Alcestis Read Online Free Page B

her shoulders shaking as she lay there.
    “Pisidice?” I whispered. “Are you crying?”
    “I want you to be quiet,” Pisidice said. “I want you to be quiet right now.”
    I was quiet. If I reached out, she might pull away and leave me alone in the big bed. I squeezed my hands together until I felt bones grind beneath my skin. The sensation of touching Hippothoe’s cold hand came back to me and I shuddered and closed my eyes for a moment.
    When I opened my eyes, Pisidice had fallen asleep. I watched her for a while, lifting myself up on one elbow to reach out and feel the warm air slipping between her open lips, to look for the flutter of blood beneath the pale skin inside her wrist. She didn’t wake as I curled closer. Her breath was regular and even. Her hair brushed against my nose and the smell of oil and flowers made me want to cry. I had not cried yet. Hippothoe was gone and I had not cried.
    Hippothoe was on the other side of life, the world’s quiet underbelly. I imagined her standing by the dark river, her chin lifted and her chest still, waiting for the boat to come and looking across the water at the vast, gray line of the dead crowding the opposite shore. All those people, all vanished from some life, leaving gaps behind them, holes like the extra space in our bed. Hippothoe would have to stand among them. Would they frighten her, my brave sister? Would she shrink away from the dead? Or would she open her arms to them, pull another dead child to her side, murmur sweet words in a rough voice until those around her forgot their own fear?
    She’d have to wait two more days before crossing the river. Her feet would get tired, I thought, from standing for so long. I wished I were with her, so she could take me in her arms. We would stand together and I would support her as I always had.
    But Hippothoe wasn’t standing. She was lying dead in the king’s chamber with the serving women, who were cleaning her with sweet-smelling oil, wiping away the scents of garlic and dust and sweat, braiding her tangled hair—the hair I’d never get to twist between my fingers again, the smells I’d never again breathe. The grooming would make no difference in the underworld. Hippothoe’s feet wouldn’t tire, and the river air wouldn’t chill her, and nothing could ever make her hair behave, not even death.
    I fell asleep and dreamed of running with Hippothoe through the asphodel fields, following her jagged laugh, timing my pace to her jerky, eager gait, still interrupted by pauses to catch her breath. When I caught her at last she was grinning, joyous, as she folded our hands together.
    I woke later to find that the room had grown dim. Pisidice had rolled over while we slept and lay with a hand curled beneath her chin. Her other hand rested on the mattress between us, fingers clasped around my smaller hand.

    WE STOOD IN a loose circle around the empty grave. It was near dawn, the sky gray, and my brothers were dark masses beside me, pinning me to the earth. I watched the men lower my sister’s body into her coffin. The body, draped in cloth, could’ve belonged to any girl. The torchlight cast long stripes of shadow over Hippothoe’s form, and I could see the point of her nose beneath the bier cloth, the bump of her chin, the twin nubs of her hipbones. Hippothoe’s chest was thin and flat as a boy’s, as my own. The men had laid lumps of bronze on her breastbone to pay her way across the river. A man would get a dagger, but Hippothoe would have no use for a weapon in the underworld, no need to show the other shades her former strength.
    The servant women were crying. They had loved Hippothoe, though not like I had. No one had loved Hippothoe like I had, not Pelias, certainly not Pisidice, who stood now with her hair in an immaculate braid and her eyes perfectly downcast. The women’s wailing itched under my skin and I wrapped my fingers into the loose cloth of my skirt to calm myself. Pelopia nudged me with one