I’m in the Labyrinth again. It would be useless to try and determine how far I am from the exit or how close I am to its heart. Every place in the Labyrinth is the heart of it. And the exit is twice as far as you fear it is. This time it appears as the depths of an abandoned grove. Trees in straight lines with unchecked growth. Vines and ivy winding around branches, slowly choking them. This was once a place where men thought they could command nature’s growth. I wouldn’t be surprised to kick over a rock and find the remains of those same men.
What I thought was the squealing of pigs is the screams of men still living. Through the trees they are chased to exhaustion. They scramble frantically for any means of departing this place, but they only go in wild circles. Those that succumb to the ultimate failure of flesh fall and are set upon by their maenad pursuers. The frenzied women tease the fallen, trying to prod them into running again. Those that fail to rise are angrily torn apart. An eyeball slaps me wetly on the cheek. The trailing optic nerve clings to my ear.
“Hey! You got your eye on me!” I threw the eyeball back at the giggling maenad. Her victim is still alive and screaming for mercy. The maenad leans over and rips his larynx out with her teeth. As he gurgles, drowning in his blood, I note that she has been merciful. Killing him before continuing to dismember his body with her bare hands.
Men wearing masks with goat skin tied around their waist run about waving lit torches in one hand and wine skins in the other. Any maenad not having blood in her mouth is nursed with wine instead.
The hearts of the victims, both men and beasts, are carried with shouts to an altar in the middle of the chamber. Once this was white marble. Now stained yellow by various fluids over the millennia, the cracks and imperfections filled with a sinister black smudging.
I’m walking around the carnage disappointingly sober. Naked, but sober. I gesture for wine, but the satyr-men bark harshly at me and brandish their torches instead. The maenads tease me as if I was next on their todo list, but refuse to touch me for pleasure or pain.
“Eh. Dionysus. I don’t get it. Am I on the menu or am I serving?” I mutter the words under my breath. I know he’s here. He’s as close as the inside of my shadow. I just don’t see him with my eyes, or don’t recognize him if I’ve seen him already.
“Yes.” His youthful voice comes from the sticky pile of organs on the marble table. White cloth is wrapped carelessly around him. It does not redden from contact with the body parts. Ivy coils around his head and shoulders like a verdant snake. He’s beautiful enough to shut Narcissus up. He is holding out a thin curving knife. The kind you use to remove meat from bones. “You will serve me your self, yourself.”
“You can’t have my heart. It’s not flesh, and it’s spoken for. That knife won’t crack this skull of mine, even with the head start. What do you want of me?”
“Whatever you remove is fine.” He gestures so carelessly, I know he is being very precise with his answer. As he leans back on the slurping organs, his weight presses blood out of ripped aortas. And still, he remains clean.
Hmm. What would be a right proper offering to this aspect of Dionysus? I had a hard time choosing because of my sobriety. I asked for wine to help me think, but he refused it. I had to decide sober.
Whatever the offering was, it can’t require traversing a bone to obtain. Not with this knife. So only pendulous flesh could be considered. Ears? No. Nose? That would be an insult. Breasts? Wait. What breasts? Where did my boobies go?
And now I notice why the maenads were giving me stink eye, and why the saytr-men treated me so strangely. I’m physically male. Out of curiosity, I poke the flaccid penis with my finger. I giggle at the tactile sensation of a half-empty sausage casing. Noting that I felt the penis on the finger, but not the finger on the penis, I poke at it with the talon tip of the knife.
OUCH! I FELT THAT FOR DAMN SURE!
I completely forget that I am in the middle of the Labyrinth, surrounded by homicidal maddened maenads, under the unblinking gaze of Madness Personified, and sit down on the blood soaked ground to play with my balls.
It is only when I hear the complete lack of other people’s movements that I recall where I am. I look up to see maenads looking over my shoulder wearing the same inquisitive and inspecting face that I’m sure I wore.
Oh. I’m… male. Shit.
“They won’t touch you. I will not allow it.” Dionysus reminds me of his still youthful, still clean presence on the throne of blood above me. “The other men that they tore apart wanted my gifts without payment. So I took what is mine as my due. But you… you have never denied me what I wanted from you. There is no need to use force when not necessary. That would be quite impolite and rude.”
I sit back and stretch my legs out. The scrotum makes contact with the cold ground and I yelp a bit in surprise. The maenads laugh with me.
“I… I did not ask, though. Yours is a realm I have no right to enter by force of will. I am here, when you wish me to be here. I know what waits under that pretty face of yours, [Gibbering Child]. The time of knowing you in your youth is gone. Zagreus. This is the Under Time. This is the Unmade Time. This is where Insanity leeches my cognition away until I fall apart and I wait for someone to remake me. Always I will be thankful for your protection and covering before. But I am not that ingenue. My knowledge undoes me enough.” I look at the knife in my hands, then look at the lazy penis lolling off to the side, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. “My body, but not my penis.” I look up at Dionysus. He is smirking to shame the sun that never shines here.
Oh. I get it.
I start laughing in bright tones. He reaches behind him, plucks a still vibrant human heart, and squeezes fresh blood into his mouth. Watching him overindulge such that blood runs down his cheek and chest, I find I am thirsty.
“Dionysus. Zagreus. Unmaker. What do you want of me?”
He throws the emptied heart into the crowd of maenads behind me. They scurry after it like desperate spinsters at a wedding reception. “What is not yours to carry. I want you to leave here, unburdened.”
I stand up and pat as much dirt and congealed blood off of me as I can. The maenads helped. They fussed over me like chickens at an ant hill. Plucking each speck of imperfection off of me until I was as clean as a fresh bath.
“You know this is going to hurt.” His words expressed concern that it would. His tone expressed desire for it. I’d call him a sadist as an insult, but then again, so am I.
I gathered scrotum and penis in my left hand. The pleasure of the sensation threatened to distract me from the deed I had to complete. “My dear Child. Unlearning wrong things always hurt. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have so many fucking dipshits in the world. Pain avoidant fuckers, and such.” As I spoke, I placed the concave blade against the bottom of the scrotum, next to the body. The cold of the metal felt really good, and I questioned my sanity again.
Before he could continue the banter, before my own cowardice could stop me, I brought up the knife and cleanly removed the male genitalia from my body. I heard shouting. When I took a breath to answer, the shouting stopped and I realized that was the sound of Not Me fleeing the suddenly unsustainable flesh.
I stood confused before the dark crimson marble altar. I had a sense of loss, but I couldn’t understand of what. I had a handful of bloody flesh in my hand, and a bloody knife in the other hand, but I bore no wounds on my body. I had a hole in my understanding, as if something that didn’t belong had been dug out but the proper understanding had yet to be found to fill it.
A maenad nudged me and I remembered where I was and what I was supposed to be doing. “Uh. I had a massive brain fart and all the fancy words I was going to say have fled.”
Dionysus laughed and laughed. “I know. I saw them leave as the Not You dragged them away. It’s okay. Just leave the offering and the blade behind, then you will be free to leave for you will have given me what I wanted from you.”
I placed the flesh and the blade on the marble altar by his feet. “This time. I’m too much fun to fuck with.”
“Well. Yea. But that’s another time. You have given me what I want. Leave.”
I bowed and noted my body appeared younger and androgynous. I completely lacked all external secondary sex characteristics. The maenads led me to the entrance of the Labyrinth. Dionysus was waiting for me at the threshold.
“Don’t lose yourself. It will be harder to cut away what is Not You.” He took my hand and pulled me through the threshold, forcing me out of the Labyrinth and out of the dream.