Short Story / Dido's Lament (Analysis)

Dido’s Lament

      It’s terrible to live as a slave. It’s awful when fear tells you not to answer the phone, or walk toward the marina, or talk to a friend. Your days are not rounded by sleep, but framed with a nameless dread that shrivels your lungs and snaps your tongue. You prodded the beach rubble with nonchalant arrogance. Now you’re on your knees in the sand.
     Your filthy fingernails look like the ancient talons of a Quetzalcoatlus, fossilized in a moment like the drowned king. (His ashes are circled by yearning lovers that never kiss when he is looking.)
      Your life is shaped by the shuddering encroachment of unrelenting fear. The result is invariably a lopsided polygon.
     Your spear is useless against the saber teeth of a tiger who had the sense not to exist. There’s no running from that cat-shaped vacuum. How do you react to an absence of action?
      The sand is hot under your palms. Your knees ache from the awkward posture of your tragic stance.
      “Sorry to interrupt your tragedy,” Dido says as her tall shadow falls over your shivering shoulders. Dido’s always saying things like that.
      “Panicking,” you say.
      “Yeah?”
      “Yeah. I need a spear that doesn’t exist.”
      Now Dido crouches down and lightly wraps a golden arm around your bending neck. She kisses the back of your head very lightly and with great passion. She’s always doing things like that.
      “That king, that stupid fucking king,” you mutter.
     Dido throws you on your back onto the endless beach. She stands above you and you love her.

Dido was a Princess and Queen since before she was born. Upon becoming a Queen in the visible world, she retained all the remarkable aspects of the innocent Princess. Thus her rule and vision were tempered with compassion, empathy for the capricious, and headlong almond-eyed optimism.
With all her earth, moon and star wisdom, though, she’s not quite sure what to do with you. She expected you long before you washed up on her shore. Pale and half-strangled with kelp, your splayed body seemed out of place on the white sand by the green sea humming with the blue deep. Even after she cleaned you up, you seemed timid and weak. She is not used to not being sure. She’s never been in love with someone she did not know.

      You and Dido are in a Corona commercial on television. This means the two of you are lounging side by side in elaborate beach chairs facing an immaculate sunset. A short wicker table between you supports two bottles of golden liquid. The golden liquid is a beer called Corona.
      “I’m glad to be here,” you say.
      “Same,” Dido says.
      “I keep feeling, though, like I’m supposed to be somewhere else.”
      Dido is surprised to find she is biting her lower lip.
      “I haven’t had any episodes in days,” you say. “Both you and your kingdom are so beautiful. But somehow, I feel like I should be somewhere else or something.”
      A bead of blood enters Dido’s mouth and flowers into a garden of grief.

      Before you were flung onto this island you were someone else with a different life. The second day on this island you were someone else again. The third day: someone else again! Will you ever be one person?
      Dido sleeps beside you like an unsung harmony. You try to remember that former life. It’s like trying to pierce with your feeble gaze the mist that rolls over the dead river of forgetfulness. You catch, though, hints and hymns. Bull fiddles and mandolins drinking red wine with happy abandon. White wooden porches and feet striking the rhythm of moondrunk clouds. A constellation of friends that wheeled around a fountain. There was also, though, something low and seething. There was a dragon roaming the blood, secretly planting his pregnant teeth throughout your ignorant body of flesh. There was a tempest, a scream of lightning, hundreds of trees brandishing bright broadswords, a woman whispering a ruby secret,
      The dark air above the royal bed seems to swirl with shapeless shapes. You turn to embrace the sleeping Queen who saved you from the endless ocean. Covering your face in the fragrant flow of her tresses, you close your eyes. You thank God that sleep will take you soon. You dream.

      One morning over chilled oranges and strong Ethiopian coffee, Dido tells you something astonishing. This northern shore is attached to no island, but a vast and varied country. In fact, this ancient land is the largest continent on Earth, filled with nations and empires, territories and tribes, deserts and seas, rainforests and mountains.
      It’s a house that holds mansions,” she says. “I’d have mentioned it before, but I thought you knew. I mean, you know.”
      She skewers a piece of fruit with a tiny fork of silver.
      Thin steam twists away from the circular surface of your coffee. You can’t keep your eyes off it. The way it turns and disappears in the angular sunlight is small enough for you to understand.
      You think you once lived in a house. The corner of a yellow moon opened a window and slid under your bed. Or was that a dream? You yearn to remember home.

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Reviews

November 18, 2008

jhmckeogh

No. of Reviews	Overall Quality	Comment Followup
150	89.5% (114 votes)	10.9%

REVIEW QUALITY: 100.0%(1 vote ) personal info reviewer stats

Age	Gender	Location	Last Login
27	M	Blue Bell, PA	November 20

jhmckeogh reviewed Version 1 - Read 100% of the Item

I feel the dialogue does not mesh with the prose surrounding it. The time jumps may be intentionally, but there is a discord i feel, between the then and the now. If you were to extend the piece, i’d work on setting up two separate spaces… one for the present and one for that otherworldly aspect you are going for. Its a bold move for a short piece, having the two voices, but if you keep the two delineated, you should be okay.

The corona reference i didn’t love. Product placement and all that. I think it would work better if you keep it as a generic “beer.” Also, i think i need more of placing the lovers on the photo shoot. Why are they there, what purpose is it serving the story? I didn’t get any of that in this short glimpse.

The spear line threw me off. What time frame were they in. What is the invisible spear? I’m not familiar with the aneais myth, i’m guessing its from that. Consider “o brother where are thou.” its a play on the odyessy, yet functions perfectly well as a story in its own right, regardless of the readers previous knowledge of the tale.

Cheers,

James

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October 14, 2008

rhizome23

No. of Reviews	Overall Quality	Comment Followup
0	87.0% (46 votes)	100.0%

REVIEW QUALITY: 100.0%(1 vote ) personal info reviewer stats

Age	Gender	Location	Last Login
29	M	Austin, TX	November 22

rhizome23 reviewed Version 1 - Read 100% of the Item

I have absolutely no idea of what this was about but I enjoyed the imagery and the language. I liked the idea of suddenly using a modern commercial as a setting in what was otherwise a generally hallucinatory poetic fragment. Maybe it isn’t about anything except for the stream of consciousness itself, which is entirely fine.