Untouchable: A Greek Myth Retelling, Part 1
“But I’m not really a man,” the god said. Before my eyes, the slick, muscled form half submerged in ocean flickered. First to air, then vapor, and finally solid… very solid, to a horse. He—It, I suppose—snorted and pawed the silt, splashing water up its thoroughbred legs.
This confirmed that the initial human-looking form that called out to me was intentional, meant to attract me. Even now, despite the god now being a goddamned horse, I felt pulled forward by the pelvis as if he had thrown an invisible rope over it. The horse face somehow smirked, knowing this.
“I don’t fuck horses either,” I said in as much of a deadpan as I could, trying not to betray how outraged I was. My heart pounded in a hysterical beat usually reserved for the servants’ drums in the Dionysus temple up in the hills.
I wasn’t exactly commonly visited by gods. Most who came by me were of the wandering Dead or housewives who asked the wrong spirit for help quelling their drunken husbands. More recently, I’d gotten a few magicians after they had messed up a Goetic ritual something serious, burning several city blocks in the process. Jerks never paid me a cent or even a thank you. But at least they’d learned not to call Marchosias during a solar eclipse.
This one in front of me still wasn’t the first god I’d felt or seen. However, the others I usually came across were at the occasional temple service. The people called, made their offerings, the gods came down to receive and give blessings, all was routine.
I had offered nothing on the sand beneath my feet. In fact, I came here weekly for solo sojourns with no bother. Yet, here he was now.
“Don’t,” I said as the form in the water shimmered at the edges, threatening to change yet again. I stepped several paces back, keeping eyes fixed for safety. I could recognize the shape of the ankles, water lapping against their sharp knobs, as an echo of my cousin Lys’. Rocks rolled under my heels, almost pulling me down in their natural machinery.
The god—dess?—hummed with disappointment. “With all my other ideas despised, I thought this one would be most pleasing to you.
“I appreciate loyalty, however,” the god considered. He tapped a chin that was much too rounded off to resemble Lys’, like a humanized remainder of the horse jaw. “Certainly there is something I can gift to someone as valorous as oneself?”
I laughed, this situation becoming more and more absurd. Perhaps this was a prank after all. After all, what could a god want with me, as squat and pugnacious as I am? I’d already been reminded all my life how I didn’t make a proper woman.
But valor wasn’t mine either. Valor was for men, the ones I was always somehow too much like with my wide stance, gait, and spittle. Yet for what was between my hips, not enough.
And did I ever want to be… enough? In youth, I’d shared of swearing, biting, wrestling like I saw more cousins do. I’d play the boy and the groom and father too when the other girls took out costumes for dress up. Plus, I once kissed an older neighbor so that he would sneak me in menswear into a pub, not that it ended well, both with him and…
“There we are,” the said the god with a new softness. I blinked, shocked that I had walked until I was directly in front of him, giving into the pull of the invisible rope. I glared at my icy toes to find them deep underwater. But truly the blame was in my sorrow, seeded in those memories.
“Poseidon,” I said. I’d suspected the god’s name and now it had revealed itself in my curved, hairless chest like a secret box unlocked.
Poseidon smiled with almost sad affirmation. I started to weep. Rarely, outside of Lys, had I ever come across such perfectly mirrored understanding.
He replied with the masculinized form of my name that I used to call myself every day as a child in hopes my body would come to match it. “Caeneus.”
He said, “Haven’t you exhausted yourself enough on this despair? I can make it so that you are never subjected to such horrors again.”
I blinked away my burning tears, their salt matching the air. I didn’t understand. “Do you mean you can make me untouchable if I…?”
“That could certainly be part of it,” Poseidon said, taking my hand in what still looked rough like a man’s, but felt as smooth as a dolphin’s fin. A strong shudder went through me, less out of fear now, more out of dissonance of that impossible contrast. “But I’d also be happy to give you what you always wanted.”
And so that’s how I laid with the god of seas, earthquakes, and horses. I think you would have, too.
