The Cyclops
By Joseph Scapellato

Blinded, he uproots rocks and hurls them—the sea swallows his volleys, churning unhappily. He stumbles and bellows and slips on sand. Turned about, he sends one sailing inland where it thumps into dirt. Another crackling through the branches of a tree. He spits, he curses, he finds his blood-heavy beard and tears it out in coarse black fistfuls.

“No one,” mocks the tiny voice, shrinking off in waves of stinging darkness.

At first, the others are helpful. (His father is connected.) They look at one another and, after wincing, grasp his arms—it is strange for them to move their own kind in this way, to hold him without force, without intending to pitch him off a cliff or into reefs or holes hand-dug and loaded high with ram manure. In this way they lead him to his cave, the walls of which still smell of roasted man. They release him, brush their hands, and move apart. They do not laugh when he insists that this is no one’s fault, that those rocks he had hurled in hopes of smashing no one’s body, sinking no one’s ship, sending no one and all of no one’s cowardly song-making nobodies to the bottom of the bay.

Damn no one, he who is fat with the weakness of woman-longing!

He who inflicts, from the weakness of woman-longing!

A stream of blood runs over his nose and around his mouth. Drops drag to his chin, patter to his quaking chest. The others shuffle about. They try not to stare.

Unsure, they give gifts: ten fine rams and six wheels of cheese and two barrels of wine. One of them, the runt, scoops up the fistfuls of clotted beard where they lay by the sea and presents them, piling the dirty curls into his hands.

Back among their flocks, they wonder: they have known death, they have known broken limbs and mangled bodies, but never have they seen such a wound as this. Will the scab crack, freeing the pearl of a single fresh and gleaming eye? Will the puss seep within, rot the nervy roots of his brain?

That running blood, was it wept?

The runt declares this wound will heal, it must, how else will he find a lady? The biggest says that doesn’t matter and it might not heal. The eldest chimes in coyly: We’ll see, he won’t. They laugh, their jagged peals like rocks grinding.

When the sun sets behind the isle they break to herd their rams. The ones who drew short straws and gave their finest livestock mutter, resentful.

The next day he wakes. He sits up in stinging darkness and the stinging darkness does not move. His new rams bleat, but remain still. He feels along the ground for his gifts and finds instead a bit of man. He is furious. Then hungry, then repulsed, then empty. He pounds the piece into the dirt.

One barrel of wine he quaffs, and then the other.

Cool gusts ease into the corners of the cave and brush the blister of his eye. He leans against the empty barrels. Still the stinging darkness has not shifted—it is firm, he thinks. The wind rises, stirring and whirling until he finds that resolve is budding within him. He leaves his cave.

He walks slowly toward the fields, which are near the sea, which he hears and feels on the salty whirling wind. His memory of the path proves strong. In this he delights, smiling with triumph, and the wind is easy, and cool, and he takes longer and bolder strides and walks his wounded eye directly into the branch of an olive tree. The wound reopens around bark. He bellows.

The others scramble over, leaving their rams to graze. They see him screaming and kicking at the trunk of the tree. He almost loses his balance. He is stubbing all his toes, showering himself in olives. They look to one another. Then they look to the sky, to the sea, and to the eldest: he clutches his fat belly and laughs.

He hears the eldest’s laughter and curses and throws clods of dirt in their direction. The eldest hurls a rock. It breaks against his head. He staggers and swings his fists, spitting.

They take back the ten fine rams and the six wheels of cheese and the two empty barrels. They pee on the fleece in the corner of the cave.

Hours later he re-discovers his cave after crawling across the island, seeing only stinging darkness, fixed and directionless, starless. He sits at the entrance, his knuckles bristling in burrs, his knees torn. Several toes are broken. The inside of his head smolders. The wind returns, bringing the scent of the sea. His stomach groans. The groaning continues, rolling into one sustained rumble, booming from the wine-stained hollows of his empty belly.

He leans over and eats coarse green fistfuls of grass. In his belly the grass pastes into slime, then dissolves. The pitch of the rumble flattens. His belly aches as much as his head.

While tugging grass he comes across a rock. He plucks it up, turns it over. He bites the rock.

The rock breaks and so do his front teeth.

He returns to grass, eating dirt and all, until the rumble gives up.

He has eaten himself a ditch. Exhausted, sickened, he gropes into the cave for his fleece, which is damp and stinks, and plummets into sleep.

(He dreams of the stinging darkness stirred into a tempest. Questions ride the wailing gales. He waits, but no one and nothing arrive to test the storm with answers. When he awakes the questions have cleared.)

Midday comes. Starving, he decides to forage outside his cave. The forgotten ditch catches his foot. He falls onto his face and the blister-scab splits and leaks puss. His nose has broken.

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t move for many hours. The stinging darkness, not moving, is just as patient. Into the dirt he says: You are firm.

When he hears whispering, he sits up. The whispering stops.

He sits still until his stomach rumbles. Hoping they’ve left, he eats grass along the ditch. Laughter erupts. They’ve peed on the grass. Then they pee on him and he curses and throws dirt and spits and falls.

He blocks the entrance to his cave with a boulder.

He eats his furniture and he eats his fleece. After hesitation, he eats his loincloth. No longer does his cave smell of man. It is empty in every way. Dirt becomes his daily diet.

Set against the quiet buzzing of the stinging darkness, his thinking becomes emboldened. It no longer mumbles, it raises its voice and leads him to questions.

He asks himself: This stinging darkness that is firm before me and unmoving—has it always been here, firm and unmoving and waiting for the snuffing of the eye?

Three months pass. His stormy dreams crackle and swirl.

Is this stinging darkness on the outside, pressing in?

Is this stinging darkness on the inside, pressing out?

The stinging of the stinging darkness becomes, by degrees, a complex sound he wholly hears It syncopates, it harmonizes, it ripples into blended waves. He thinks: It is thick but faraway. It is around at all times, tingling through guts and flesh, flesh and guts.

He is now as skinny as a sapling. His beard pours to his knees, a great shaggy net. He waits all day to dream. While dreaming he watches questions blow by. Most of his teeth fall out of his head. He eats them.

The stinging darkness is neither on the outside pressing in nor on the inside pressing out. Is, then, the stinging darkness the firmness that sustains?

The sustaining that is firm?

He thinks: But I am firm in my unfirmness, and leans against the wall he knows is there.

Three months pass. The firmly unfirm music of the stinging darkness leaps and evades and obeys its fickle, shifting melodies. He rejoices in knowing that he has trouble knowing when he is dreaming and when he is awake, and senses that this state is a privilege, to be of this darkness and transforming into a no one.

A no one needs no one, he thinks.

Then the boulder explodes—wind blasts into the cave. His father has arrived, enraged. He makes a majestic racket, he shouts and kicks and slaps his son into the back corner.

Coward! Ninny!

 No son of mine will be fodder for the lyres of sappy songmen, fuel for the laughter of those who listen through time!

He trembles as though weeping. His father yanks him to his feet.

They eat roasted lamb and discuss the weather. Lately it’s been fair. But even when it’s not, his father says, it damn well is.

His father tells him he must leave the cave and walk among the others. That he must go and sit by the sea. That his wound may soon heal.

He chews slowly, with his gums. He asks his father, What if I do not believe I have been wounded?

His father pokes his eye-scab with a licked-clean bone—he screams, then whimpers, then is silent.

Later he tells his father, I know now of the stinging darkness. His father says, You think you are the only one? He answers, From now on I can only know what I cannot see.

His father pours a cup of wine. You may be right, my son. But you may be merely blind and stupid. Drink this honeyed wine, your mother’s favorite.

He drinks. His father gives him rich robes. Wear them, he commands, and departs.

He asks the stinging darkness, Shall I leave this cave?

The stinging darkness responds by not responding. He dons the robes. They hug him in a sisterly way.

He leaves the cave. Again he has forgotten the ditch but the ditch has been filled to the top. His skin is as white as a sail. With stiff knees, he walks to the sea.

They watch him from the fields and they dare not speak. Their lips are split and their eyes are black and all the bruises on their bodies sting as though salted. The runt, still dazed, has his head wrapped tightly in a loincloth.

He walks from memory, his new robes swishing, leaving a scented trail.

The runt leaves his grazing rams and follows close behind. The others pretend not to notice. The biggest, who has two broken arms, says: Still his eye has not healed. I wonder what will happen. The eldest, one hip crushed, says, We’ll see; he won’t. The biggest kicks him over into the grass. He stomps his face. No one laughs.

When he reaches the sea he sits. His beard fills and swells with wind. He listens for the stinging darkness but instead hears the sea—the sea is loud because it wants to please him. Everything on the isle now wants to please him.

The runt with two loincloths sits near him. He runs his runty fingers through the sand and asks, loudly, so as to be heard above the chatter of the sea, if he thinks today’s weather is fair.

He bellows wildly and swings his fists and curses and spits and falls onto his back, heaving.

The runt is cowering. When he stops cowering he retightens the loincloth to his head. Then he looks over his shoulder to make sure the others aren’t watching, and leans and helps him up from the sand into a sitting position.

The runt asks if today’s weather isn’t just the fairest in forever because he thinks it certainly is and so does most everyone’s rams.

He says quietly that the weather has changed.

The runt mentions that he’s wearing two loincloths, one on his head. He says he’ll probably have to for the rest of his life and that might hurt his chances with the ladies.

He says that the tempest has abated.

The runt says, You bet. Do you want to throw rocks?

He thoughtfully fingers his scab. It has begun to pulse, beating out a second, whispery heartbeat. He agrees.

The runt gathers rocks. Together they hurl them. The darkness of the sea receives each one, gladly and with relief. The sea, he thinks, is not firm.

Between tosses he listens for the stinging darkness, but it is gone.

After the pile of rocks is exhausted the runt runs off to collect more. He says he’s headed to the far beach, to find the heavy ones. They splash best.

The darkness reddens. His socket itches.

Alone, he faces the sea. Again he listens: a song arises, coming through the waves, the dutiful waves that now hold back, receding, hushing—out between them, a singer singing. Every note is silky, beautiful, decanting from a young body, decanting into him like his father’s honeyed wine. He shivers and pulls his robe tight. He accepts that, for the first time in many months, he longs to behold something other than the darkness he has come to know.

He knows when he beholds her he will be in love.

He knows she is barefoot, stepping toward him through seafoam, following her song.

He knows that this singer, coerced by his father, will not love him. He knows she cannot be made to, ever.

Like the weather, he thinks, it can be only fair.

© 2009 prickofthespindle.com