Eulogy for a Muse
by Lynn D. Jung
Sixteen hours after my sisters cast me from Parnassus, I smashed my knuckles to ribbons in the bathroom mirror of a Denny’s diner.
My ichor ran in rivulets of sunlight down the shattered surface and pooled in the ceramic sink. I traced the cracks with electrified fingertips, mourning the damage I had wrought. There were no such mirrors on the mountain, where we admired our reflections in the idle waters of fresh springs, for my kind are incapable of creation.
No, this amalgamation of metals, glass, and paint, layered one atop of another in complex symphony, was a purely human innovation. It was brought into the world by a mortal named Justus von Liebig who, as a child, survived a cataclysmic global famine. He went on to become a chemist, eventually inventing not only the mirror, but also agricultural fertilizer to ensure the world would never suffer another Year Without Summer.
In their grief, they innovate.
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My sisters were like petals in the wind. They sprinkled their blessings as if they were powdered sugar, raining them over the mortals’ heads and giggling at the feckless results. They kept their gazes fixed upon royal courts and the upper echelons of society, preferring to nourish the dreams and minds of those who were just as lovely and hollow as them.
I was once the same—a beautiful, empty creature who had never so much as shed a tear—until I descended from the spire on a whim.
In my wandering, I encountered a barefoot child tracing shapes in the ashes of her village with her fingertips, drawing forth gray-blossomed flowers and trees wreathed in soot. I found a destitute singer choking on the name of the lover who abandoned him, an aria crescendoing to breathtaking heights as he wrenched every ounce of hurt out of his chest and into the music. I danced beneath the moonlight with a hundred sweating, exuberant strangers after an elder’s death, tasting the salt of mortal sorrow alongside the nectar of their joy. They sweetened one another, in the end.
The truth became apparent: my sisters and I had been breathtakingly, maddeningly arrogant to consider ourselves the catalysts of humanity’s brilliance. In my disgust, I spurned the sugar bowl of petty inspiration and descended again and again, scouring the earth for the grieving, for I craved more than gilded halls and languid poetry.
In the ashes of the Second World War, I gathered the broken to my breast and let them weep until their stories were scrawled across my skin—I would not let them fade. Later, I kissed the tear-stained cheeks of artists who had lost their hearts to the AIDS crisis and guided them gently toward pen and paper, scissors and sound. In between the great tragedies, I found smaller wells of grief—a writer who mourned his daughter, a sculptor who survived a terrible fire, a pianist who had mere months left to live but could not, would not, give up her music.
Over the decades, I came to know that ink and tears tasted the same, and I learned to weep. My kind are not meant to cry, and so my foolish dancing sisters finally took notice.
Art should be happy, they said. It should be beautiful.
There is nothing wrong with joy, I told them. But there is just as much beauty in sorrow.
But try as I might to explain to them the taste of tears, I lacked the words to describe true sorrow, for I had never experienced it. None of us had.
Immortals are indolent beings, drifting from one eon to the next, and our argument took years to reach its zenith. And the zenith was this: a sixteen-armed push, a stumble, a fall. My robes fluttering in the wind like boneless wings and olive branches shattering beneath my weight as the sprawling peak of Parnassus and the disdainful faces of my sisters faded into pinpricks, and then nothing at all.
I landed with a terribly mortal crunch. For some time, I laid on the hot Missouri asphalt, staring at the cloudless blue sky. After a while, I picked myself up, for what else was there to do?
In the Denny’s, I gathered the shattered pieces one by one, my ichor beading on the tile. Fresh droplets wept from my broken flesh, and already their color was beginning to darken from eternal gold into deep, mortal red.
Gently, I placed the last of my godhood and Von Liebig’s shards into a paper grocery bag and carted it all to my new home, in the hopes that my grief, too, might someday yield fruit.
Lynn D. Jung (she/her) writes speculative fiction in all shades of strange. Since obtaining her B.S. in Zoology, she has bounced from one exciting location to the next in search of more adventures to put on the page. Aside from traveling and writing, her hobbies include crochet, climbing, hiking, and making YouTube videos that help writers grow.