ODYSSEUS DREAMS OF DISINTEGRATION
by Luke Condon
When Dawn appeared, fresh and rosy-fingered, terrified Odysseus rose with it. In the bed he shared with Penelope, that goddess amongst mortal women, he screamed in a most ungodlike way; he did not at all resemble the inventive hero of Troy, bursting from the grim horse to raise floods of blood in the streets; nor did he take after the cunning revenger who voyaged across the wine-dark sea in search of his homeland, bringing doom to the ignoble Suitors and outwitting many monsters. There in that bed, with its olive tree leg, he screamed and screamed, and he did not look one bit like an immortal god.
Then, when he had stopped, he turned to wise Penelope and said this:
“My wife, I have just woken from a terrible dream; I believe it is an omen, and I would like you to interpret for me. In fact it is the latest in a sequence of dreams, which began on that blessed day I held you in my arms after many years without doing so. In these dreams I will be acting as I have acted in the past, and nothing will be particularly amiss; I will be doing battle on the beach at Ilium, and here will be an enemy dying on my spear, there a fine companion of mine such as swift-footed Achilles, son of Peleus, or his good friend Patroclus, lying dead in the dirt; and if these things are not exactly as they happened I will not find it strange, as I have heard tales from the mouths of other lucky men who survived the fighting, or from those brave shades themselves in Hades’ house.
“Sometimes the vision will be of a more gentle kind, and I will be entertaining a guest in our home, drinking wine and feasting with them, or receiving the same courtesy as a suppliant in the house of a generous host, feeling quite well cared for. In these visions no harm will come my way, nor will I see myself sustaining some grievous wound in those other episodes where I wield a spear, as my strength and skill allow me to defeat my enemies without much trouble, just as I have in life. But then I will feel the presence of some unseen powerful God, usually that of Zeus the Thunderer, who makes the clouds darken.”
This is what fearful Odysseus said to his wife, the prudent Penelope, who lay there, looking like a goddess, and listened to her husband with concern. But now he became frantic, and the next words he spoke were winged.
“Tell me this, good lady. In these visions I am presented trials I have already overcome through my own power and have long seen the back of, or a time of great happiness in my life which I should be quite pleased to revisit. But then an encroaching God appears behind me and strikes me down the moment I am at peace. If it should be Artemis or Apollo with their invisible arrows, piercing my heart painlessly, I might understand that my natural time has come, or is soon to come, and make the necessary preparations so that you and Telemachus do not suffer again at the hands of some new villains, even though I think by now he is very strong and could handle any foe with ease.
“But why instead do I find myself gored through the back by the bronze-tipped weapon of Pallas Athene, of whom I was a favorite; why does the room suddenly fill with drowning waves of the kind whipped up by raging Poseidon, when I traveled far and sacrificed a fine bull, ram, and breeding boar each in order to make peace with him; tell me, fair Penelope, why the great Chief of Gods himself strikes me down with a fearsome bolt and turns me to black ash in a moment, without allowing me to turn and face him as he does so? Why should these things happen now, when my suffering is so long past, and I have finally landed at safer shores?”
Wise as she was, Penelope had no answer to her husband’s pleas, and could only urge him to come closer and find comfort in her arms. But when next Dawn appeared, fresh and rosy-fingered, wailing Odysseus would wake her again.
Luke Condon (he/him) is a 23-year-old writer from Cork, Ireland. He is a graduate of English Literature at University College Cork, and is currently a postgraduate student of creative writing at Trinity College Dublin. He was the winner of University College Cork's 2024 Louise Clancy Memorial Prize, and his fiction work was highly commended by the judges of the Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship.