Polyphemus

A creature the size of a house with a single eye pale as fat, never still. Polyphemus is a shepherd, of all things. Before Odysseus arrives, his life is cheese-racks and lambs sorted by age, the careful order of a man who knows his stores. Then twelve uninvited guests show up in his cave eating his food, and he reminds them which one of them is bigger. He picks two men up like loaves and dashes them on the floor. He eats them where they fall. He seals the cave with a boulder no twenty men could move and goes to sleep on top of his sheep. The horror is not just the eating. It is the casualness. He is a householder going about his evening. [SPOILER: Odysseus blinds him with a sharpened olive stake after softening him with the priest’s wine, then hides under the rams to escape. The Cyclops feels each fleece as it leaves and never thinks to feel above. Then Odysseus, drunk on his own cunning, shouts his real name across the water and Polyphemus calls down on him the curse of his father Poseidon: come home late, come home alone, come home to grief. The curse takes twenty years to land. Every man Odysseus loses on the long way home is paid in part to this one ruined eye.]