The Shades

They come up out of the dull black mud as Odysseus pours the offerings, first a few, then a crowd. Maidens dressed as they died. Boys. Elders. A man with his ribs open. A woman clutching an infant. They cannot speak. They have no flesh, no weight, no warmth. They cannot recognise their own sons. Until they drink the blood from the trench, they are only hunger and shape. Once they drink, they remember. The cunning of Circe’s instruction is brutal: the prophet must drink first, no shade may approach until then, and so Odysseus and Eurylochus stand with drawn swords and hold back his own mother as she lunges feebly toward the pit, eyes empty of him. [SPOILER: Anticleia drinks and knows him, and tells him she died of waiting. He reaches for her three times and his arms close on nothing. The dead cannot be held. Achilles tells him being king of this place is worse than being a starving labourer alive. Ajax turns his back and walks into the dark without a word. The lesson of the underworld is not a lesson. It is the weight of what cannot be touched.]