Paul Hetherington
Mythologies
1. Travelling to Ithaca
The broken plastic cup spills gin and tonic on the leg of my jeans, the flight is full of Greeks returning home. One of them is Odysseus, reading a book that tells of how the world came into being—on the glorious isles that succoured him. Circe has written an email, asking for her animals back—something about a lack of goat’s milk for her cheese—and Penelope has sent a text about her failing loom. She says his bed has turned into a veritable grove, the leaves thick about the bleached and tucked-in sheets. ‘I sleep badly without you,’ she comments, and he immediately thinks of the suitors she’s alluded to, imagining arrows in their throats. A hostess brings a wet cloth to soak up the remaining spillage and Odysseus leans back, murmuring a name. ‘That’s me,’ the hostess says. ‘Helen. Can I bring you a coffee?’
2. Ariadne
There was an absurd moment. She’d shifted position near the table, looking for her wine glass, and her gown was holding her figure like twenty smoothing hands—or that’s how a friend of mine characterised it. Her lover ran into the room and everyone watched him fall on his knees. It was preposterous, but she accepted his pleas and before long he’d left her on some island. She began to sign her letters Ariadne, and sent threads of that gown to everyone she knew. There was a story that she was painting again, after twenty years of neglecting her art, and also a rumour that her live- in companion had manners like an animal. No doubt, her exquisite sense of decorum remained. I tried to seek her out but she wouldn’t have a bar of me—her former husband, her one reliable witness. I’d given her that gown and it irked me to think of her scissors upon it.