October’s story is from Sheree Renée Thomas! Sheree is the editor of the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthologies, but she is also the author of many wonderful short stories and poems, with two collections published to date: Shotgun Lullabies and Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, both from Aqueduct Press.
This story has originally been published in Circe’s Lament: Anthology of Wild Women Poetry (ed. Bianca Lynne Spriggs and Katerina Stoykova-Klemer) and Revenge: An Anthology (ed. Tamryn Spruill) , but I came across it in Sleeping Under the Tree of Life. It has been reprinted a few times, but never before online – and I knew I wanted to share it as widely as I could. There has been a lot of discussion lately about how when people say ‘X, Y, Z topics have been done too many times in speculative fiction’, usually we find that this means that non-marginalized authors have done X, Y, Z a lot, and there are still many perspectives that could be presented. I always feel I am hard to surprise when it comes to new takes on Greek myth; but this flash story, this surprised me. (Another one that surprised me was the poem marsyas by Na’amen Gobert Tilahun, which I had the honor of publishing in inkscrawl.)
Enjoy reading this tale of revenge on a schoolyard bully — or a Greek deity…
– Bogi.
Arachne & Medusa Jump Athena by Sheree Renée Thomas
And it’s about time, ain’t it?
That girl always kept up some kind of trouble, always starting up some mess. They say trouble don’t last always but with Miss Athena, trouble was a never ending story. What can I say? Some folks like misery and stress. Athena was that way, always up to no good, like to twist and turn things so that everything was about her. Had a real thing for victimhood. Don’t get me started on Athena’s tears.
Always got to be the finest one in the room. If you didn’t know, you better ask somebody. Can’t let nobody else shine. See you beaming, she gon’ shade and block the sun. See you sipping cool waters, she gon’ steal the drops off your thirsting tongue. Athena got to have the last taste—and hers better be sweeter. Or she gon’ dry the well with barren sand, and raid the river with a bitter dam. Poison is what she was. Killjoy, ain’t got a single sister friend, the first. Only thing worse than a jealous heart is a wounded mind, evil enough to act on it.
First, she see Arachne, my right side, my bestest friend, minding her own natural business, weaving like she do. Spinning nothing but love. Arachne spins you dreams you want to follow, braid your whole life through. Hope in every glistening thread and strand, her splendid tapestries the work of a master’s hand. But Athena can’t stand to see nobody else’s beauty but her own. She see mine and tried to take it. Thought a head full of snakes would erase it. Talking ‘bout, see who gon’ want you now.
Hmpf. Athena always been simple minded. Her aim is sure but her vision unclear. She see what she want to see and what she want is pain. Seem like everywhere she gaze, she see lack in herself, instead of looming possibility. She thinks beauty is what you see. She never bothered to look inside, to seek within, or she would know beauty is not where you’ve been, it’s where you’re going. Beauty is the life you make be.
So Arachne and me come up with a master plan. Athena was always terrorizing the land, ripping and running so, through the woods taking lives with her tainted arrows. Talking ‘bout, bow down to the queen. We wait ‘til she deep dark in the woods. We wait ‘til she can’t see her way out, ‘til she standing right where we stood. Arachne spins a web so pretty, it look like starlight, like great heaven above moonshine. A great silver mirror, glistening and shimmering in the shadowy night even the fireflies stop blinking and hover in the hushed air, admiring its light.
Athena stops to stare. Now, she’s the one that started that whole mirror, mirror on the wall, fairest one of them all mess, ratchet folks been trying it ever since. While she stunting and staring, Arachne’s magic threads reflect the huntress’ best self. I sneak out from my hiding place behind the elder tree, unwrap my hair ‘cuz now it’s all eyes on me.
We leave Athena there, a century or two, frozen in her vanity. Arachne gathers her webs and threads. I retie my headwrap and don my shades, while we laugh and laugh, dragging her name in the dust.
_______
Sheree Renée Thomas is a Memphis-based writer, poet, and editor whose “black pot mojo” creative work explores ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances. She is the author of Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press), honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review and longlisted for the 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and of Shotgun Lullabies (2011), described as “a revelatory work like Jean Toomer’s Cane.” Thomas’s Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative from the African Diaspora won the 2001 World Fantasy Award and introduced W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” as science fiction. Dark Matter: Reading the Bones won the 2005 World Fantasy Award. In 2017 Thomas was honored with the L. A. Banks Award for Outstanding Contribution to Speculative Fiction. She has been awarded writing fellowships from Bread Loaf Environmental, the Millay Colony of the Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, VCCA, Blue Mountain Center, Art Omi/Ledig House, the New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. She has received Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror and in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 and 2018. Her work appears in anthologies and literary journals, including Apex Magazine, FIYAH, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Memphis Noir, An Alphabet of Embers, The Moment of Change, So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, Obsidian II, Stories for Chip, Revise the Psalm, Jalada, Circe’s Lament, African Voices, An Alphabet of Embers, Blacktasticon, Mojo Rising, Callaloo, Sycorax’s Daughters, and Harvard’s Transition. She has guest edited special issues of Apex Magazine and Strange Horizons, and she is the Associate Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora (Illinois State University, Normal) and the founder of Black Pot Mojo Arts and BSAM Memphis (Black Speculative Arts Movement), a festival held in the historic South Main Arts District that celebrates Afrofuturism art, music, artivism, and scholarship. Follow her @blackpotmojo on Twitter and on Instagram and Facebook @shereereneethomas
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