I’ll tell the story through myth, not a true story, but this metamorphosis, driven by rape then murder, sings true to me, like the birds at the end of this story, pecking at the asphalt and concrete. The truth in their song is silent. Philomela is transformed into a nightingale, and the females don’t sing.
Following winter solstice, the mortal world was preoccupied by the fear that computers and clocks would come crashing at the turn of the millennium. Of Tereus’ and Procne’s New Year’s Eve wedding, not one mortal foresaw the problem, though none of the gods thought their union a good one. The dark hoot-owl watched over the marriage bed from the shadows. Neither Hymen nor the Graces said a thing.
In his castle a fortnight later, of what Tereus did to me, Philomela, his new queen’s younger sister, I could only watch in silence, clinging to the ceiling by claws. When he finished I gave him the whatfor. My yellow velvet stained red, my virginity forsaken, my father’s trust violated, my sister turned rival. “Thanks ever so much,” I spat. “You put the fuck in King.” Stupid man confounded everything. He reeks of piss, never bothers to clean the gristle between his teeth.
“I told her you went out for groceries.” He pulled from his waistband a special dagger, and where I had a tongue, he sliced me a pool of blood. “A mere chambermaid. And now you disappear.”
I clung from claws once more. Watched.
From the crimson trail coursing behind us, he hustled me down a gangway, something for shame, and shoved me into the dungeon.
Me, a princess!
No one down there was surprised. They knew this is what a king did. It pulsed through the dungeon like blood, like a whisper, a given.
Of course I hadn’t seen this before. Me, a princess, I had no idea.
Down there they had an in with the kitchen. A rag, a poultice. The people in the dungeon were deep with resources. They told me my sister was sick with grief. The king told her I died, wept funeral tears. Down there they didn’t need a word from me to understand what happened. They’d lived it themselves, though no one cut their tongue because, well, when they talked, no one listened. Stories untold. No one could say what.
I curled the stub in my mouth as it healed.
In the corner a loom and a candle, white and purple thread. I was a wicked weaver, always had been, my sister’s envy. Taken by music television as we came up, she wanted to be a video vixen, seen, wanted, seen. When we were young, I wished I lived far into the future, and I cultivated myself that way. I didn’t want to dance for men.
In the dungeon, I embroidered a mean tapestry. Stem stitches, lazy daisies, bullion roses, blanket stitches. Whipped-backs for the trails of blood. Colonial knots, of course. Feathers and seeds. In the sequence of events, I was proud of my hand on the tongue, a fishbone with tied French knots, a little je ne sais quoi.
When it was finished, I folded the scene in, like the swaddle of a newborn darkness. It was passed through the dungeon to the light and floor above us, one king’s victim to next king’s victim, servant to servant, that is, my story, rolled and hushed through the halls. The tapestry was ungainly like an oversized picnic. The servants carried it gently. If they carried it like a precious object no one would suspect a thing.
The morning mail and tea on the tray beside her, the tapestry was set across my sister’s lap. As it unfurled, she saw my needlework, the chain stitch on the legs as her husband took me.
Through the thick dungeon walls my nephew Itys screamed blood. His cries echoed. Down there they knew what was happening, but no one said a thing. The hiss of meat on a spit. Kitchen humid with grease. Scent of stew, fragrant with local spices, no trace of home in those scents. But was it ever home? My father sold us. Sold us! My sister with a bill of sale and a ceremony, me on faith and a handshake, or maybe a wink and a nod.
Yet who was I to be questioning my aggrieved, aging pop? He assured me to that man’s care. They all knew in the dungeon, the king was cruel and violent. Out there we didn’t have a word for insane, not for kings. My father implored him to return me safely once I’d seen my sister settled. He wept real tears as we sailed away.
When my sister’s call came, they smuggled me through the gates. They told me to be careful, they said I was precious, but they didn’t handle me that way. They contorted me to fit through the lock and narrow opening. Later I’d find a bruise on my hip, a crush of blood at my knuckles.
I sucked my gums. Waited. Then I saw my sister, broken vessels around her eyes.
A hand to measure her son’s size, I mimed a stab to my chest for his death, then held my hands like a bowl before me.
“Why should his son speak when my sister cannot?” She took my hands, but she didn’t understand: to hold my hands muted me.
No time for chat anyway. I hid to see the king eat his fill before he asked about the rare meat. My sister still had her tongue, so she spoke. I couldn’t contain myself as she bore witness. I brought forth my body, pushed it into the room, my arms flailing, as if I could push the story away, as if they were wild wings to fly me elsewhere, or Itys failing to fight off his mother’s knife. I didn’t realize the terror of looking Tereus in the eye. I was so angry, I was terrified. No escape from a king’s tyranny. He forced himself in. House Arrest 2000, punishment of the gods. I, nightingale, never sang again. My sister became a swallow who haunted the palace eaves. The king turned a lapwing, a bird that looked armed. But he moved so slow he never caught us. Entrapped, we circled each other, never confronting or speaking, landing on the yellow lines in the parking lot for solace, some real alone time. Vigilante justice. No one reported a thing.
They’ve repainted the lot near the castle gift shop with straight lines to make room for more vehicles. All day long, our tense quiet is interrupted by the honk and screech of cars like geese. Once upon a time, my sister was a swan, and I was a duckling, both birds of migration. When we set sail, we believed we would fly home again one day.
Fiction writer, literary critic, and erstwhile punk bassist, JP Solheim worked through high school as the assistant manager of a music store, then as a café barista and in the receiving room of a bookstore when they were college age but toured with their band instead. After they went to school, they worked as a textbook editor while they played more music. In graduate school, they taught French and English comp while studying literature and writing. They’ve had a nice range of titles as contingent faculty, including Visiting Assistant Professor, Lecturer, Adjunct Instructor, and Honors Fellow, and several more titles as a contracted administrator, with programs and services appended to direction and management. They supplement their income as a freelance academic editor. They live with their partner and child, whom they raised until recently as a solo parent.
JP Solheim is a fiction writer, teacher, and literary critic. The author of The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture (Liverpool University Press, 2018), their fiction and essays have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, MQR: Mixtape, Midwest Weird Audio Literary Magazine, The Pinch, and Poets & Writers. They were also bassist, singer, and songwriter in several Chicago indie punk bands. They hold a PhD in French from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Writing and Literature (fiction) from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and have taught at the University of Michigan, Université de Paris VII, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as writing centers across the United States. They serve as the Associate Director of the BookEnds novel revision fellowship at The Lichtenstein Center of Stony Brook University
