Emperor Caligula declared war on Poseidon and ordered his soldiers to thrust their spears into random, threatening, foaming waves.
I approach wearing only a gauntlet. I slap her pale cheek with the heavy glove creating a small, bloody crack in her perfection. I remove the violent hand covering. Naked, I toss it, and it lands on the cutting, shell’s edge.
Offended, she tries to pierce my eye with her slave Cupid’s arrow.
Refusing to be blinded by love’s aggression, I duck my head and spit in her navel cavern.
I pounce on her and intertwine my legs with hers. I Indian leg wrestle her. I flip her.
She submits.
She offers no wishes. She is a defeated goddess not a genie. She offers to answer one prayer.
“Venus, please bring him back to me even if he never loves me or recognizes me. I just want to see his face one more time. I just want to breathe in the molecules that once caressed him. Or, if I can’t have that, please let me forget him.”
She smiles enchantment and answers, “No.”
I murder her and eat her hoping to take on her immortal soul. She, like me and other women of sea origin, was soulless. I eat love and am still empty.
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Veronica Haunani Fitzhugh is an author, activist and good friend keeping busy saving the world and sipping sweet tea on her front porch in Charlottesville, Virginia. She holds a BA in English from the University of Virginia. There, she won a Jefferson Cup for her story telling. She founded Peer Review, a literary and art magazine for the Charlottesville recovery community. Her work has appeared in Piker Press Magazine and the women’s initiative’s Challenge into Change 2013 anthology. She blogs regularly at cvillewinter.wordpress.com, a page featured in wordpress’ freshly pressed, and also guest blogs at other sites.
