Medusa in Orlando

Medusa in a teacup, whirling. This is 2016. This is the Magic Kingdom. A hurricane is on the way, but she's a motherfucking Gorgon with snakes for hair, so fuck Hurricane Matthew.

"The park will close in ane hour," a phonation calls through loudspeakers. It's simply 4PM. The park is shutting downwardly early for merely the fourth time in forty years. The downpour's torrential. Humans scurry meekly through the moisture. But not Medusa.

The teacup line was long, and she'd shouldered and snake-hissed her way to the front of information technology. Now, she sits astride the steering wheel, spinning, spinning. At the center of the rink, a teapot spins, a drunk mouse ascent, teapot lid for a tam. Above her, paper lanterns glow and sway. Somewhere, the Mad Hatter cackles. But Medusa pays no mind. She's Medusa. Conqueror of men. Pillager of villages. Wait her in the eye, and she'll turn your ass to rock.

She's got wings. The poets leave that function out, a lot of them. That she can fly, out-flap a picayune storm. Just she is mortal. That much she knows, or, leastways, she'south been warned.

She spins. But she'due south not feeling, all of a sudden, so well. What bothers her isn't the rotations. It'due south not the storm or the fact the park won't refund the hundred bucks she dropped on a ticket for a unmarried day.

No, what's bothering Medusa is the boy. Or, non boy, just teenager. The kid at the controls who operates the ride. He's watching her. With each revolution, the boy sizes her upward, seems to have her in. He's not agape of the snakes, unworried by the wings.

He'd best be careful. He'll turn to rock to look at her for long. But he doesn't meet her gaze. He knows what he's doing. He'due south looking at her without looking at her.

Others await away. Parents cover their children'due south eyes and their own. A trail of statues marks her pilgrimage from the park'southward front gates to the Mad Tea Party ride.

Merely this boy, this child of sixteen, seventeen. He's not afraid to await. She spins. He watches. His nametag reads: Perseus. Which is when (Fuck! Shit!) she knows.

How many times has the Oracle warned her? How many centuries has she marauded the Florida countryside knowing this twenty-four hour period would come? How many men turned to stone hoping 1 of those men might be him.

Only none were him, for, here he stands, a male child with a scabbard in an employee compatible — white shirt, pink stripes, tan boots, blackness slacks. And though this boy doesn't look the part, doesn't seem the blazon to pull a sword from his scabbard and split up her body from her head, Medusa is afraid.

She doesn't desire her body separated from her head. Yet, thinking this, she can almost feel the bract already, feel the wingbeats of Pegasus, the fists of Chrysaor, the equus caballus's blood brother. They will ride a fountain of blood from the wellspring of her neck. Even now, she feels the horse, the boy, colliding to become out, as though to be in Perseus's presence has sent the pair of them into labored kicks. She does not want them out of her. Does not want the blood fountain. Does not wish to know the sabre's adamantine osculation.

Plus, who the fuck gave this child a sword? Aren't there rules against information technology? Similar, Disney World rules? She isn't sure, but it seems like No Swords Immune would be an awfully appropriate policy for any family unit-friendly identify.

Isn't this Orlando, subsequently all? Isn't this "The Urban center Cute", "The Happiest Place on Earth"?

Where, if non hither, can a Gorgon go for a picayune vacay and harmless fantasy?

Except, no. Expletive her damned, serpent-headed luck. Information technology figures the twenty-four hour period she picks to get her Alice in Wonderland on would be the twenty-four hours her murderer tracks her down and the day a True cat 5 hurricane bears downward on the land.

"I've been looking for you," the male child says, except that he can just become a word in each fourth dimension her teacup flies by, and then it comes off more similar: "I've…been…looking…for…y'all."

Either style, information technology's ominous. Either way, she wishes she were Alice, wishes a drinkable could shrink her and then she could escape through a teacup'due south fissure.

Only that own't happening. Cause this is it. The calliope music is decrescendoing. The ride is coming to a end. And, oh, that's clever, the kid, sword drawn, has put sunglasses on. The better to see her with.

And the teacups terminate their spinning. And she's so airheaded.

And and so she stands. And sits. And stands once more.

And runs.

She'southward screaming, running, people turning, left and right, to stone.

And the boy, he's gaining on her, gaining in his well-ironed pants and khaki boots. Through the rain, he's gaining on her. Sword raised, he's gaining on her.

She tries to wing, but the rain, it'due south too much, her wings too wet. Then he has her by a fly, is spinning her, throwing her to the ground.

And, up close, why, he really is just a boy with a boy's featherlike skin, a male child's pocked cheeks, an Adam'south apple not nonetheless fully formed.

There will be a fountain of blood.

But not before she thinks back to Kisthene's dreadful plainly. How she and her sisters — serpent-haired just like her — played jacks, jumped rope, fished shine rocks from the stream. How Stheno could make a stone skip nineteen times across the surface of a lake. How Euryale braided tulips into the coils of their hair. How, when clouds gathered and lightning flashed, they joined hands, the sisters, and bellowed their sadness beyond the shore and over the ascent body of water. And how, not once, did the sea respond them back.

To be built-in a girl with snakes for pilus.

But that was all so long ago.

And here's the blade, the blood, the outer bands of Matthew moving in. Soon they'll be in the middle of it.

And here come the boy, the horse, the children trapped within her all this time.

And where will Perseus take her now, her caput? Is she really to exist a wedding nowadays for the rex?

Oh, sisters — you are immortal. But this, this is the gift.

To depart.

To leave the land of men.

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David James Poissant is the author of The Heaven of Animals: Stories, winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a Florida Book Honor, longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Blink Train, The New York Times, Playboy, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Central Florida, and he is currently at work on a novel.

(Adjacent story: Those Left Behind by Laura Solomon)

(Previous LADY MONSTER story: Experimental Adult female by Subashini Navaratnam)

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Art by Ugo Bongarzoni and Marc Tarlock

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