Protectress
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About this ebook
Protectress is a hybrid poetry-prose novella offering a risky take on the legend of Medusa. With stunning economy of words and a delicate hand, Protectress provokes us to think about the feminist identity and the power of compassion. Readers who fell deeply for Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, Madeleine Miller's Circe, Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of Beowulf, and Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth will find themselves enamoured with Protectress.
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Protectress - Kendra Preston Leonard
Protectress
––––––––
Kendra Preston Leonard
PROTECTRESS
Copyright © 2022 Kendra Preston Leonard
All Rights Reserved.
Published by Unsolicited Press.
First Edition.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. People, places, and notions in these stories are from the author’s imagination; any resemblance is purely coincidental.
Attention schools and businesses: for discounted copies on large orders, please contact the publisher directly.
For information contact:
Unsolicited Press
Portland, Oregon
www.unsolicitedpress.com
619-354-8005
Cover Design: Kathryn Gerhardt
Editor: Bekah Stogner
Print ISBN: 978-1-950730-63-6
Contents
Contents
Prelude
In the Age of Gods
Stheno in Suburbia
Medusa Domina
Gorgons Völkerwanderung
Destruction
Medusa Academe
The Nightmare for Three Sisters
Euryale’s Eyes
Arrival
Strength in Numbers
Fold Up Your Wings
Cavelight and Seamorning
Saving Face
Time
Phantom Speech
Hebe
Avalon
Pallas’s plea
Mutability
Salt
Preparations
Plynteria
Birth Magic
Afterparty
Autumn
About the Author
About the Press
for my sisters
Prelude
Medusa was raped.
Medusa was not raped.
Medusa was given rohypnol.
Medusa lured Poseidon from the sea with a bed of seaweed soaked
in salt water.
She became pregnant.
She did not become pregnant.
She became pregnant and used her knowledge of the medicinal arts to end
her pregnancy.
She became pregnant and gave the resulting child to Poseidon to raise.
She gave the child to her own parents, Phorcys and Ceto.
She and her sisters raised the child, who then became a sculptor,
a psychoanalyst, a designer of prosthetics.
Her body after death produced a winged horse and a golden giant.
Her body after death wept from its palms and the tears mixed with earth to
create a golem.
Her body after death was dressed by Versace and laid in a bronze tomb
in Buenos Aires.
Medusa angered Athena.
Athena was jealous.
Athena was not a feminist.
Athena was a prude.
It did not matter to Athena what actually happened to Medusa.
Athena was required to take action by a committee.
Athena was wise but had already had to deal with mansplaining
gods that night.
Athena was a slut-shaming bitch.
Medusa was made an example of through the great wrath of a
goddess warrior.
In the long nights, a mortal woman made immortal because of her story ran
from a temple, from a cave, from Kisthene’s dreadful plain
seeking blindness, baldness, rebirth
with her sisters.
So many stories. Let us begin anew.
In the Age of Gods
Phorcys and Ceto were thrice blessed two times:
their first brood was born of the ocean and the land,
part swan, part legend, even at their births.
These Grey Sisters were a trinity
of fashion, of sharing, of making do.
Deino, Enyo, Pemphredo:
like an ancient warhorse, they had but one eye and one tooth.
They saw selectively, ate softly, and walked with a rocking
wave-like gait.
The second weird sister-batch of Phorcys and Ceto
were unequal, but never needed to share.
Stheno and Euryale were born immortal
beneath the gods’ mountain.
But the third was born in the light,
and the sun, with its daily rise and fall,
decreed she be mortal.
From the plains of Kisthene
the Grey Sisters watched
their new siblings thrive.
Living by the sea, the second trio
drew salt from the water,
poison from the frogs,
strength from the leaves,
and became healers.
In love with wonder and knowledge
and the appearance of wisdom
and strength,
the sisters gorgon
become enamored of goddesses:
Euryale is drawn to Aphrodite;
Stheno, Artemis;
Medusa, Athena.
Medusa takes vows,
swearing always
to protect the goddess
to serve her
and
to worship her.
Trusting Athena,
Medusa leaves
her sisters and their cave
for Athena’s temple.
Mincing no words:
Medusa the beautiful is raped.
As Poseidon pulls away, seal-like,
from between her legs,
or draws back and down,
in his form as a horse,
Stheno, night hunting, finds her sister
in the temple of Athena.
Footprints wet with ocean’s foam
and healer’s blood grip the marble steps
and point to the departing
form of a man.
Stheno pulls on her helmet
strengthened by the shining scales
of giant fish and
made ferocious with the tusks of a boar
taken by the hunter herself
and stupidly attempts
to attack
a god.
She does not even touch him before
she is thrown by a cutting, hammering wave
onto the white temple floor.
And where Stheno seeks violence
against the god,
the dedicatee of the consecrated ground
takes further unjust action.
Athena curses Medusa,
not caring that she is a victim.
The shame, rages Athena. The shame you bring.
As Medusa’s hands claw at her head,
a single priest ventures out
of his nighttime hiding hole
to curse the women
further,
as if
that could be done.
And while Stheno crouches to aid her sister,
the youngest of the triplet Phorcydes turns on the man
and makes him stop.
He stops. He stops.
All of him stops. His lungs,
his heart, his kidneys stop.
His veins stop. His mouth stops.
And when in anger Stheno throws her helmet at him—
you already know this, of course—he shatters. Priest becomes pebbles,
rubble, dust. Long nights begin.
There is darkness
and cool water.
Euryale bathes her sister,
her eyes,
her bruises,
all over her arms and legs,
and abdomen,
and then each
minute, coiled, delicate, transparent
baby snake.
They emerge from Medusa’s scalp
sightless:
they have no eyes themselves.
They seek not to bite or crush
but relish the touch of
the cool skins of one another
and the heat of their—what?
carrier? mother? bearer?—her
head.
Her long locks have fallen away
like the hair Stheno will see
on hospital floors
many centuries from now,
hair lost to other poisons,
poisons that cure.
Late, a different goddess visits,
briefly, as is her wont:
Hecate, who weeps
silently for Medusa and
her serpents.
Her tears add to Medusa’s bath,
her soft lamplight embracing the sisters.
I too am three, she says. Although my power
is faint, I offer you blessings:
for healing yourselves and healing others;
for finding your ways home;
for being three;
for bringing light;
for protection;
for Medusa, an immortal life
to protect others.
She stands, fading against the cave walls.
Her voice is low and strong.
You need not sacrifice to me:
I cannot undo what Olympians
have done, but I can light paths
to redress and peace.
Dazed a little by the
goddess’s rare appearance,
and still looking to the empty space
from where she has
disappeared into a haze of
glowing air,
Euryale sings a soft song
a lullaby. And then a fiercer one
to help her test her own mettle
and matter
and she looks into
Medusa’s eyes
and lives.
And sighs.
Sisters, she says, I think we three
at least are safe. Together. Here.
But Stheno hears the battering sea at their cave door,
riled Poseidon beating with both fists against their hideaway
and Athena, far above, howling at her
former priestess:
shame, shame, shame you should die rather than bear this shame
and she replies no, we are not safe.
Hecate’s gifts may armor us,
we may live forever,
and we may be safe from Medusa’s eyes,
but we are not safe from these gods.
Would we could not believe in them
that they had no power over us
over any
over the natural world.
They should be so cursed
to be forgotten.
But