Hello and welcome back to The Madison Review’s web series, the Extended Cut, where we showcase exceptional work that was not selected for the Fall or Spring editions of our journal. This week, please enjoy “THE ANCIENTS” by Phyllis Agins, a short story of a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.
Phyllis Carol Agins has long found inspiration in Philadelphia, PA. Two novels, a children’s book, and an architectural study of synagogues and churches were all published during her years there. Recently more than 50 short stories have appeared in literary magazines, including Art Times, Eclipse, Lilith Magazine, The Minetta Review, Soundings East, Pennsylvania English, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Verdad, Santa Fe Writers Project, Westview, Whiskey Island Magazine, and Women Arts Quarterly Journal. Just published, “Frankly Feminist,” an anthology of fiction that appeared in Lilith Magazine (Brandeis University Press) includes one story. For many years, she divided her time between Philly and Nice, France, adding the Mediterranean rhythms to her sources of inspiration. Please visit: phylliscarolagins.com.
THE ANCIENTS
We came from all over, linked decades ago by four years on the common campus of our all-female school. The alumnae brochure had promised. Women: Renew Your Spirit. Return to the Source to Where Civilization Blossomed. We were a group of fifteen who decided to run from family-splitting politics and from that long plague, now that the world had opened again.
The first night we sat in a large circle and introduced ourselves. Five minutes each to reveal a lifetime—sixty, seventy, even eighty years. Most were divorced. Some had never married. Only one was a widow. We listed the number of children and grandchildren. No one admitted any longings for passion that they still might carry, perhaps even folded in luggage with one pair of fancy underwear. Just in case. No one admitted the last time they’d made love.
But she was different. Lena. An old woman, like us, although after two or three drinks, we did swear to feel exactly as before. Like in our twenties, even after a year of quarantine by virus. And, of course, without the youthful joy or wise old age the poets and our mothers had once promised us. But Lena spoke little. Guarded her words and her history. Crossed her arms when she did speak. Why had she joined us, we wondered. Wouldn’t a loner be better on a trip by herself, we asked each other. Somehow, she stopped us from laughing, stopped the silly jokes some told, stopped the reminiscences of when we were girls. And so full of our future.
Maybe the discomfort was only ours. She did smile when she walked into the breakfast room each morning, did try with her cheery good mornings. Did offer an idea here and there of what could have motivated the ancients to act. Did wear bright yellow and blue, alternating each day so we could tell the days of the week by what she had on. Some of us set our hair each night and sprayed the result against the Mediterranean humidity. But her hair was long and gray. Wrapped up into a knot that moved daily from her nape to the top of her head. Secured there by a single pin that she’d pull out nervously to recreate that bun, twisting and tightening it all day. Her lips remained naturally pink, like a girl’s. But she kohled her eyes darkly black that made the pale blue almost impossible to regard.
Lena’s eyes. Shockingly blue, even turquoise, jumping out from that kohl and pale skin. And clear as if knowing all. Otherworldly, we thought. As if she saw more than we did. Understood more. Those eyes were ageless like the land we traveled.
We started in Italy. She always sat alone on the bus, so filled with reflection that no one wanted to disturb her. When we stood in Pompeii’s frozen forum, we watched those eyes fill; we saw the tears fall onto her face and old hands when she covered her eyes.
“The weight of time,” she told us. “How important we think we are in our very small lives.” And then she wandered off while the rest of us tittered over the images of the male private parts etched all over the city. Not that that part of a man’s body ever brought any of us much luck, we laughed together.
“Maybe a few children,” someone said, while we remembered.
When we rode to the top of Vesuvius, Lena sat in the front of the bus where the view was better, she insisted. Where the driver’s window enlarged the view. We stopped to study a farm swallowed by the now frozen lava, only its upper windows and roof still visible. We ate sandwiches by the side of the road.
“Black dust everywhere,” someone complained, drawing circles with her feet.
But Lena said, “It’s ancient lava, pulverized by the wind.” She scooped up a handful and rubbed the black between her fingers. “Centuries of eruption after eruption. Once violent, now passive dust.”
We looked at each other after that pronouncement.
“What does she know about violence?” someone asked.
“Dust to dust,” another repeated. And the rest of us laughed a little.
She always was there to remind us. That despite our trip of a lifetime, we were transitory. Less permanent than the columns the Romans had left behind. But hadn’t last year revealed how close death was?
“Oh Lena,” someone tried. “Do lighten up, my dear. We’re here for adventure.”
“Yes, yes,” the rest of us muttered. “Let’s think about happy things.”
But Lena turned her blue eyes on us, and we stopped. We were irreverent and silenced by her thoughts.
“No birdsong,” someone noticed. “So quiet.”
“Still some bugs around,” another offered.
“Hear the silence,” Lena started. “Listen to the vacuum left by the volcano’s voice.”
“Why does she have to talk like that?” She made us tired and angry. “Lena, if you’re unhappy, you can go back early.”
“Or continue on your own,” one added, dismissive.
We watched her eyes cloud. We watched her move to another rock to eat her sandwich and drink her iced tea. To draw lines in the black with her fingers and read the clouds floating over Etna. Perhaps to determine her place in the universe.
…
That night she didn’t come to dinner, and we were relieved. Some felt uncomfortable and perhaps a little guilty. But not too much to leave our table and our wine to search for her.
Finally, we did find her, just before we said our good nights and air-kissed our new friends. She was standing outside the hotel, deep into the parking lot. As if some Greek god had planted her in the spot and not even a reprieve from Zeus could save her.
She raised and lowered her arms in continuous circles. Minute after minute, circle after circle, as if her arms were independent of her body.
“What the hell is she doing?”
“Maybe she’s sick, after all. Maybe we need to get the guide.”
“She’s some kind of sick, for sure.”
“Look, she’s watching the stars.”
“I bet she’ll have an important revelation for us tomorrow.”
“She can’t stay out there all night.”
“She’ll come in when she’s ready, won’t she?”
Then we went to our rooms and left her alone.
At breakfast, Lena announced, “They know all about us. They watch what we do and know why. Since I was a child, I’ve understood this.”
The tour guide put an arm around Lena’s shoulder. “Who is watching us?”
When Lena said “the gods,” the rest of us gasped.
“Are you tired, dear? Did you sleep enough last night?”
The guide called the rest of us Madame. We heard the word all day: Madame, would you please; Madame, this way; Madame, you might need more sunscreen. As though she placed all of us in a single folder and couldn’t wait to tuck us away in a drawer. But to Lena, it was Dear.
“I’m not imagining,” Lena said. For the first time there was anger in her voice.
“Of course not, dear. People hear all kinds of voices here. It’s impossible not to,” the guide told the rest of us. “All the centuries, millennia actually. Lives so tied to the land and the sea. Didn’t they pack the olives into baskets and press the oil? Kept it safe in great earthenware jars. And the honey the bees produced. Tamed in masses that had no equal. There are lives everywhere, voices as well, if you only listen.” The guide looked at us solemnly.
When Lena went inside, the guide said, “She’s frail, you know. Her husband died just last month. Sick for years, I understand, forgot everything he knew. And once a famous scholar. Loved the ancients. Read their languages. Her children wrote me. This trip,” she looked at us, “is a pilgrimage for her. Have compassion,” she reminded us.
“We’re all running from something,” a voice insisted.
“A year of solitude,” another added, “with that virus hanging in the air around us.”
“We’ve suffered too,” a few added.
The tour guide pressed a handkerchief to her temples. Embroidered with words that advertised a local shop. Then she shook her head and walked away.
“We’re the ones who are paying her,” a voice trailed off.
…
After one day on a ferry, the bus transported us to Delphi. If there were voices to be heard, it had to be here. We wandered around the stones, hobbled across fault-thrusted rock, read the signs, and took in the scent of pine and the clear, high air. We knew the Greeks called this place the navel of their world, where the gods informed humans of the future. How to secure an empire. Who would die in battle. How to make male children and when to beware them. Even Alexander once visited Delphi to discover his truth.
Long ago the authentic oracle spoke as she sat over a vent in the earth. She chewed a laurel leaf and then pulled in the escaping chemicals, a hallucinogenic cloud of the purest form. She breathed the gasses and saw and spoke. Better than reading the entrails of a sacrificed lamb or goat. But we knew it was only the male priests who would be allowed to interpret her words. Like so many of us on this trip, she had given her power to men. Just another woman used for her talents.
We waved to each other from the ancient stones. Laughed as we climbed higher like skipping goats, as we threw off knee and hip and back pain. Delphi wouldn’t give us our future; it was a miracle that we discarded our past.
But where was Lena? Almost nine and the sky finally moved from blue to navy. This high up, we started to shiver. But no one wanted to sit in the bus and wait. We called her name. Some of us climbed back up to the heights. Some fanned out east to west. Lena? Lena?
Now only the shy moon illuminated the site. The ancients once had their torches. We turned on our iPhone flashlights and cried, Leeenaaa?
“Here, here,” one called out.
We scrambled toward the oracle’s niche. The sign was there marking the spot. We saw Lena’s body beyond the roped area, lying on the ground. Her face pressed to the stone.
“She’s hyperventilating.”
“Anyone have a paper bag?”
The guide reached her first and carefully turned Lena’s face to the moon. Her eyes were closed and her lips parted. As if in ecstasy, as if transported by passion. She opened those eyes slowly—unfocused and lidded, pupils huge and black.
“You shouldn’t have,” the guide said. “They say the gasses don’t press through the rocks anymore. But something…”
Then Lena was laughing. A sound we hadn’t heard before. Like bells chiming. Like the cicadas sounding at dusk. Like the swallows squealing in the morning sun.
We brought her a bottle of water. A piece of chocolate high in sugar. A paper fan to clear her air. We placed our offerings before her as she sucked in the night air.
She fixed her blue eyes on each of our faces. If we were hoping for a fortune-teller, we were disappointed. And what future might Lena have offered to the old women gathered in a circle around her? We all knew what was coming.
…
Crete was the last of the trip. We flew to the island instead of taking the ferry. It was unbearably hot, more than one hundred under the Cretan sun.
The palaces will wait, the guide told us. Until the morning when the air is cooler. We had traveled even further back in history to a world older than the Greeks, far older than the Romans. We were in the heart of myth, searching for the labyrinth and the Minotaur. We walked among the invisible people, so much smaller than we were today. Small enough to be buried in bathtubs, curled fetal for the next birth.
In the sea, we wore large sun hats and sunglasses and stood like animals planted at a watering hole. We talked and planned, but Lena arrived, with her long hair released and spiraling gray across her shoulders and down her thin back. In her arms a brown box.
“It’s ashes,” someone said. “She’s brought her husband with her.”
Lena walked past us and into the water with the box clutched against her chest. She swam with it past our group and out to an outcrop nearby where she dragged herself up to a low rock.
Then she released her husband. Those ashes would rise with the waves until they fell to feed the fish, the plants. Organic matter to matter. Dust to water, to dust. We could hear her weeping. We almost wanted to swim to her, for suddenly, we felt pity and community and our own losses.
But within seconds Lena dove into the circle of ash. Long, ashy traces followed her in white ribbons against the turquoise blue. She swam until she was a faraway dot in the water. Specks of dust washed against us on the incoming waves. Pieces of her husband caressed our skin.
Finally, someone found her and pointed. We knelt together on the shore. The guide waved her umbrella to mark the safety of land.
“Come back. Come back,” we tried with hoarse voices.
Lena turned as if to survey land one last time. Then long strokes took her past the rocks. Past outlying trees on a tiny island. White arms reached for that impossible horizon that had seduced Jason and Ulysses, where only a faint line separated blue from blue.
Those white arms that had waved at the stars pulled Lena into eternity. And left us all kneeling and alone.
THE END
“Twelve Apostle” by Jo@net is licensed under CC BY 2.0.