Leda's Daughters

Fiction by ​​Elizabeth Wing

I’ll tell you a secret: my mother screwed a swan. My sister Helen and I hatched from eggs. Mother keeps the fractured shells under her bed with the crusts of honey cakes she eats. She’s getting fat. Cellulite roils up her legs. When my father is at sea she brings dancers and drummers into her chamber while we all get drunk. At midnight she makes everyone else leave. We start to go then she says, Clytemnestra! Helen! Stay with me! We sit on her bed and finish the wine while she tells stories about uncles and monsters, and our father. He fell into my arms, she says. He was chased by an eagle. He was all sinew under those feathers. His neck moved like a snake.

When Helen and I were twelve we started sprouting snowy feathers along our shoulder blades. Helen plucks hers leaving angry red pockmarks. She can never wear anything backless, but the subtle ripple of her scapulas under her chiton are still enough to drive you crazy.

When we are children we promise to both marry men who believe us when we tell them about the swan. If either of us has to marry a man who won’t accept our parentage, we’ll sacrifice three fine goslings and invoke our father for proof. We suspect he’s no ordinary swan. Perhaps he’s the King of Swans, perhaps he’s a god. Are we vain for believing this? Probably. Are we right? Absolutely.

But neither of us follow through. King Menelaus courts my sister, and when she shows him the pockmarks on her back he thinks she’s hysterical. He says it’s only a rash and tells her to apply a salve of thyme and ash. She marries him anyway, for honor. On their wedding night I knock on her bedchamber door, holding three squawking goslings in my arms, and say, Sister, come! The goslings struggle and cackle. I have the knife, the incense, the ceramic vessel to catch the blood. It would be so easy. But she doesn’t hear me.

Once Helen is claimed suitors come to me as well. I am wed to Agamemnon, the rugged northerner. Although they say he’s a fearless warrior my feathers frighten him. He shivers when his hand brushes them by accident. He thinks they’re a curse. As a joke Helen includes a platter of three goslings for our wedding feast. We laugh with honeyed tongues until all the guests think we’ve gone mad. Our promise lies cracked with the eggshells under our mother’s bed.

You know the next part of the story: Paris arrives and kisses my sister under the frothy cherry trees. She debates whether or not to elope to Troy. She comes to me for council, I say, Does he know about the feathers? She says, No. I tell her to wait for three weeks for them to grow in, and she does. When they began to sprout from her back she takes Paris to the baths and there, among the tile-refracted light, she drops her robe and shows them to him. She says, my mother screwed a swan. He says, Cool. And I said to her, Go on, then.

The day Helen leaves my mother finds me in her bedchamber, with a candle and a brush and a vial of tree-sap, gluing our shells back together. She crouches down, her back starting to ache. She wears her fat like it’s a fur robe, a kind of luxury. There’s a smell of salt and honey in her unwashed hair, her breath’s full of wine.

What the hell are you doing, Clytemnestra?

I show her how to heat the sap, dip the brush in, fit together two shards and hold them till they dry.

Elizabeth Wing

Elizabeth Wing is a freshman at the Pratt Institute.  Her work has appeared in venues including Hanging Loose Magazine, Up North Lit, Jet Fuel Review, and Euphony. She currently has fiction forthcoming in The West Marin Review. She is influenced by Haruki Murakami, the Beat Poets, and the California landscape.