Elpis, Unerring ~ Gwendolyn Maia Hicks

Wild orchids still grow on the hills of Lesbos. When Elpis first heard Sappho sing, it was beside a patch of red helleborine, just before dawn, when the day’s forthcoming threads glowed silken on the beech boughs. They were eleven, the two of them, and it was spring. 

Sappho was sitting on a weathered limestone boulder, dressed in blue, her braided hair as dark as earth, her feet bare. Elpis had stomped into this clearing after a long and directionless walk from her father’s house, an argument still throbbing in her mouth. At the sight of Cleïs’s noble daughter on that boulder, bent close to a barbiton, the song of her deep russet voice vibrating in the light and air between them, she forgot the argument altogether: she forgot everything, everything, except for how to listen. 

At the song’s end, Sappho looked up from her instrument and gasped. Her cheeks darkened with embarrassment. Elpis couldn’t blame her. It would hardly be proper for a child of such an esteemed family as Sappho’s to traipse through the wilderness at daybreak hurling music from her heart, even with the matriarch five years widowed. Her three brothers might be given such latitude. Not Sappho. 

“Hi,” said Elpis, maybe. 

“Don’t tell,” said Sappho, maybe.  

“How come?” asked Elpis, maybe. “You’re pretty good.” 

“I know,” said Sappho, maybe. “But I don’t want anybody to know yet.” 

“Well, fine,” said Elpis, maybe. “But only if you play me another one.” 

Sappho smiled at her, bare as moonlight. She made space for Elpis on the boulder. 

“Yeah, okay,” she said, seen for the first time, wanted for the first time, new and unnamed under the trees. And Elpis took her spot and listened. Maybe. 

#

Today I promised I would meet you at Lake Michigan. I’m already twenty minutes late and getting later. I’d spent the morning manufacturing excuses not to leave the apartment. You know how it is. I’ve spent two years reaching for the apple that is you. I’ve strained my cells and muscles closer, closer. But now I might actually touch you. Not just with my aching fingertips, but with my open palm. I might pull you down off the branch and you might let me. And the thought is wringing my stomach inside-out. If I lose the longing, will I lose everything I use to define myself? 

Someone felt like this before. A woman on a distant island where the wind peeled back the layers of love. She wrote it down. She wrote it all down. Because of that, I knew exactly what was happening to me when we were in the kitchen after closing and I burned my hand on a hot skillet and you led me by it to the sink and turned on the tap. I knew exactly why it was that the heat suffused my entire body, took to my veins like a hand at the loom, seared the soft underside of my heart a sizzling, permanent brown. I knew exactly what it meant when you took off your radish-printed bandana and wrapped six ice cubes in it and placed it in my injured palm, and all that I could notice was that the bandana smelled like you, like old patchouli. I knew what it meant. She wrote about it, after all. The delicate flame beneath the skin. The sweetbitter. 

On the bus, I close that hand—now healed just fine—over my knee. The Schoolcraft County bus rattles under me like it’s held together by packing tape. I can relate. Maybe wanting you is the only thing that’s been holding me together for these past two years. So what will happen when I get you? What happens in this world when anyone gets anyone? What is left to know?

#

The years unwound themselves, the orchids bloomed, and Elpis and Sappho grew up on that white rock in the Aegean Sea. Whenever Sappho played new songs for Elpis—hymns to Aphrodite, melisma made from Eros’s marrow—in empty courtyards, in secret caves, in olive groves, Elpis always asked for more. Elpis was a politician’s daughter, and often accompanied her father to the mainland, where she learned reading and writing and, most importantly, the Attic dialect. Sappho, in the meantime, wrote and wrote and sang and sang. It wasn’t long before she was the talk of the symposia, her lyric attunement to the heat of the heart entrancing every listener with an unknown ache. It wasn’t long before couples sought her epithalamia, before she and her friend Alcaeus were followed by gaggles of protégés, before word began to reach as far as Thessaly of The Poetess, keeper of ten thousand knowings, translator of goddesses. Elpis, of course, had always known what her friend would become. 

“I want to write it all down,” she said to Sappho, maybe, one evening in the garden of Sappho’s family’s house. They were twenty-three. “All your words. Every one. Can I?” 

“What for?” asked Sappho, maybe, fiddling with the strings of her lyre, her mouth half-open in thought, a bowl of quince untouched beside her. “People will remember.” 

“Just in case,” said Elpis, maybe. Sitting comfortably on the ground, she drew her knees up to her chest, the mosaic tiles cool against the soles of her feet. “I think it’s important.” She thought about it. “I think you’re important.”  

By then, a lot of people thought that Sappho was important. Sappho’s wealthy family had been made wealthier still by gifts and drachmae. She was stopped in the street by admirers, quoted by scholars, accompanied by great singers. But, thought Elpis fondly, she still was afraid of bees. And she still did not like quince. 

A sweet flush came over Sappho’s downturned face. She plucked out a quick melody, notes dancing through the orange leaves before going quiet in the dusk, this precious dusk, this dusk that belonged only to the two of them. 

“I love you,” Elpis said plainly—maybe. Because, in that moment, she was overcome by it, by the shivering love inside of her, by the new names it had given to her body, by the sweetbitter taste of it in her mouth. “I love you like a wife. I want to write you down.” 

Maybe Elpis was afraid, for a moment, of how rejection might cleave her in two—or maybe Sappho had already taught her that to be left wanting was to be whole. Maybe Elpis thought of the Anatolian man her father willed her to take for a husband; maybe Elpis thought of her family and their strifes and the coming of a new age that would not have them in it; maybe Elpis thought of how much papyrus she would have to buy. Maybe Elpis thought of that morning under the beeches, when she first heard the sound of her own heart. 

Sappho’s fingers stilled over the lyre. She gazed at Elpis for a long time, saying nothing. Her mouth was still half-open; her brown eyes were dazed and bright. Elpis rose to her knees, came closer. Sappho bent to meet her. The knowing hummed between them like a third body. 

#

I will reach you in ten minutes. I should text you and tell you so, but I don’t. My hands are cold, my fingers stiff and heavy. Maybe, when I get there, you’ll already be gone. Maybe you’ll have decided, rightfully so, that I’m not worth the wait. 

I know exactly how to tell you what I feel. I know exactly how to define what fluttered delicately in my chest after a sleepover at Shannon’s house, when the lights were off and all the other girls were asleep and we decided we were going to get married. I know exactly how to specify my joy. 

Joy is a weird one for me these days. I’m broke and I’m angry and some mornings it feels like every good thing in the world has the weight of a cruel boot bearing down on it at all times. I am fighting and I am tired and I will not stop fighting but I am tired. Still, when I love, I don’t have to be scared; I don’t have to feel like my words are insufficient. Not ever. Because there is language for me. I exist. And you’re standing right there, in the doorway of my life, speaking it back. 

Someone, in another age, wrote it down. All of this—the bus ride, the memory of your hand under my hand, your long hair hanging past your neck and the January light laying there— my tardiness, my wild hope, my turning—it has been written down before. 

Desire is a dialogue in which we all participate, day after day, motion after motion and feeling after feeling. We have always known how. We have always been here. There have always been words for us. Here is the proof. 

#

“This is incomprehensible,” the man Athenian man said to Elpis, maybe, frowning at the sheafs of papyrus she had handed to him. “Like what does this even mean.” 

“Is this Aeolic?” the other Athenian man asked, maybe, peering at the words Elpis had transcribed so carefully. “Nobody writes lyric poems in Aeolic. Who will understand that? Tell Sappho to get with the times.” 

So Elpis sailed back to the mainland and, night after night, into the tiny hours of Eos’s daily gift, wrote down all of Sappho’s poems in the Attic dialect as well. It felt wrong to compress Sappho’s words like that, but she did it anyway, until her wrist was sore, until her thumb trembled. The materials for this endeavor were not cheap. She told her father she was writing a family history. He told her he would rather she get married and bear him a son, and she promised she would work on that. 

As the power of the Penthilid kings who had ruled over Lesbos unraveled with the years, the tyrant Myrsilus came to power. Word rippled from Mytilene to Sigri that Sappho and her family faced exile in Sicily, along with Alcaeus and his. The age of the poets was at an end. There was little time for farewells before Sappho and her mother and her brothers boarded their ship, so Elpis ran to their grand house in the dead of night, her head bowed against the rain, her peplos fringed in mud. As soon as she arrived, she saw Sappho standing in the doorway, lit only by a lychnos in her steady hand. 

“I wrote it all down,” said Elpis, maybe. She was out of breath, and her voice was rough with tears. “And sealed the papers in a box, and locked it, and buried it in the beech clearing, and when I die my children and grandchildren will know where to find it, I promise, I swear.”

Sappho’s braid was threaded now with white. It hung about her shoulders, undone. The rims of her eyes were red, but it struck Elpis that it was not from grief, but from something more volcanic—an enduring heat, throbbing bravely underneath a lesser surface. 

“I’ll miss you,” said Sappho, maybe. 

“We’ll see each other again,” said Elpis, maybe, wiping her raw face clean with the back of her wrist. “And even when I don’t see you, I can read you.” 

“And I can know you’re reading me.” Sappho smiled, that bald nacreous smile Elpis had only seen a time or two in their braided lives. “Even when I don’t see you.” 

Then Sappho set down the lamp and pulled Elpis close in a fierce embrace. Their hearts beat against each other like claves through the fabric. Elpis twisted her head to one side and kissed Sappho’s cheek. Both of them laughed and held each other tight. Elpis, of course, was not really her name. That, unlike the poetry of Sappho she carefully transcribed, has been lost to the ocean of time. It is an approximation. Sappho turned her lips to the pink shell of her lover’s ear. 

“Someone will remember us,” she said. This we know for sure. “Even in another time.” 

#

The bus trundles to a stop under the row of American beeches and I think to myself, reaching for the handle that will steady me on my way to you, that I love our world. And I love loving you in it, and I love the dictionary we were all given for that kind of love, that kind of love that never goes cold, that kind of love that’s made of god-spit, that kind of love that pulses out of me even when I’m asleep. I love the bus ride, the long space from one state of being to the other. At its beginning, empty-handed, I was reaching out to you. And now, at its end, I am touching you: as I step down onto the pavement and pull out my earbuds, I see you standing underneath a beech, with your hands in your coat pockets, craning your neck to catch sight of me. 

We were in the kitchen when I asked you out, my jacket pulled halfway up my back, my hands shaking as they gripped the open cuffs of the sleeves. I blurted out the question like a fever to be flushed out. You, me, Lake Michigan? A Thermos full of pumpkin soup? That was all. Two girls standing face-to-face on a clean floor, sleep-deprived and smelling like garlic, one of them wanting. I had no qualms about the feeling itself. I was more scared of its aftermath. You stared at me for a second, and then gave me a bright, naked grin. You said, I’d love to. Love to. Love to.

You give me that grin again now, waving, breaking into a jog to meet me where I stand. I watch you come with wind-scraped eyes, dressed in the possibilities of all that I can say to you. I’m still broke and not halfway good but there is a language for my longing. Everything is as an ancient poet knew that it could be. Everything is within reach. 

~~

Gwendolyn M. Hicks writes emails by day and fiction about feelings by night. An alum of the Clarion Workshop and the Lambda Literary Retreat, they are currently earning their MFA in Fiction at San Francisco State University. Their writing has appeared in Kaleidotrope, Small Wonders, Trollbreath, and others, and has been a finalist for the Rhysling Award. When not writing fiction or emails, they like leaving apple cores on tables, collecting sticks and rocks, and swimming in the Eel River.