Free Starcrossed by Josephine Angelini Page B

dawn swim. At first she left her shirt on the passenger
    seat, but the scent of him kept wafting up, smelling of cut
    grass, baking bread, and snow. In a fit of frustration she screamed
    at the steering wheel and tossed her shirt out the window.
    She was exhausted to the point of collapse when she got home,
    but she couldn’t lie down in her bed without taking a shower. She
    had to scrub Lucas off or his scent would chase her around in her
    dreams. She was filthy. Her elbows and back had grass stains on
    them and her feet were a black mess.
    As she watched the dirt melt off her shins and ankles under the
    water she thought of the three sisters and their perpetual suffering.
    Lucas had called them the Furies, and no name could have suited
    them better. She vaguely recalled hearing Hergie saying the word
    at some point, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember what
    story they were in. For some reason Helen was picturing armor
    and togas, but she couldn’t be sure.
    She picked up a pumice stone and rubbed off every last speck of
    dirt before shutting off the taps. Afterward, she stayed in the steam
    to put on sweet-smelling lotion, letting it soak in, obliterating every
    last trace of Lucas. When she finally tumbled into bed, still
    wrapped in a damp towel, the sun was long up.
    Helen was walking through the dry lands, hearing the dead grass
    crackle with each step she took. Little clouds of dust puffed up
    around her bare feet and clung to the moisture running down her
    legs, as if the dirt she walked on was so desperate for water it was
    trying to jump up off the ground to drink her sweat. Even the air
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    was gritty. There were no insects buzzing around in the scrub, no
    animals of any kind. The sky was blazingly bright with a tinny
    blue light, but there was no sun. There were no wind and no
    clouds—just a rocky, blasted landscape as far as Helen could see.
    Her heart told her that somewhere close there was a river, so she
    walked and walked and walked.
    Helen woke a few hours later with heavy limbs, a headache, and
    dirty feet. She flopped out of bed, rinsed off the increasingly familiar
    nocturnal grime, and threw on a sundress. Then she sat down at
    her computer to look up the Furies.
    The first website she clicked on gave her chills. As soon as she
    opened it she saw a simple line drawing on the side of a pot. It was
    a perfect depiction of the three horrors that had been haunting her
    for days. As she read the text under the illustration it gave a nearly
    exact physical description of her sobbing sisters, but the rest confused
    her. In classical Greek mythology there were three Erinyes,
    or Furies, and they wept blood just as they did in Helen’s visions.
    But according to her research, the Furies’ job was to pursue and
    punish evildoers. They were the physical manifestation of the anger
    of the dead. Helen knew she wasn’t perfect, but she had never
    done anything really wrong, certainly not anything that would have
    earned her a visit from three mythological figures of vengeance.
    As she read on, she learned that the Furies first appeared in the
    Oresteia, a cycle of plays by Aeschylus. After two solid hours of untangling
    what had to have been the first—and bloodiest—soap opera
    in history, Helen finally got her head around the plot.
    The gist of it was that this poor kid named Orestes was forced to
    kill his mother because his mother had killed his father, Agamemnon.
    But the mother killed the father because the father killed their
    daughter, Orestes’ beloved sister Iphigenia. To make it even more
    complicated, the father had killed the daughter because that’s what
    the gods asked for as a sacrifice to make the winds blow so the
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    Greeks could get to Troy to fight the Trojan War. Poor Orestes was
    bound by the laws of justice to kill his mother, which he did, and
    for that sin he got chased halfway across the earth by the Furies
    until he was nearly insane. The irony was that he never had