousand yeses. I would stand bathed in blood and vengeance; I would know the dangers of disobeying and fling myself regardless from an Olympic peak.

Wait. No.

Not regardless.

Regard-full.

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Skin-Deep

Once upon a time, in a kingdom very far from the sea, there lived a little princess who spent her days scooping up frogs and kissing them full on the mouth (though with very little tongue). This was the destiny bespoke her: that her lips would one day free a prince, who would come to rule her people with justice and grace and love her as deeply and true as only a man with a second chance at life can.

One day, the little princess noticed a strange thing happening. After each kiss, even as the frogs remained all entirely frog-like, a green splotch would bloom upon her fair skin. Then two splotches. Then three. No amount of lemon juice or pumice stone undid the pigmentation. Soon she grew quite mottled, her once smooth complexion pebbled and waxy to the touch.

“Well, no matter,” she thought to herself, “for isn’t this the essence of love? To transform ourselves without question into that which our Beloved will most desire?”

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