song of a woman

by Katelyn Deng, Connecting Waters Charter School East Bay, 27'

I. girl
     She is the village’s greatest joy. That is what her mother whispers to her every night, as
they brush out her long hair that shimmers golden under the fiery gaze of Helios and flutters
silver under Selene’s. That is what her father boasts to all the men each time she is called to
present a new song she has just learned or an old one she has sung too many times already.

     After each performance, they admire her like she a prized stallion – too expensive for
them to buy, yet fascinating enough to admire. They marvel at her voice—like liquid gold! She
must have been gifted by the Muses. They fawn over her luscious hair, her sea-green eyes set
like two delicate emeralds against ivory skin, her full rose-tinted lips—the beauty of a goddess;
any man would be lucky to have her as his wife. They praise her parents, the gods, the Fates,
anyone but her—fortune smiles upon your family! The child has been blessed by the Olympians.
 

     The nightingale. The lark. The songbird. That is all they call her. That is all she is.

     She turns sixteen, and youth blurs into womanhood, a child becomes a maiden, naive
innocence gives way to brutal reality. Her father hands her over to whoever offers the highest
price: a tall young man with a charming smile, a knack for trading goods, and an even better
one for breaking hearts. He treats her with tender gentleness, and this is what leads her to
accept her fate, more personally rather than literally as she never had any say in it anyway.
 

     She should have known better.

II. woman

     Spring ends. With it goes her husband’s good temper.

     He comes home as the silver moon hangs high among the stars, reeking of wine and
rage. He leaves bruises the color of rotted cherries and decaying plums on her arms, her legs,
her chest. The oldest slowly fade to grotesque splotches of green and orange, the new ones an
inky magenta, swirling together to create a neverending mosaic of misery that she can only
cover with musty shawls. Yet, as a rainbow of colors wax and wane across her body, the world
around her only grows grayer.

     She finds she does not remember how to sing anymore.

     She shows someone her arm. Once. The woman who she had always considered to be
her closest friend, the woman who had been at her side since they were babes in cradles to
when they were brides in white, that same woman spits in her face.You hypocrite. The attention
is never enough for you. Always begging for more. The woman’s eyes are a snake’s – slit pupils
set within an orb of fiery amber.

​

     She goes to her father. Once. Hunched before him, her sandals worn and feet aching
from the long walk down the mountain, she pleads and begs and cries and wails. Her voice,
once brilliant, now weak, chants a dull mantra of desperate, useless words. please don’t make
me go back please don’t make me go back. He kicks at her. Whore. You are no daughter of
mine. Her mother stands silent in the back of the room, wilted like a paper doll. Her father’s
mouth is curved into a wolfish snarl.

     She tries to run. Once. An elderly couple finds her and drags her back to her husband,
muffling her screams with a mildewed blanket. They shake their heads, cluck their tongues,
scold and chide her. You should be grateful he still wants you back. Learn your place as a
dutiful wife. Do not bring shame on your husband’s name. Their faces are blank, carved by a
sculptor’s steady hand from of stone.

     Maybe she would have tried again and again and again. Maybe she would have
succeeded. Maybe. But she learns of the babe growing inside her, and now nothing else
matters. Her heart fills with joy, with peace, with love because it was all worth it.
Until her husband comes home one day with the stench of liquor in his mouth and rage
in his eyes, and starts toward her. When it’s over, she lies on the ground, her ribs aching from
an especially hard kick and her head throbbing. She patiently waits for the blood to stop, but this
time, it doesn’t. This time, something tugs, hard and angry, in her stomach.

     The cool marble of the wall presses against her body as she crumples against it. A river
of red widens between her legs.

     She buries her child, her daughter, in the garden where they dream as an eternal
innocent, forever shielded from the cruel, bleak nightmare that is a woman’s life. Her own body
throbs and aches, thousands of daggers piercing her bare skin, injecting a cold poison into her
veins. The poison reaches her heart. Vicious, bitter, unforgiving.

     Three nights hence, she thrusts the kitchen knife into her husband’s fleshy stomach and
bathes their bedroom in the brilliant crimson of a setting sun. She waits until his pitiful gurgles
slowly ebb away into quiet stillness. She watches as the floor turns scarlet, his filthy blood
seeping through the stone tiles. She savors the acrid, metallic smell that hovers in the air. The
river swells into a sea.

     She walks down the mountain, toward the homes of the woman with snake eyes and the
man with a wolf’s snarl and his paper doll wife and the couple with masks of stone– the knife at
her side stained with the rich color of grape wine. The sea turns into an ocean.

     The houses lie silent. She is done.

​

     The waves comfort her. They embrace her as she wanders into the silvery water, they
kiss her stained chiton, they curl around her aching feet and soothe her feverish skin with a
tranquil coolness. She wades in deeper and deeper, stumbling through sand and shells and
pebbles and stones.
 

     There is no more ground beneath her legs. She is the water and the water is her. The
ocean pulls her down yet pushes her forward, swirling and dancing around her body, beckoning
her toward a new life, a new purpose.

​

III. siren

     Her voice. Her beauty. Irresistible. Even in their last moments, the men never try to keep
themselves afloat. They only weep as they slowly sink beneath the waves, their eyes
unfocused, their minds still in a place they will never see and a dream they will never live. They
do not know when the end comes; her singing ensures that.

     Enticing. Seductive. Fatal.

     As the last melody fades into silence, she smiles and surveys her handiwork: the
wooden remains of the capsized ship, the disappearing capes of the soldiers and sailors as the
water takes them. Swords and daggers lie discarded on the sand – the weapons these men had
chosen over their wives, their homes, their families. All for the fruitless pursuit of glory.
She is merciful: she puts them out of their disillusionment and misery fast enough.

     Half virgin, half bird. Half enchantress, half monster.

     Another ship appears on the horizon, cutting across the water with its smooth hull, its
leader standing at the helm. She turns toward it.

     Sometimes, the men’s souls are restless. They died too quickly, too unhappily. They
whisper accusations in her ear, blame her, denounce her, criticize her, scorn her.
 

     Sinful. Wicked. Evil.

     She does not listen. She is untroubled by what she does, content in helping those girls
who wear shawls to cover the inky shadows blooming under their skin, girls who weep in the
silence of a still night, girls who no longer remember how to smile. She does not mind what they
say. After all, the stories we speak are always written not by those who have already won, but
by those we want to win.

     The ship is closer now, and she can make out the man commanding it more clearly. A
hero just like the rest–his face set in a triumphant smirk, his eyes glowing in anticipation of

another obstacle to conquer, another trophy to bring home, another mythical story to boast
about.

     Eyes like her husband’s, she thinks. Satisfaction flits across her milky-white face, and
she tilts her head, letting the afternoon sunlight comb over her lush, golden hair, her piercing
viridian eyes, and her lips, red like freshly spilled blood pouring from an open wound, as she
opens her mouth and begins to sing.