you're too young & eager to love

Who doesn't like an immortal Cleopatra and Egyptian-Roman references of the Underworld?

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You are Isis, complete once more. Reborn into a body you remember. But where is your Osiris – where is your Lord? You think of him, and your hands are bloody. Inside you is a pyramid of mourning. There was a betrayal and a death, and Antony’s soul wrapped, briefly, fleeting, around your heart. Your insides have been worn into husks ever since. Now, your breath is the fire of Ra and your voice the stir of a thousand scarab beetles. You weep, you claw, and your skin renews itself when, pliant, you sacrifice yourself to the sun’s healing rays.

Antony is war-scarred and incomplete. Traveling the Underworld, lost on Acheron, made of salt tears, with no payment for the ferry. The man beside you is not him. A shade, instead. A reflection of a God. “Ramses.” His eyes are blue like the Aegean. He is unchanged and, in his folly, he has made you of the same substance. Soulless. “You and I shall be the only things that will not go to dust.”



You drink blood and honey, the food for the dead.

Ramses speaks to you in Latin, in Greek, and finally in your own tongue. It is a language that has, like you, been long dead. “You are no God here, my Queen. But you are not without life.” He undoes your plaited hair, lets it gather loose and lustrous down your back. He removes the mixtures, the perfumes you would anoint your burial body with, and leaves the modern linen skirts. Silk stockings that crawl up your legs. Heels that draw attention to your defined calves. Large pearls for your ears, your neck. (Once, you turned vinegar to wine with a pearl. Once, you charmed a Roman general by such antics.)

But you do not leave the house, do not leave the room. You hunger in a way you never have before. Nothing satisfies. You learn the era from your window, the language something you can mock and mimic. These are heavy words for your tongue and you dislike the taste of them. This century, as Ramses told, knows no loyalty or devotion. Religion has been replaced by science. You and what you once were do not belong. Below you, felines press themselves against the building, stretching their bodies. You can feel the snakes traveling beneath the streets, towards you. Sekhmet’s creatures and the only things still drawn to worship.

Your screams are a howling deep within the night. Terrible and monstrous.
“Insatiable.” He says with a bitter smile.

You cannot take your fill from anything. The food is like sand in your mouth. The wine like water and the water as undesirable as stone. Even skin cannot appease you, though Ramses venerates you with a fervor that has never waned. But you are a waif within his bed, dusky skinned and easily conquered. A trait he never thought you were capable of possessing.

Laughing, you tell him that you are capable of many things now, and you try to tear apart his chest to see if his heart, like yours, no longer beats.