By the gods, my son was beautiful.

But he too closely resembled his father: his real father and not my husband, Kephysus. Long pale limbs, dark chestnut hair, warm amber-toned eyes--neither Kephysus nor I could have bestowed these gifts, and so I was undone.

My son's name was Narkissus. It was ordered that he be immured in a dark room, his beauty ever to be shrouded in gloom, so that Kephysus wouldn't have to look upon the reminder of my infidelity. Only his niece, Ekho, was allowed to visit from time to time over the years. I hadn't noticed her attention turn to love. The day she stormed out of his room, I was surprised.

"He has refused me," she spluttered, eyes red.

"Refused you?"

"My grandmother will hear of this."

My bones grew chill. Ekho's grandmother Nemesis--a vengeful sorceress rumoured to be a child of Hades--was great-aunt to my husband. She bore no love for Narkissus. How I feared her.

Narkissus sat in his dark corner, pensive. Shadows collected around his pale shoulders.

"I should not have to love that which I do not find beautiful," he said.

"Of course not," I replied, stroking his hair. "Dear boy."

He grasped my fingers, met my eyes with a gaze of yearning. "I have heard that the sun is beautiful. When shall I ever see the sun?"

I could not answer.

I expected Nemesis to come to me raging, but sinister deeds are often wrought in obscurity. While I weaved at my loom, movement in the courtyard caught my eye: Narkissus, wandering freely towards the olive grove. I flew to the door. Nemesis, dark and bony, caught me, held a crepey hand over my mouth. Narkissus roamed off, marble skin dazzling in the sunlight.

"You shall not interfere," Nemesis said, whiskery voiced.

Narkissus free? How was this a punishment? I feared it all the more for it bewildered me.

Afternoon came: Narkissus hadn't returned. I crept away to look for him, through the grove and the forest behind, over sun-dappled ground, calling in the long afternoon shadows. Finally, I found him, naked but for a sash of deep vermilion around his lovely loins, lying among oblique sunbeams near a clear pond where he had caught sight of his reflection. For the first time.

"Narkissus?"

Silence except for a breeze tangling in tree-tops. I kneeled, touched his shoulder. Still, so still. He breathed, his skin was warm: he was not dead.

What then? Bewitched?

I leaned closer. He was transfixed by his image, ensnared by his own beauty. As I watched, he stretched out a hand as though to grasp the beautiful boy. The reflection rippled apart into glimmers and shards. He whimpered: "Gone. Gone." As the reflection grew still, he sighed a strange comfort.

Bewitched.

"Come," I said, taking his face in my palm to turn it towards me. He shoved me. I fell in the muddy ground beside the pond, rejected. Forgotten.

Two nights passed and he did not return. I went to him with food and water--he touched neither. Knowing that Kephysus wouldn't help, I pleaded with my brother's family. They set to the task, four of them, with nets and ropes. I led them to Narkissus and they trapped him, hauled him away. He resisted so violently that the ropes bit into his skin--purple welts in the soft pale flesh.

In a locked room, he beat at the walls, wailed, screamed like an animal with its bones crushed between the jaws of a trap. It abraded my heart, I could not endure his pain. So I set him free. Like a dreamer he returned to the pond. I sat with him a few days, but was soon constrained to return to smug Kephysus.

After two weeks the weather grew bitter. Out there, cold moonbeams and the careless tips of autumn leaves were tracing patterns on his skin. I smuggled him a blanket, but he did not recognise me. Wasted as he was, jutting ribs and blades of shoulders, I barely recognised him.

It has been many years, now, since I buried the withered body of my son by the clear pond. A mother should not outlive her child. In the cold of night my arms still ache as if they have hearts of their own, ache to embrace my son.

In vain.

(© Kim Wilkins 2000)