CALENDAR OF REGRETS: AN EXCERPT LANCE OLSEN

Heart swollen with anticipation, Iphigenia steps onto the rocky shore and immediately feels she has done this before. Gnarled graygreen cypress trees spattered here there. The sky a violent blue. How the flock of white birds gyre above her like a flock of silent white hands.

She pauses to take in the scene. Scree crunches beneath her sandals. Iphigenia is in Aulis to marry Achilles. There is a story she has heard. In order to make her son immortal, Achilles' mother, a sea nymph, dipped him into the river Styx. The black water caught the baby's soul on fire. The fire has never gone out. To anger him is to witness uncontaminated rage. Yet the opposite is also true: to know uncontaminated anger is to know uncontaminated love. Iphigenia cannot wait to learn what such a sensation feels like. Whenever she brings up the topic with her attendants, they lower their heads, cover their mouths, titter.

In the dining hall one evening, her father told his wife that Iphigenia would be sailing with him to Aulis the following morning. Next Iphigenia knew, she was standing on the dock, throat aching as if she were about to cry, hugging her mother goodbye.  Next she knew, she was kneeling sick at the railing in a mad storm on the open sea, wind and rain tearing into her. Next she knew, she was stepping onto this rocky shore, thinking: This is where I shall be wed. This is what it is like.

Her attendants flow around her, bearing crates filled with her wardrobe and jewelry, her favorite foods and favorite oils, bearing her favorite bed above their heads, her prized satin chair, her prized satin pillows. Her pet cheetah growls in a cage nearby. The townspeople have arrived at the periphery to gawk at this impromptu entertainment.

Agamemnon steps beside his daughter and halts, huge palms on hips, surveying the disembarkation.  He smells of balms and garlic. Iphigenia asks:

When shall I meet him, Papa?

Agamemnon does not take his eyes off the commotion around him, the temple high on the craggy hill overlooking it all, the delicate white hands spiraling through this morning.

Behind him scores of ships, sails bloated, ease into the bay.

Soon, daughter, soon.

But it isn't soon. It isn't soon at all. The afternoon is a plodding settling in. The evening a great feast sans bridegroom, with panflute music, dwarfs in monkey outfits, the sacrifice of a colossal ox. The night a series of alarming apparitions.

Ever since she can remember, Iphigenia has been visited by visions from a future that is never her future. She sees what will happen to others while remaining blind to what will happen to hers. A large bat with her sister Electra's face sucks on her sleeping mother's neck. The god Phantasos materializes before her brother Orestes as an inexpensive pearl necklace, a heavy battleaxe, a beautifully crafted arrow embedded in a bloody heel, yet refuses to utter a sound.

Iphigenia is thirteen, but she feels much older and wiser. She has traveled. She has seen things. She possesses a pet cheetah. She is marrying a demigod.

Surrounded by attendants in the modest temple at the top of the hill, Iphigenia prays. Offers up to the gods a piece of cloth from her most lavish childhood dress. Offers up her special childhood toy: a mechanical bird that sings and flap its wings. These items will assist Iphigenia in departing her youth, in the migration to the foreign land called adulthood.

To the goddess of virginity, Iphigenia offers up a lock of her own long glossy blueblack hair and a miniature engraved chest filled with silver coins. On one side of each coin is the image of Helios, sunrays streaming out from his head. On the other is the image of her father, sharp nose, thin lips, jug-handle ears, almond-shaped eyes emanating confidence.

The air is tangy with incense. Behind Iphigenia's eyelids, the cosmos seems dark and damp as the back of her mouth.

Iphigenia is closer to her attendant Anthea, the one whose prehistoric skin reminds her of an elephant's crumpled shank, than to anyone else on earth.

Anthea taps Iphigenia on the shoulder and tells her it is time to move on.

Iphigenia rises.

The procession winds its way from the temple to the women's quarters for the pine-scented nuptial bath. Ten garlanded slave girls—:none older than nine—:have drawn water from the sacred spring in the hills and carried it back in beige and black vases usually reserved for funerary purposes. The vases, Anthea explains, are to remind Iphigenia that after this she has only one more important passage to make in her life, and that is out of it, the water to purify her soul and instigate fecundity within her loins.

Head bowed, Iphigenia kneels over a gutter set in the marble tiles. Two of the slave girls pour the spring water over her hair, her skinny shoulders, the bluewhite concatenation of her spine.

Iphigenia thinks: This is how it feels to become another person. Iphigenia thinks: Three more hours, and I shall populate the center of a completely new tale.

In one dream, she watched Electra standing among vast sand dunes pressing her palms against the flank of a white Arabian horse. Each time she pulled her palms away, crimson imprints remained behind. Soon, bloody flowers covered the horse's side. When Iphigenia awoke, the sheets between her legs were soggy with metallic seep. Her nipples ached.  It felt as though she had eaten something that was poisoning her. She decided a succubus must have attacked while she was dreaming and now she was bleeding to death.

Sitting bolt upright, she cried out in horror.

A groggy Anthea dashed in, fluttery oil lamp in her hands. Iphigenia's attendant ran her hands over the frightened girl's body, searching, taking stock, calming, and, when she reached that mess between her thighs, she broke into a wheezy cackle.

You're not dying, child, she said. You're just growing up.

Next morning, Anthea mixed corn with Iphigenia's menstrual blood and spread it on the nearby fields to celebrate her newfound fertility.

Her proud father gave her a cheetah cub the size of a housecat. The fluffy fur along his backbone and atop his head stood straight up so that it was impossible to take his pipsqueak growls seriously. Iphigenia named him Zeno because she liked the sound of bees and surprise living within the word.

Her mother, whom she often did not see for weeks on end, said nothing.

Then she said nothing again.

She is alone in the bath with Anthea.  Anthea is dressing her. The other attendants are waiting outside, ready to escort her into another life. She can hear them speaking in low hasty voices through the open window, although she cannot make out what they are going on about. She can hear the deep murmur of hundreds of spectators collected on the promontory overlooking the sea several hundred yards beyond. She finds the air she is breathing far too moist, salty, warm as the day matures toward a blazing noon.

When Anthea slips the veil down in place over Iphigenia's face, Iphigenia whispers: What's it going to be like?

Anthea has been thinking of different things. She holds an ivory clasp between her lips. As far back as Iphigenia can remember, her attendant has never boasted a tooth to her name. Toothless Anthea comes back to this world. Iphigenia is certain there are others. She watches them every night in her sleep.

You'll see, Anthea says around the clasp.

Iphigenia grins.

But I want to know now. Have you seen him?

Anthea removes the clasp and says: Some things should be a surprise. Some things you shouldn't know about until you know about them.

Iphigenia's grin loosens into a full-blown girlish smile.

Is he handsome as they say?

There you go, Anthea says, fastening the clasp in Iphigenia's hair, hand loitering on the back of the girl's neck. We're ready, sweetheart.

But you're not telling me, Iphigenia says, whine tinting her voice. You've got to, you know.

They have been sitting on facing wooden stools.

Anthea lifts her stiff body, sighs, says: It is time to tell yourself: I shall meet today expecting nothing.

I don't understand.

You don't need to. There's going to be a war.

A war?

Anthea gestures toward the doorway with her long sharp chin that almost touches her long sharp nose.

Far away. Yes.  This is what men do, she says. They kill each other. Sack each other's cities. All those ships in the bay? They will sail tomorrow, the gods willing.

Iphigenia stands, tipsy with this surge of newness, steps toward the exit.

Behind her, Anthea adds: Remember. Everything changes, sweetheart. The universe loves to happen.

Iphigenia is thirteen, but she has petted a baby rhinoceros her father brought back from Cyrene. She has walked beside her siblings through the cobbled streets of sprawling Athens. She has listened to the story of how her father's kingdom was stolen from him, how he took it back by rightful force, how he took his bride—:Iphigenia's mother—:the same way, killing her first husband, that spineless yokel Tantalus, and then their newborn son. Agamemnon had oil poured over the man on the stage in front of the theater and had him set on fire. Tantalus became a living torch, running in circles until he dropped. Agamemnon returned to the palace and lifted Clytemnestra and Tantalus' baby boy out of its crib and crushed its skull between his huge palms. The noise was exactly that of biting into an onion, Agamemnon said. It sounded exactly like victory.

No husband is waiting for her: this is the first thing Iphigenia notices as the altar swings into view. A large gray slab of stone on a steep rocky promontory. The crowd surrounding it falling silent as she approaches, heads bowed in awe. Warriors in full armor, but also men, women, and children from the nearby town. Their reverence is as it should be. This is the part Iphigenia always likes best about her appearances, how others offer her their respect and admiration. It makes her feel warm like the sun on your face.

But there is only the granite lozenge, only her father and two priests standing beside it.  Iphigenia scans the vicinity for Achilles. He is nowhere to be seen.

Anthea and the other attendants form an unhurried human wake behind her.

In the distance, the multitude of ships at anchor in the bay, like a multitude of whitecaps.  Beyond, the sheer cliffs of Euboea. In her chest, a hand closing, applying slow pressure to her nervous heart.

Sometimes she would not see her mother for weeks on end. Clytemnestra's face would fade in her memory, become incrementally nondescript, a statue's sanded down detail by detail until only the outlines remained.

When Iphigenia had almost forgotten it, her mother would appear without warning by her bedside in the middle of the night. Sometimes Iphigenia would awake to discover her sitting on the floor, knees to chest, sobbing quietly. Sometimes her mouth would suddenly be so close to Iphigenia's ear that she could feel its angry wet heat.

There is an ocean, Clytemnestra would whisper, and it will dry up. There are islands, and they will sink.  There are men, and the path before them will be spread with their own entrails.

Fast as a hiccup, she would be gone again, leaving Iphigenia lying alone, staring up into blackberry night, her bedroom a cavernous resonance, her soul a frantic tern.

Lie back, daughter, her father tells her as she nears. Take your place. Here.

Where is he, Papa? Iphigenia asks.

The priests, she sees, possess elongated faces and wild cloudbeards. They stand side by side, robed columns, expressionless, hands clasped before them.

Every land has its own ways, says Agamemnon. This is how things are done in Aulis. Take your place in preparation for his arrival.

Iphigenia does as she is told. She steps up to the foot of the altar. She turns. The priests help her into position with their pointy fingers.

Beneath her, the rock warm with sunshine. Iphigenia moves inside herself. She hears her lungs working. She senses the sparkling wine that is her blood coursing through her veins. She feels, as if from very far away, Anthea take her wrists tenderly and lift them over her head.

Iphigenia remains within her body until the tenderness begins to give way to something else—:until one of Anthea's assistants who has never touched her before lays a hand upon one ankle, a hand upon the other, tightens her grip.

Iphigenia finds her muscles trying to retract involuntarily.

The assistant bears down.

Anthea leans forward and kisses Iphigenia softly, quickly, on the forehead. Iphigenia opens her eyes and the first tickle of alarm passes through her. Anthea has never kissed her before. Some things are done, and some are not. Yet Iphigenia's father does not move, says nothing. The birds keep circling above her. The waves keep lapping against the shore below. Iphigenia's lungs keep pumping and clearing, pumping and clearing.

She lets her father be himself for several seconds, then asks:

Papa?

Agamemnon answers with wordlessness.

Papa? she repeats. What's happening?

Instead of explanation, she hears the priests at her feet begin to chant: 

Oh, Artemis, grant us wind, speed, billowing sails. Grant us strength, grant us true aim, grant us swift triumph. Grant us wisdom, luck, hope. Grant us cunning, grant us bounty, grant us

Close your eyes, Anthea whispers into Iphigenia's ear. Think of Zeno. Think of your beautiful mechanical bird. When you open them next, your husband will be standing in front of you.

But just before Iphigenia does what Anthea asks her to do, she catches sight of the glint in her father's enormous right fist.

Each of us must forgo in his own way, Agamemnon intones. This is called heroism. Each of us must give what he least wishes to give. This is called duty. Through forfeiture, our people hound success. For favorable winds, I do what is demanded of me.

Iphigenia twisting madly, her mouth suddenly stuffed with cloth.

Iphigenia struggling against the flock of hands holding her down, eyes an outburst of shock and panic.

Her father's face darting above her, now a stranger's: indifferent, blank-eyed, unwavering.

Be still, it says. Be still.

The knife a long flash of sunlight.

The knife a silver bird plunging down.

Heart swollen with anticipation, Iphigenia closes her eyes and parts her lips to receive Achilles' first kiss.  She immediately feels she has done this before. They are alone in Achilles' tent on their wedding night, the grand ceremony behind them. All the others have tumbled away into the past. The somber betrothal, the sacrifices, the banquet, too. It is time for the sacred unveiling.

Achilles stands before her, slender, strong, chest and arms and legs agleam with oil, teeth flawless, breath licorice and mint, eyes cucumber green.

He takes her wrists in his hands, bends toward her.

Around them, a night sky of votive candles.

Iphigenia thinking: I would sacrifice my life to save him. It is that clear, that untroubled.

But just before Iphigenia does what Anthea asks her to do, she catches sight of a skirmish erupting beside her: five attendants wrestling a terrified deer forward, its neck and hindquarters roped.

No, a goat.

No, a bull.

No, a

The attendants have lifted the buck so that its kicking hooves cannot touch earth. Hanging there, it twists madly, strangling, struggling against the flock of hands trying to hold it down, its rolling eyes an outburst of shock and panic.

Quickly, Agamemnon commands, glint appearing in his enormous right fist.

The priests make way. Anthea lets loose Iphigenia's wrists, orders her assistant to let loose her ankles, helps the frightened girl off the altar. The attendants hoist the deer onto the gray slab in her stead, force it onto its side. Its legs skitter, trying to find purchase.

In a single gesture, Agamemnon advances, yanks back its head to expose its throat, and, driving down the knife, tearing sideways. A cable of blood arcs from the thrashing animal's neck. It sprints briefly on its side, gargling forth its life. Its chest heaves, then its body goes flaccid as a stand of wet flax.

Agamemnon steps back, blood dripping from his knife blade, and searches the skies for a sign.

Nothing.

Then, slowly, the breeze picks up. Steadies. The atmosphere blues.

A half-smile develops across Agamemnon's face. The goddess Artemis has not been paying attention. He is almost sure of it.

Today we are lucky men, he announces, turning toward to the crowd. Today we are saved.

Achilles is more than twice her age, twice her knowledge and wisdom. He possesses a hundred times her experience.  He has seen the sun set at the end of the world. He has seen an island levitate, each snake on Medusa's head bow down in prayer, a rainstorm turn hard and white like sand, only cold, a flaming dragon fall from the night sky.

Iphigenia adores the very idea of all that understanding embodied in this doorway to her future.

She digs her nails into his shoulder blades as he has asked her to do, learning him, his body's geography, what it has to offer, what it takes pleasure in, learning about the nature of the cosmos through its furious movements.

She gasps. Time stutters. She falls into his deerhide scent, parts her lips to catch each droplet of sweat as it abandons his face, his neck, his magnificent tousled crow-black hair.

But just before Iphigenia does what Anthea asks her to do, she catches sight of the glint on the white-capped waves below.

A furious wind grows out of nowhere.

The sky dims.

Thunder paces back and forth along the plum horizon.

The priests notice her looking past them and turn to see what it is she is seeing. Her father follows suit. They stagger back in horror at the huge glistening black hump splitting the sea, hurling their way.

The giant serpent's head, big as one of Agamemnon's ships, rears up out of the furrowed water in an agitation of spray and commotion.

The wind shrieks.

A grainy blizzard of dust sweeps across the altar.

Bystanders cry out in dread, scattering in pursuit of their lives. Iphigenia struggles against the flock of hands holding her down. But Anthea and her helper stand fast.  They will not give. They will not let Iphigenia loose.

They close their eyes. Lower their heads. Brace themselves for whatever will come next.

Struggling against the flock of hands holding her down, eyes an outburst of

A lurch, and

A lurch, and Iphigenia is twisting madly, her mouth suddenly stuffed full of Achilles' fat tongue.

Watching Agamemnon recline in a warm pine-scented bath upon his return from the long series of battles, head tilted back, eyelids heavy, suspended at the very edge of fatigue, proud at what he has done, content, happy to be here at last after nearly a decade away, fingering absentmindedly the latticework of scars on his chest, his left forearm, his right thigh, aware of his wife's footsteps clicking across the room toward him.

He feels his penis stir between his thighs at the sound of her. He feels it prickle and begin to swell.

In the underworld, a gray, rubbled hollowness, Achilles' shade hobbles toward her, his armor worn, his once beautiful face gaunt, his eyes missing, his lips sewn shut with sheep gut.

Iphigenia surprises herself by feeling neither love nor loathing for him.

He is, she realizes, just a man she knew for several hours a very long time ago before she came to know many others. What she took initially to be broken stones littering the ground she now grasps are smoldering bodies.

What's it going to be like? she asks him.

Achilles has been thinking of other things. Blood leaks from his eyeholes, from the back of one foot, puddles on the ashes that pass for earth. His hands have lost their skin. Brownpink strips of cartilage hang from his elbows. He comes back to this place, lowers his head in thought.

You'll see, he says without moving his sealed mouth.

The bodies extend across the wasteland to the blank horizon. Sometimes they exist in pieces. A naked trunk jutting from the ground. A pyramid of smoke-wisped heads. Sometimes they lie quietly and sometimes curl fetally on their sides or sit hunched, ribcage to kneecaps, translucent maggots tumbling from where their noses used to be.

Will it be what it appears to be? asks Iphigenia.

Achilles raises his blasted face to hers.

Some things should be a surprise, he says without speaking. Some things you shouldn't know about until you know about them.

Is it as awful as they say?

On the battlefield? he says. As Paris's arrow struck its target? I didn't think of you.  I wish I had, but I didn't. You should know that.

Iphigenia stares at him.

Remember one thing as you make your way back to wakefulness, he says. There is never a death, not a single one, that isn't a surprise to the one dying.

Her father's face darting above her, now a stranger's: indifferent, blank-eyed, unwavering.

Be still, it says. Be

Lying beside Achilles in the dark hotness, appalled by what he has just done to her, and how, Iphigenia knows that, come dawn, her sudden husband will rise and dress and step through the tent flap to join her father down at the docks. They will sail for Troy with more than a thousand ships, each carrying fifty rowers, each a hundred soldiers, to fight for the woman whose mother was raped by a god descended from the heavens in the form of an outrageous whirl of swan wings. Paris has kidnapped Helen. Paris must pay. This may take months. This may take years. Such retribution is as it should be. Yet there is only a short chain of minutes left in this wedding bed, the atmosphere around them already beginning to soften into a fuzzy gray daybreak, and then Achilles will start to become less than himself, more recollection than man, something you cannot even hold in your hands, let alone your heart.

Good.

No one is waiting for her: this is the first thing she notices as the altar swings into view. A large gray slab of stone on a steep rocky promontory. The crowd surrounding it falling silent as she approaches, heads bowed in awe. Warriors in full armor, but also men, women, and children from the nearby town. Their reverence is as it should be.  This is the part Iphigenia always likes best about her appearances, how others offer her their respect and admiration. But there is only the granite lozenge, only her

Then she notices the stubby-legged man with the bulbous stomach step from the crowd, arms akimbo. His crazy hair is thinning, his face pocked with acne. When he simpers at her, Iphigenia sees what teeth remain to him are flecked brownblack.

Beside her, Agamemnon smiles proudly.

Meet your new husband, daughter, he proclaims. Meet the heroic conqueror Achilles.

A lurch, and

A lurch, and Achilles slips the veil away from Iphigenia's face and she whispers:

What's it going to be like?

Achilles is standing before her in the tent on their wedding night, slender, strong, chest and arms and legs agleam with oil. He takes her wrists in his hands, bends toward her. Around them, a night sky of votive candles.

You'll see, he says.

Iphigenia grins mischievously.

But I want to know now.

Unclipping his belt, he replies: Some things should be a surprise. Some things you shouldn't know about until you know about them.

With that, his tunic flaps open. Iphigenia gazes down, her grin loosening into a full-blown girlish smile. She is thirteen, but she suddenly feels much older and wiser.

It isn't soon. It isn't soon at all. Sex with Achilles' is a plodding disappointment. He thrashes about like a hooked salamander. He makes disgusting wet sounds at the back of his throat. He calls Iphigenia by the name of other women. His breath smells like cat shit. Somewhere in the midst of this awful perplexity, he slips out of her and doesn't even seem to notice. He just keeps grinding away against her tummy. Iphigenia decides to let him. At least this way things will be less uncomfortable.

A soggy metallic seep leaks from between Iphigenia's thighs, soaks the sheets.

Tomorrow morning Anthea will hang this bloody flag outside the couple's wedding tent as a trophy for everyone to witness.

His muscles, the sheen upon his walnut-brown skin, the way his breath will always smell of mint and licorice: Iphigenia hates each of these with a ferocity she could not have imagined a short hour ago.

There is a story she has heard.  When Thetis made her son immortal, her husband Pelus stepped from a nearby thicket, calling out his wife's name. Taken by surprise, Thetis dropped her baby into the inky water. Death leapt on him, scalding the baby's face and neck and back, bloating his belly, shrinking his legs, searing his soul so severely that Achilles was never again capable of caring for another human being.

In place of love, he felt only lust. In place of compassion, rage and fright. In place of tenderness, viciousness, cruelty, undiluted hatred.

A lurch, and

A lurch, and the knife a long flash of sunlight.

The knife a silver bird plunging down.

Iphigenia jolts awake to her mother's lips softly brushing her forehead, her fingers running through her hair.

There, there, Clytemnesta whispers. There, th

A lurch, and

A lurch, and Iphigenia steps onto the rocky shore from her father Agamemnon's ship. She immediately feels she has done this before. Gnarled graygreen cypress trees spattered here and there.  The sky a violent blue. How the flock of white birds gyre above her like a flock of silent white hands.

So this is where I shall be wed, she thinks. So this is what it feels like.

The blade piercing her breast in an azure thunderclap.

Achilles thrashes on top of Iphigenia like a hooked salamander, pressing the air out of her lungs, spraying sweat across her clamped eyes, mumbling into her neck a series of mysterious syllables, Pa-tro-clus, Pa-tro-clus, Pa-tro-clus.

Suddenly Iphigenia remembers where she has heard that name before.

The blade piercing her neck in a blast of shrill whiteness. Then a shriek. Hers. And, somewhere down by her feet, Iphigenia hears her baby's first scandalized screams at the state of the world. She feels the soggy metallic seep leaking from between her thighs, soaking the sheets.

A son, Anthea's voice says. Praise be to the gods.

Tomorrow morning Iphigenia's attendant will hang the bloody flag outside the girl's window as a trophy for everyone to witness. For now, exhausted by the painful newness of things, Iphigenia, sprawling in the dark hotness, slides down into a weightless sleep in which she does not believe she is sleeping, wondering vaguely what her husband is doing at this very second, and where.

Agamemnon feeling his penis stir at the sound of Clytemnestra's shoes clicking across the tiles toward him. His member prickles, begins to swell. He opens his eyes, commences a lazy rotation in his warm pine-scented bath, the thought gathering within him: Tonight I am a lucky man. Tonight I am a

The arrow stabs into shocked Achilles' heel.

He pitches forward onto the dust without another idea having time to enter his mind.

The giant serpent's head darts above the terrified girl: stub-nosed, blank-eyed, drooling fangs long as a man's leg.

At the palace, Clytemnestra catches sight of the glint in her son Orestes' enormous right fist and, hand to mouth, staggers back in horror.

No, she says.  Please. You don't understa

The multitude of ships plying their way across the bay toward the open sea, a multitude of whitecaps beneath the ideal sky.

Electra cackling at her mother's screams tumbling in from the next room.

Somewhere in heaven, Artemis jerking awake from uneasy dreams.

The giant serpent strikes.

It strikes again.

And in that stunning moment, Iphigenia comes to recognize death by its antiseptic silence.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Lance Olsen is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, including Nietzsche's Kisses and Girl Imagined by Chance. Winner of a 2006 NEA grand and recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Olsen has published widely in periodicals such as the Iowa Review, Hudson Review, and the Village Voice. He lives in Idaho.