to Megaran dirt. The gate stooped ahead,
framing a bar broad as a mast
and flanked by guards who feared no virgins.
She began praying to the god of doorways,
but his name tarried on her tongue’s bevel.
She asked her slave Athea (once
a temple whore in Halicarnassus,
who was seized by pirates, who sold her to Pandion
before his brother forced him out).
Athea answered, There is no god
or goddess of doorways. I don’t know why.
Though Cerberus haunts Hades’ entrance,
who’d worship a monster, a mutant dog?
Perhaps only mortals make hinges
and gods live lives like level jambs.
Scylla replied, I’ll please the god,
whether or not he’s now in existence.
Athea, fetch me a fit offering,
a billy goat, the best you can find.
When Athea left, she opened a roll
of papyrus, clutched her kalamos,
and tried to imagine Minos in ink:
she sketched the profile she’d seen afar,
but his beard gabled like a billy goat’s.
She heard her father’s hiccupping footstep
and folded the roll. But her father lurched past
the doorless portal, down the hallway,
giving Scylla a slipshod nod,
which he failed to notice she refused to return.
When his exit emptied her ears’ compass,
she unfolded the picture and found it had cracked
in the middle of the crease, but the man sketched there
had doubled his head. She honed a knife
when she heard the bleats of the billy goat
and gave him a necklace he’d never wanted.
The blood coursed through the crack in the crease,
which began to pout. The papyrus roll
sopped up the blood and swelled, bending
into a pasty opisthograph,
which took on the shape of a tiny man
with two bearded heads and a hidden nape.
This wasn’t the offering Athea expected.
Her mistress’s hand held the knife high.