Excerpt from Psyche

Set in an unnamed land, at an unnamed date

On the night my father left for the oracle, the bull gored itself to death.

It happened sometime after midnight. I awoke with a jump, heart beating so violently it was hard for me to breathe. The air was stifling. The sheets clung to my skin.

I didn’t know what woke me, at first.

I sat in the dark for a long time, curls slick against my back. The month neared its end, and darkness shrouded everything. I thought I sensed something scraping outside my door.

We didn’t know what had possessed my father to leave at such a time—a big journey like his should have waited until the new moon.

It’s strange, but I don’t remember anyone trying to persuade him. I don’t remember much, from those few months leading up to his journey. The days seemed to have passed by as they always did, and by that I mean this: the days seemed to have passed by as they always did, but I had started to notice an undercurrent of something rotting. It’s hard to explain. It was an alien thing, something felt through glances, through whispered conversations echoing along twisting corridors. I remember sitting on the doorstep, hands sticky with clementine juice, watching my mother stand beneath the almond tree. It was the time when petals bloomed and blossoms filled the air. They stuck to the bottom of our feet, slippery, raw.

I remember the surprise on my mother’s tear-struck face when she saw me. I remember lying awake that same night, hearing someone pacing along the cold stone corridors outside.

Whenever I would get up to look, the halls would be empty.

But on the night my father left, the noise, when it came, seemed to split the night apart: it was a low, thunderous thing, something between a roar and a moan. An inhumane sound.

I gathered the bedsheets around me and crept towards the outline of the window. The terracotta floor was cold. I shivered in the moon’s dark-light.

When I looked down, I could already see a few of the men rushing around in the courtyard, their torchlights casting ugly wax shadows that flickered and jumped all around. Their faces looked like masks from the theatre. They spoke in hushed, violent tones. My stomach churned.

Something was wrong.

I felt a gust of wind break through. The air smelled of orange-blossoms and something strange, something acrid. One of the men looked up. The flames shadowed his eyes. I couldn’t tell who he was.

The roar tore through the night again. I jumped so violently that I hit my shoulder against the wall.

There were distant cries of alarm. I watched the men rush from the courtyard, their torchlights frenzied and bright. 

Everything fell back into darkness. I could see nothing but the shape of orange trees below me.

I stood by the window and traced the outline of the wall, smelling the faint damp clay. The night seemed to be a heaving, living thing, and I wondered if I could still have been dreaming. I turned over my hand and pressed my knuckles against the wall, pushing and dragging against the clay. My skin stretched. Ripped. A faint burning coloured the dark.

It was then that I heard something out in the corridor. Hurried footsteps and harsh, muffled voices. Shadows flitted beneath my door.

Someone knocked.