My Father's HandsA Chapter by A Shared Narrative A young man honors the last memories of his father. Today, I laid my father’s hands on the temple steps.
He was a master mason, and had been partly responsible for the construction of the temple. It seemed fitting that the hands that helped draw the structure from the earth’s stone be the place where those hands would eventually weather and crumble back into the earth and dust.
It was sixteen years ago those hands were last warm and held me, as a child. They were always dry and dusty, covered with evidence of his day’s work on the temple’s foundation. His touch was always something that made my flesh chill, as one unaccustomed to chalk and dust and earth responds when it’s rubbed into their skin. But they were still my father’s hands; strong enough to break stone, and soft enough, despite the callouses, to embrace his wife and his son.
I was just weeks past my fifth year when the monster came.
The creature walked out from the shadows of the temple’s foundation. She was a skilled hand with a bow, and killed four men before anyone there was aware of what had happened. It was a terrible twist of fate that the three of us were visiting that day, during the very last weeks of construction.
My father quickly secreted my mother and me behind an arch, covered from the arrows that crossed the temple from unseen angles, without sound or expectation. The only time we knew when it would strike in person would be when we heard the scream. That scream. There is no sound on earth like the dying scream of someone whose very breath was turned to stone in their lungs as they died in petrification. Despite their eternal silence afterward, there is no sound like the death of someone who has seen a gorgon.
He held my mother close, in an embrace that captured the both of us. Then he knelt down and put my face in his hands. Those warm, strong, chalky, calloused, invincible father’s hands. My flesh shivered and crawled for a different reason in that moment: he was crying. It is now impossible to remember if he was trying to tell us to stay safe, or run to safety, but I remember that behind those tears was a resolution as hard as the stone he shaped every day. He selected his sharpest tools, one to each hand, and strode out from behind the arch to assail the creature who had been stalking in and out of the shadows, killing men unseen, and killing more men when they did see it.
Other masons had attempted to join the fray, to combat the bestial woman. If they could swarm her, she could not rain arrows upon the innocents in the temple, and she could not look upon all the men at once. Someone was bound to strike a killing blow in the ensuing melee, as they rushed her.
I heard it again. That terrible scream, of air forced out of your chest by organs and blood flexing and tearing away from the stone the rest of you turned into. Terror and pain and wet, bloody sounds. The scream I heard was more terrible than any of the ones I had heard since the assault had begun. It was my father’s.
A child knows almost no fear. Everything is an exploration and an adventure. What terrifies a child who is full of wonder and joy, as a child’s heart should be? Only two things. Darkness, and aloneness. I received both of those things that day, as I rushed from behind the arch where my father had been moments before with us, moments before abandoning us forever. He heard me call to him as the petrification crept through his body, and he tried to turn to me.
The monster also heard my cry, and turned.
My blood stirs now, against my will, as I remember the details of her frozen in my memory. Her legs were tight and lithe, flawless scissors only parted by a sheer, hanging cloth. Her hips and waist tapered in a classical way that evoked one of two sensations, depending on your age and ability to appreciate such a form. The lines naturally followed a curve your eyes automatically tracked to the rise of her chest, covered with the same flimsy cloth that ran the length of those curves to her throat, where it hung from on a simple brass choker. Her skin was pebbled, marring what could have been flawless beauty. The pebbles undulated and shined, drawing eyes and leading gazes as she moved, even swarmed in a fight with men struggling not to look upon her. They were not pebbles, but scales that reflected the light to lead the eyes up that body, past the choker to a delicate throat and chin…
My father’s last breath and tears were spent with me, as he locked my gaze with a cry of my name, and flung one of his tools at me. He took my left eye from me with that throw. I don’t remember it, but one of the few survivors from that day told me it was the only thing that saved my life, as it stopped me from looking beyond the first curve of her twisted smirk and meeting her gaze above that. I was flung to the ground, unconscious from the blow, and not to awake until after the carnage had ended.
Sixteen years ago, I lost my eye, my father, and my mother to the gorgon. Her hideous beauty stole so much from all of us that day, and I am told that her attack was motivated from spite and jealousy that our goddesses were more beautiful than she. Her vanity knew no bounds, because even with the scales that replaced the natural flesh of a woman, there has been no sight in my years that has rivaled it. Beauty it doesn’t even take a sculptor, let alone a god to see, and she strikes out at us because she has been blinded to what still exists in her. I lost sixteen years -- no, a lifetime -- with my family because of something so petty.
I took up my father’s trade, to honor him. Without much of a childhood, I made great inroads as a sculptor and mason, and my talent soon blossomed into genuine art. I have used that gift that the gods inflicted on me that day to protect the people who died in the temple, protecting their families and honoring the holy place where those gods and goddesses visit us.
The gorgon cannot stand the sight of her own visage. On the outside of the temple, I have worked from all sides carving reliefs of the creature from the smooth stone. I have assembled the best composite I can, from those who saw her without meeting her gaze, and etched it into the temple exterior. Her vanity will bar her from ever setting foot on this holy ground again. She cannot face herself any more than we can face her, and I have made sure to protect this temple against her petty evils and revenge by making sure she has to do just that.
Time and weather, though, take their toll. The salty sea air wears even the most resilient stone down, eventually. Stone that was flesh does not compare to marble. It does not compare to granite. It crumbles and decomposes in its own way, under the ravages of even a short time, as a corpse is wont to do.
And today, my father, who had stood and defended his family in the temple that day, and stood defending us there ever since… Today, my father crumbled and split into rock and dust. I took what remained and put them in the place of honor where the remains of the other people who died that day go, on the steps that lead into the temple, to show that the people who protect their families are as great a ward against evil and a salvation to our citizens as any icon, any engraving, and I say honestly, any god could ever be.
The sun is warm as I lay my father’s hands upon the very steps he helped to lay into the earth. My hands are covered with the grit and dust of his remains, and it makes me remember that last day with them, every day I had with them. One last time before I go, I press my father’s warm, hard, and dusty hands to my face, and let him embrace me. # # # © 2016 A Shared NarrativeAuthor's Note
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1 Review  Last Updated on May 7, 2016 Tags: short story, flash, flash fiction, mythology, gorgon, medusa Author
A Shared NarrativeAboutI am mostly an on-demand writer. I respond to prompts and contests as an exercise to compel creativity in different ways. more..Writing
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