After the disaster—after the litigation, the endless testimony, the needling comments of the defendant’s counsel—there is at last a settlement, with no party admitting error, and the state recognizing no victim, least of all yourself. Although the money cannot mend any of the overturned things left behind, it can pay for college, so that’s where you go next.

Not for anything practical. Instead, you think about the awfulness of language, the inability to say exactly what you mean, and you decide to study translation: the art of sliding meaning from one mind to another. There is enough money to finish your degree, and for a basement apartment not far from campus. The dictionary you bought calls this σχολή, leisure, from which the word school is derived. You have never had it before.

You have a landlady now. She sends you a garbled e-mail about mice, so you spend a week on dorm couches before she permits you to sleep in your own bed. True, the first night, while you wait for sleep, a draft curls through the front door, where past floods have chewed away the sill, and where the cunning mice presumably make their entry. And in the bedroom, there is an antique shutter above the bed that opens only on more wall, more darkness behind. But still, it is dark and quiet. It gives you a hopeful feeling. Σχολή.

It is surprising, then, and not a little distressing, that you dream that night. You dream you hear a knocking in the wall and the patter of mice. When you wake, there are droppings on the pillow beside you, and the trap in your kitchen is empty.

It feels so delicious to make your own tea and settle down at your own coffee table to do homework. You are in the middle of translating Apuleius for your Roman Novel class. So far, you have picked apart the tale of a traveler transformed into a donkey, Apuleius’ disturbing, constant reminder of humans’ ultimate animality.

But today you have progressed to the tale of Cupid and Psyche, and you know this one, the way your classmates already know so much of what you must learn. You open your book to the page where a bandit woman recounts the tale to Apuleius the ass.

There once lived a king and queen who had three daughters, all three lovely. But although the elder two could be described in words, the third outpaced all mortal praises. Those who saw her said she was more beautiful than Aphrodite herself, and that was the first of Psyche’s many woes.

At your break, you look up why someone would put a window underground. You learn that they are called blind windows. Once you read it, you cannot shake the feeling that the window is a great shuttered eye watching you sleep.

When you slide into bed that night, you have a plan. You arm yourself with a Japanese Breakfast CD, because it is empirically impossible for indie pop to exist in the same soundscape as monsters. And like a charm—like music is apotropaic, as your professors would call it, like the blue glass eye your distant grandmother sent for your true window—you hear no mice in the night. You fall asleep, wondering which window you should hang the blue eye in.

It should be perfect, but it isn’t. Problems pile up in a way you did not expect. The sunlight does not reach you down here, and your work lasts well into the night, so on days without classes, you live entirely in darkness.

You are not as good at Greek and Latin as your classmates. You say right to their synecdoche and of course to their asyndeton and try to write the words down phonetically to look up later. They are all younger than you, and the humiliation is so insidious that you do not even ask your professor, either, when she checks to see if you need any help.

But at least you have been sleeping. And if you dream, at least the dreams are new ones. You must dream, at least, because one night, when you have slept too late and too shallowly, you dream that the tapping comes back. Tapping closer and closer, like a dowser wandering toward a well.

You thought you left Japanese Breakfast playing, but the CD whispers, Lady, all that you see is yours.

And you wake up. You make your careful inspection of the kitchen for signs of mice and eat cereal when you are assured that they have not yet found the food.

There is a story about mice scratching at your thoughts, until you give up and go looking for it. It is an epithet for Apollo: Σμινθεύς, the Lord of Mice. You read it in the Iliad, another story about girls. One girl, Chryseis, was kidnapped by the Greeks and bundled unwillingly into Agamemnon’s bed. Her father, a priest, prayed to Apollo.

You find the page, find his words, translate them. Lord of Mice, he prays, if ever I roofed a temple to your liking, or burned the fat thighbones of bulls and goats for you, then bring my wish to pass: may the children of Danaus pay for my tears with your arrows. Not because Chryseis was a person who had been harmed. Because Chryseis belonged to her father, and her father belonged to Apollo.

So Apollo, who gave the Greeks music and medicine, sunlight and prophecy, rained down his arrows. He brought plague upon the Greeks, until Agamemnon was glutted with corpses, sick of his war. You half-remember that Apollo did this through mice, a living, skittering blanket of disease, but you aren’t sure who told you that. You can’t find it in the book.

It lands oddly in your mind, that such a big man would dispense revenge in mice. Big men hate little things, as you have learned to your detriment. But he isn’t a man: you have to remember that. He is a god, and that is something else entirely.

That night you dream the window opens above you, yawning wide. Like a mouth, you can smell its breath. It reminds you of Cassandra declaring she smells the stench of the grave, just before Clytemnestra and Aegisthus murder her.

You’ve never smelled a grave. But you have smelled mice. The sour tang of fur lingers beneath your kitchen sink and in your walls. You smell it now on the cold, wet air that seeps through the open window. You feel the delicate weight of feet on your skin, the press of a tail against the seam of your lips. You hear their chittering not through your ears but through the bones of your face.

Lady, a voice whispers, like a skittering of claws along a floorboard. All that you see is yours.

But all you see is the window and the dark.

Exactly.

It feels like you have been translating Cupid and Psyche for years, but you are only just past Psyche’s parents sacrificing her to the god in the mountains, and the west wind carrying her to an empty palace. You have a pain in your neck from bending over your coffee table, level only thanks to the valiant efforts of a thin copy of Lysistrata.

You are reading about Cupid, only Psyche does not know it is him yet. Psyche is lying in the dark, probably sweating from terror, perhaps thinking that the goddess may have sent her here, but her parents did not save her. Shivering, maybe; scared, certainly; and stock-still to keep from waking the sleeping figure beside her that she cannot see.

Apuleius did not say whether Cupid raped her. You do not know whether Apuleius thought someone could rape his wife, or if he would bother to write it if he did. Maybe this is just another part of the long unwritten history of wives.

You have slid into distressing territory without watching where you were going. Now you are upset, and there is nowhere to go, no one to blame except yourself. You are the one who read the words, who thought about them too long. Blaming yourself is more possible than blaming Apuleius or Apollo or Cupid.

It is probably your fault that you have nightmares.

You are lying in bed. Japanese Breakfast is not singing, and the light is off. You hear the creak, smell the sourness of mice. Then a stirring as the mattress swells and tips away from you, as someone climbs into your bed. They do not give off any warmth. Only the scent of mice.

In your dream, you do not run or scream or any of the things you swore you would do. You only drop a hot tear from your eye, into the edge of your hair, where it itches.

I am not Psyche, you think you whisper.

There is no breathing beside you. But someone says, You could be.

You try to figure out how you would express potential in Latin. In the lightness of your head, you cannot remember.

Are you Cupid?

Just the barest movement, like someone turning their head to look at you. You wonder if it can see in the dark.

You know it’s stupid, and you can’t remember why. You haven’t translated that far yet.

You lean over and turn on the light.

The creature in your bed is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. You sympathize now with all those mortals who could not describe what Psyche looked like, apart from beautiful. You can only patch the words together. Crystal. Quartz. Crowned. Hard. Beautiful, twice, underlined. Frightening. A question mark.

The jeweled prince blinks up at you, like you startled him awake. It occurs to you that whoever named Pygmalion’s statue Galatea and called her beautiful had not seen what you now see. Statues are only beautiful until they move. Then they become monsters.

Do I have to do something awful now in recompense? you ask.

The jeweled prince’s hand rests on your wrist. It is not flesh. He is harsh and scraping against your veins.

He does not answer.

It was a dream. Nothing happened apart from the violation of your sleep. But it is a bad enough dream that you spend the next two nights on couches in the library on campus, where the lights are always on and it smells only of cleaning chemicals. Long fluorescent hours pass, enough for you to think, ashamed, that a dream should not have been sufficient to drive you from your bed.

Your landlady e-mails you on the third day, checking to see if you are alive. You tell her you were visiting friends. She asks you to tell her next time.

The lack of sleep starts taking bites out of you. Your days stretch thinner and thinner. You get your lowest grade yet on a Latin quiz.

And so, you make what is probably the right decision and return to your apartment that night. You seal the front door behind you, valiantly stuffing a towel into the nibbled and leaking edge. You do not believe that is where the mice enter anymore.

In joyless ritual, you turn off the lights and slither into your cold sheets.

The stereo whines into silence like tines on a plate before the CD finishes this time. You know because you are still awake, or you think you are. You are ready this time. The bed tips you toward the prince, but you grab your pillow and keep from capsizing.

His eyes are raw gems. I missed you, he says.

Without preamble, you ask, What are you?

I am the prince of chalcedony, the tiger-eyed one, the rutilated prince. King of quartz, lord of mice. Emperor of all darkness underground. Your bridegroom, my lady.

You hate it here. You hate getting the lowest quiz grades in your class. You hate everyone getting to decide what you are except for you.

Night after night, the jeweled prince lies beside you in bed. You count forward and backward as he sleeps, chilly between your sheets.

A few days or perhaps a few weeks later, you break and say, Why are you here?

The prince answers immediately. He is like the snakes you have seen among the dry leaves, that hunt through stillness and must only be a second more patient than their prey.

To be your bridegroom.

You are so tired that you feel the weight of it pulling your eyelids shut. What do you want from me?

To be my bride.

There are cold stone fingers against your face.

You stop your landlady on her way out. You missed class to wait for her.

I can’t do this, you say. It feels forbidden to speak of it in daylight. But you do not think you imagine the flicker in her eye. Did you know about him, when you told me I could live here? Is that why your rent is so cheap?

I don’t know what you’re talking about, your landlady says.

Who is he? you ask. Why does he smell of mice? What were you getting rid of when you made me move in late, if it wasn’t him?

Her eyes slide away from you.

You misunderstand, your landlady says. You have brought this upon yourself.

You want to crack open the world like an egg, just for the visceral release of breaking something.

Can you hear me? you say. Are we speaking the same language?

If translators change the world, they do so incrementally. You wish you were Medusa. You wish you could be the one to wrench the world into a horrible shape for once.

Your landlady brushes past you and gets in her car. You think she could hear you, she just got tired of listening. You feel a whole new sympathy for Cassandra. Like her, you are not listened to. Like her, you believe you will shortly be dead.

You are ignoring your Greek homework when you discover how to kill the jeweled prince. You are flipping idly through your Middle Liddell dictionary, watching the words scratch across the page, when you see the word κρύσταλλος. You had not known it was Greek. Middle Liddle says it means crystal, as you guessed, but that is not its first meaning. Its first meaning is κρύος.

That rubs something like a memory, like you had known this long ago. You check again, and you are right. The natural philosophers of antiquity did not understand the etiology of crystal. They thought it was ice.

It must be tonight. You cannot return to your bed with this in your head, for fear he will hear it rattling around in your thoughts. You do not know what he would do. You are too frightened to not try.

You are so scared that you have to tell yourself you are not doing it, you are making dinner instead. You ignore the dry food, which you are frightened to eat, for fear the mice have gotten into it. Instead, you fill up the pot. You tell yourself that you are boiling water for eggs or tea or something else not killing.

You repeat this to yourself as you flip off the lights, as you walk into your bedroom, as the heat of the pot bleeds through your threadbare oven mitts.

The window creaks open. You close your eyes.

Bride? The prince sounds confused.

You keep your eyes shut so he cannot see the truth in them. I have a gift for you, my lord prince, you say. My sweet husband, my bridegroom.

A gift? And he sounds so delighted that your nerve almost breaks. You wonder if Judith felt this faint when she slew Holofernes.

You open your eyes and gaze upon the jewel-eyed prince laid out beneath you.

Yes, you say, and pour.

So this is how the blade felt in Clytemnestra’s hands when she slew Agamemnon. Or did Aegisthus hold it for her?

You suppose it does not matter now.

The water scalds you. Of course it does. Your hands try to open around the edge of the pot, but you steel them shut. You think the prince might make a sound. But the water hits his face first, so that is where he starts melting.

This is not how crystal works, no matter its etymology. But the water melts him into a slurry. It unmakes him. You unmake him. You sublimate him into sweet-smelling steam, until what is left is barely enough to stain your sheets. It is gone as soon as you bundle up the bedding and carry it out to the trash. It is gone. He is gone.

The air snaps. You let out the scream you held behind your teeth all night. But it is only the mouse trap, sprung at last. You have to get on your knees to check it, in the dark crevice beneath your kitchen sink.

The body is twisted and grey. Shockingly small, to have brought such disaster. You look at it and try to imagine Apollo, the gleaming, golden god, dispensing healing with one hand and plague with the other. You try to imagine it carrying Apollo’s disease, bearing his revenge. But its broken body in the trap is so small.

There is a tang of burning dust as the heater kicks on for the first time this year. You could light a candle. You could try to eat some soup.

You could sleep now.

You cannot bear to close your eyes.

Not that night, nor the next.

Each breath of air tightens your eyes. You should, like Apuleius’ beloved Isis, be able to cry a whole river. But you are dry. You think of Helen, drugging her husband’s drink to make him laugh even in the face of great horrors. Heartsease, it was called. You think of the curious floral scent the prince left behind and wish that you could cry for yourself.

You should not have killed the prince in a way that destroyed his body, because now you cannot look upon it to reassure yourself that he is dead. Once again, the disaster is swept away, like it never happened to you.

You lie on your couch and feel him still lying beside you. You can feel him poking around in your mind, the fear of him coagulating into something that feels more like him than fear. There is no place he has not touched. He is leaving fingerprints on all your memories.

You are dead, you say to the jeweled prince that lives in your head.

Then why do you still talk to me? he says. What is the difference between remembered and dead, if I still haunt you?

You stop going to class. You stop going up to see the sunlight. You sit on your couch and let the hours drip by. It rains, and you let the water lap at your door, eating away more of the paint. It does not come inside and wash you away. You wish it would.

You want to stop fighting. You want to start fighting, in a way you have never been allowed to fight before. You want him alive so you can shred him apart even worse. You want to be the monster this time.

You are still afraid. But perhaps that just means you will have to do this afraid. You think about Psyche’s parents making all those cruel decisions and wonder if they were scared. You knew all along that power can make you monstrous. But so can fear.

You are so afraid that it turns into something hard in your breast. You are so afraid that, as Japanese Breakfast winds down for the night, you do the unthinkable. You restart the CD. You stand up, and this time you pull open the blind window. You peel the darkness back into a tunnel. Flashlight in hand, you turn on the CD as loud as it will go, and with the gold defiant voice in your ears, you step into the dark.

You walk down and down, stumbling on each uneven stair like Eurydice tripping over the doorstep of Hades. You are too afraid to point the flashlight down and see what you are walking on. You remember Άτη from the Iliad, the goddess of ruin who moved through the mortal world by walking on human heads. It feels like you are walking on your own stomach lining.

And there, at the bottom, where the staircase ends in a great crack in the earth, you see it. A matted grey tangle of shredded fabric and reeds. The mouse nest.

You feel like Ion, whose faith in the gods broke when he discovered Apollo had raped his mother, Creusa. You feel like Creusa.

Your scream is so sudden it frightens you. It cracks against the stone walls, like there are other people underground, screaming with you.

Face me yourself, Apollo! you scream.

And then the words are gone, and only the scream is left. You think of all those wordless, untranslatable sounds of suffering, the written-out wails characters give in Greek tragedies, which you have never said out loud before. Ἀτταταῖ. Παπαῖ. Ἀπαππαπαῖ. You say them now to the darkness. The only answer back is the echo of your own voice.

An undecipherable length of time later, you look back at the road that carried you here.

It is made of rough and uneven tiles of stone. They waver as you look closer, and you realize you have seen them in textbooks. They are funerary stelae. Monuments to the dead, and they were your steps. Before you and above you, roof and walls and floor, all graves. Each night the prince came to you, he walked upon their bodies.

You walked here on the graves of women: the silent, the thousands, the girls holding doves, the swaddled babies. Their figures range from reliefs wearing marble that runs like snow melt, to the faintest scratched, humanoid lines of poor women’s graves. Grave after grave, a mountain of dead women, and there, no wider than your two feet, the last smooth stone in the tunnel, which was meant to be yours. Except that you did not die.

If water undid the prince, then you will send these women out in fire. It takes trip after trip down the graven steps. You bring newspapers, kitchen towels, anything that will catch, and when you have crowned the shrine with candles and stuffed it full of rags, you borrow a bottle of lighter fluid from your landlady’s mudroom.

You are leaving the bathroom after washing it off your hands and feet when something catches your eye. There, face-down on your uneven coffee table. Apuleius.

You cannot stop yourself from liking him. Irreverent Apuleius teasing his audience. Pious Apuleius writing about what it was like to love a goddess with your whole heart. Distant, dead Apuleius, gone thousands of years before you were born.

You are not sure he deserves it, but you grab the book anyway. You need something that will catch alight.

You stand in the window for a long time, looking down at your makeshift shrine and waiting to feel something. The feeling, when it comes to you, is hunger, and thirst. It is the daily unpleasantness and unceasing clamor of being alive. You are alive. The prince is dead. You hope that it feels like a victory, someday.

You try to remember any victorious, happy, living women in any of your tales, and cannot. You do not have any context for this. Only your own, indecipherable feelings in the dark.

There is a burning-hair smell as you set the lighter to the corner of Apuleius. When the flames are nipping at your fingers, you throw it down the tunnel, pages fluttering like wings, and feel the air rush downwards in a dry-mouthed roar as it catches.

The CD is singing in your ears, as loud as your heartbeat. You pull the window closed behind you. You make the darkness bright.

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Ruan Etsebeth

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors