So now we sail on, looping the world on our stolen boat. Very occasionally, we drop anchor by a seashore, but I never go on land. Not because I’m afraid to be seen, but because I do not wish to have more unnecessary stone men on my hands. I live on the outside, in the blue depths which edge our cities, plains and beaches. This is a life sentence of its own kind – never to get close to a person, for fear that if a lover so much as laid a glance in my direction, his life would be over. I could collect men like stone playing pieces, arrange them in a tableau on the deck. Euryale would like that.
I’m not lonely. Self-awareness is a great banisher of loneliness. And my sisters, the immortals, are with me. The ocean’s a companion, as are the dogs – and you, of course, here, listening. I have noticed, as we travel the world, that there are more people listening. I can sense them. I know they have their questions. I feel a deep vibrating in the earth, in the skies and stars, and I want to give my answer.
And a strange thing: perhaps it’s all the time I spend with my sisters, for whom time means nothing, but I feel as if I might go on forever, or at least that my myth will. I could break into a million pieces and stalk a million minds. I could drive women to feats of fame and liberty and wonder. I might live for hundreds of years to come, crossing continents and oceans, empires and cultures. Because, unlike a statue, you cannot break up a myth or wedge it on top of a cliff. A myth finds a way to remember itself. It makes a new shape, rising out of a shallow grave in glory.
You could take away my arms and legs, my body and my breasts; you could cut off my head and still not end my myth. You will not find my answer in the puzzle of a stony foot, you will not find me in my snakes. You will not find me in my deeds, nor in poems written by long-dead men. But you will find me when you need me, when the wind hears a woman’s cry and fills my sails forward. And I will whisper on the water that one must never fear the raised shield, the reflection caught in an office window, or the mirror in a bathroom.
I will tell you to look into me, and you will see. Look, Medusa, girl and Gorgon.
You.
Me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jessie Burton studied at the University of Oxford and then went on to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She is the author of three novels for adults, The Miniaturist (2014), The Muse (2016) and The Confession (2019), and is both a Sunday Times no.1 bestseller and a New York Times bestseller. The Miniaturist sold a million copies worldwide in its first year and has also been adapted for television by the BBC. Jessie is now published internationally in forty languages. Her first children’s story, The Restless Girls, was published by Bloomsbury in 2018.