chapter 25
Fury cannot tell its own story. If it could, it would not be what it is. It would be something less potent: a little anger that time can heal, or a grudge that an apology could resolve. With true fury, there is no stepping outside of one’s self to tell the tale; there is only stepping into more blind fury.
It is up to me to describe the scene that follows.
I was in the room below. I wore no special costume this night—just my usual black on black, a skirt and sweater—but I was the most disguised person at the party. While I waited, I unraveled the two tightly wound coils of hair at my ears. I held them firm at the neckline, and with a sharpened pair of gardening shears I lopped them off. They fell to the carpet like two dead animals. Gone! Good riddance to anything extraneous. The hair that was left on my head, I cut and hacked at.
Finally my satisfaction came. Above me, she howled with three times three to the thirty-third power of undiluted rage.
The others were so easily manipulated and played their roles so admirably. The chorus hid where I told them to hide. My target was captured by love and lust, as I knew he would be. These young princes are so predictable.
Megaera remained my only question mark. Would she soften? Had life twisted her precious psyche enough? When it came down to it, would she have the right vengeful stuff?
But isn’t this what they say about slow learners? They take their own sweet time, but when rage finally comes it is deep, profound, and unshakeable.
His perceived offense hit her smoldering pain like a splash of gasoline.
She called the others and they turned on him with the outrage of every loss in their lives.
She wanted to be swept away with feeling, and so she was. She lost control in the service of ultimate control.
They swarmed him like delirious, demented flies. He swatted. He begged for relief. He was innocent this time, but what prince doesn’t have regrets? They uncovered every slip of his toxic tongue, every crime.
What mortal man is not terrified,
gripped in fear and horror
To hear their sacred law.
Those girls, those Furies, did not smell the delicious stench that the hormones of their rage released from the maggot-loving plant.
They did not see the storm cloud building over the house. They did not see the ash in the snow globe falling on all the old trapped princes, plus this new one, snagged and helpless.
They opened the window and invited him to step through it.
“Jump,” they sang. “Here is your reprieve. Escape our misery. Jump and find peace.”
Leaping from the heights,
The hard, heavy downfall.
I walked to the window, heard that glorious rush of air, and it felt like a drug coursing through me. I saw his flailing limbs and his body hitting the clump of bushes.
I heard the screams of the so-called innocent bystanders. But nobody is innocent here, all are bound together by the guilt of everyone else.
FOURTH STASIMON, THE BOOK OF FURIOUS