Pasiphae, the King’s blond grail, lived in a world of soft abundance. Oils, fats and silks were her dowry, her feather bed her impregnable fortress. With an insouciance that enraptured Minos, she wound him around her finger, ensnaring him in her material desires as if within Ariadne’s web—his own will softened, sublimated, dissolved like a housefly, silk-bound and liquefied. Magnificent in her excess, empowered in her indulgence, she had never known the spindly cloying fingers of hunger until she saw the bull.

 

Desire makes a door where none should be. Desire makes a hollow space and says: enter.

 

The bull was beautiful. So a structure was built, a form that was also an opening, a mouth that swallowed her whole. Inside, Pasiphaë was weightless, beyond pleasure, beyond shame, lost in the spiraling whorl of her own wanting. Outside the world continued without her. The banquet halls filled and emptied, and beneath her ribs, something began to turn, like the slow grinding of stone against stone.

 

What came next was simply cause and effect. A door opened, something passed through, and Asterion came screaming into the world. And Pasiphaë, who had always gotten what she wanted, turned away. She did not look back.

 

Asterion did not know the blue steelplate face of the sky. He could not envision the folding rivers of his country. But he knew the house as the body of a beast knows its own breath—he could feel its slow pulse in the stones beneath his feet, its tender sigh in the drafts that slid like fingers across his skin, like those of a lover.

 

Each night, Morpheus, on stardust-gilded wings, folded lonely Asterion into the hush of dreams. He dreamt of other houses. He saw himself moving through rooms with vaulted ceilings and soft beige carpets, his great shadow stretching across granite countertops, past breakfast bars set with unused wine glasses. The air smelled of lavender plug-ins, of disinfectant. Every room led into another, open concept, smooth and seamless. He wandered past identical staircases, identical pantries stocked with bulk-buy cereals, identical stainless steel refrigerators droning in the dim twilight. Outside the streets coiled in upon themselves, looping back into oblivion.

 

He would wake to the house’s silence, uncertain if he had truly woken at all.