the song of the black axe
i should not have to do this, but you've left me no choice. // CW: blood, fire, references to the destruction of a city, weapons
While you are loving in the dark or in the light
the black axe is singing of your death.
Agamemnon!
Listen in the silence of your tired fucker's body
to the song of the black axe.
-- Brendan Kennelly, "The Trojan Women", from When Then Is Now: Three Greek Tragedies
[Lights up. They are garishly bright, almost too bright, blinding, like the lights are pointing at you rather than at the stage. A plain wooden table, no chairs or adornments, rests in the center of the stage. Dripping from the table is a seemingly endless stream of blood flowing from a puddle around an obsidian axe on the tabletop. Its blade is dug deeply into the tabletop, you can see a point sticking out if you look underneath the table. Both handle and blade are stark, shiny black, as if the whole thing were made out of obsidian. Barely able to tell it's black due to all the blood.
The lights are so bright that some parts of the stage still remain in shadow. In one of those shadows, far behind the table, at back wall of the stage, you can almost see something shift, as if someone is standing there. But again it's too bright to see clearly. Are the lights getting brighter? It sure seems that way.
HE enters. Perfectly Arian, blonde hair, blue eyes. Bedraggled hair, shirtless but with faint scratch marks down his chest and arms. Wearing comfortable, baggy pants, almost like mental-hospital clothes or pajamas or clothes a rich white person would wear on a spa retreat. Is there a difference? HE, too, seems to have not noticed how bright the lights would be before walking on stage. Was this in the script, or a technical difficulty? It is so, so quiet in the room....]
VOICE. listen
[It's so loud in comparison to the silence before that it sounds like a shout. HE doesn't seem to hear it, still blinded by the lights and trying to figure out where HE is. HE looks at his hands as if he's never seen them before.]
VOICE. come
[This time, HE hears it. HE looks around, sees the table with the axe and the blood for the first time. Is at first repulsed but quickly that changes to interest. Again, that shift at the back of the stage, this time more pronounced -- more people in the audience seem to notice it this time. Still, though, it's hard to say if someone's really back there or if it's a trick of the light.
HE walks to the table. As HE walks, there is a faint noise like music that starts to play, but it's so faint that you can't tell if it's actually something you're hearing or if the silence has finally started to make you hear things. It sounds vaguely like humming, but again, it's impossible to tell.
HE walks, barefoot and slowly, towards the table in the center. There is so much blood on the ground it starts to color the hem of his pants. HE doesn't seem to notice; in fact, HE walks confidently and smoothly, almost like he's waded through pools of blood before. His steps don't falter once. When HE reaches the table, he stops for a moment, gazing at the axe. HE reaches forward, running his fingertips along the handle and the blade gently, as if caressing the naked body of a lover.
As HE caresses the blade, the music gets slightly louder; it is now obvious that music is playing but its words, if they exist, are still unintelligible. At the same time, movement is again seen at the back, this time with more clarity. Something is definitely back there, though its form and figure are still blurred by the shadows.]
VOICE. come, come closer.
[HE jerks his shoulder as if something touched him, or as if he could hear the whispered words breathed directly into his ear. The music gets even more pronounced, and HE starts swaying gently in time with the beat; it is an absentminded movement, there's nothing outward that shows he hears the music at all.
His hand grips the handle of the axe, tries to lift it out of the table. It doesn't budge. This intrigues him; a challenge. HE likes those. He tries again, this time pulling even harder than before. Still, the axe doesn't move. Over and over again he tries, yanking so hard the table moves slightly with each pull. With every attempt, the music gets louder.
Whatever that shadowy figure is in the background moves again, getting closer and closer to him. While its form is still relatively concealed by distance, shadow and mystery, it becomes clear that it's dancing to the music. A strange, almost interpretive, dance, mostly twisting and winding the waist and hips; while it moves in time to the beat, the movements are unpredictable enough that it looks off-beat at first.
HE still can't see the figure behind him, even as she gets closer, but almost like some unconscious part of him senses her, he starts swaying too. Not as crazily or as interpretive as she does, but his movements match hers in an eerie way.]
VOICE. [louder now, slightly above the music] see. see me.
[HE hears it very clearly this time. He stops moving, and, for the first time since he appeared on the stage, looks around him to see where the sound came from. HE sees THE SHADOW behind him now, and jolts with surprise, fear, and maybe a little horror. Noticing that he sees her, THE SHADOW stops moving and crawls the rest of the way into the light on the stage.
It takes a while to notice, but the music has stopped. It's so silent, everything still, almost expectant, as if this meeting were important, as if everything stopped to see what would happen. The blood has stopped dripping too, a droplet inexplicably frozen in space halfway between the table and the floor.
As she comes into the light, he flinches away from her so forcefully he hits the table. If it weren't bolted to the floor he would've knocked it over. She stops crawling, sitting in front of him in a crouched position, looking up at him with big, round eyes both innocent and dead, expectant and hesitant. Horrifyingly, her face flits between three faces, each similar in appearance and still distinct from each other. It isn't that her expression shifts - that's just your mind trying to rationalize this moment. It is not as simple as all that, though. Her face actually changes.]
HIM. Who-who are you? What are you?
[She tilts her head, her expressions showing different forms of anger and frustration. She rises from her crouch and takes several slow, measured steps towards him, the thick, coagulated blood squishing between her toes. When she speaks, it's with three voices instead of one, overlapping and unifying and splitting apart with each word. Her voice is so clear, so perfectly sharp and crystalline and piercing, that it takes a minute to realize her mouth doesn't move when she speaks.]
VOICES. you don't recognize me?
[HE shakes his head. Though her expression(s) don't change, you could've sworn she rolled her eyes. Her faces move again, but this time, it pauses between each transformation, as if giving him a chance to really see her forms. The first is a middle-aged woman's face, around his age, with harsh features, angular facial structure, deep-set and narrow eyes. She doesn't smile at him, just stares out at him with a calculation so cold it burns. The second is younger, the eyes wider with wonder and perhaps a little naivete. Her face is rounder, less pronounced than the previous one, with full lips and accentuated dimples though she, also, does not smile. She is less calculating than the other was, but she looks at HIM with a brilliant clarity, as if she can see through to his very soul. As if she could tell he was lying when he said he didn't recognize them.
The last face is confusing to you. It is still young, though much younger than the face that came before. Girlish features and clean, dewy, porcelain skin, her big brown doe-eyes stare at him lovingly, happily, joyfully. This one smiles. It is big, bright, and full of adoration and love. Her lips move, but no sound comes out. If you had to guess it looks like she's trying to say, 'Father'.]
HIM. How...how is this possible?
[THE WOMEN cock her head.]
THE WOMEN. oh, so you do recognize us, then? you've always been a liar. i guess the egg is on our face for assuming you'd do anything differently this time.
[THE WOMEN have reached the table now. HE has backed away fully at her approach, in fact, it looks as if they've switched places.
Calmly, she wraps her hand(s) around the handle of the axe and pulls it out of the tabletop. From the crevice where its blade was stuck, a river of blood gushes forth. Suddenly the air smells like smoke, chokes like smoke. It becomes hard to breathe, hard to see, as the table catches fire. The blood doesn't stop pouring from the tabletop, even as the fire blazes stronger with every passing second.
THE WOMEN reach HIM, now cowering in the front corner of the stage. You all try to get up and leave, but try as you might, you can't move. Your bodies are fastened to the seat cushions beneath you. Everyone's coughing, some people are screaming. THE WOMEN turn her head towards you all. She says nothing, though her eyes pierce through the thickening smoke, and she communicates through them so clearly you could've sworn you heard her voice(s) inside your head. 'Stay here. You will want to see this. You need to see this. I need you to see this.' She turns back to HIM, lifting the axe above her head.]
THE WOMEN. this is not just for me. this is for all of them. [points to the burning table, the river of blood continuing to pour from its wound in the center.] i should not have to do this, but you've left me no choice. for me, for them all, for all those gathered here. behold, the song of the black axe has reached its end.
[She brings the axe down upon him. He is dead with the first strike, but she doesn't stop she keeps going and going and going bringing the axe down on him over and over again
his blood flows across the floor and the minute it touches the gargantuan flood from the table, the river stops, as if his blood was all it needed. at once, the river and all the blood that was there before gets sucked back into the table, the fire stops and decreases steadily until it disappears, the smoke dissipates, and you can breathe again, talk again.
She's still not stopping her killing. The axe continues to thud into him. The doors to the theater burst open, and first responders pour into the room, spreading out just like that flood of blood from the tabletop. They don't look to the stage, they don't seem to hear that axe chopping him into miniscule pieces.
A fireman guides you gently to the door. Before you exit, you look back at the stage one last time, and startle. The thudding sound remains, but there is no one, nothing on the stage - the table, the axe, the blood, the lights, THE WOMEN, HIM... all of them are gone. As if they had never been there at all.]
THE END.
* * *
This is a piece from my short-story and poetry collection, Turning and Turning, a work in progress.
Who’s Who: So, this one’s…different. While it follows some characters I’ve written about before, I wanted to play with genre and formatting a bit. The ‘HIM’ in this story is Agamemnon, THE SHADOW/THE WOMEN/VOICE/VOICES are the same people (in order of how the faces change): Clytemnestra (his wife in myth), Cassandra (his concubine taken from Troy), and Iphigenia (his daughter he sacrificed to get to Troy). The story’s title, epigraph, and formatting are all inspired by Brendan Kennelly’s translation of Euripides’ play The Trojan Women, which follows Hecuba, the queen of Troy, and the many women of the city as they spend their final moments in their city before getting delivered to their new Greek masters. The table, in this story, represents Troy, and the axe is death, destruction, and all the things Agamemnon, as the Greek general, rained down upon the city in his 10-year battle. I didn’t have a person in mind for ‘you’, but the poetic side of me wants to say it’s Helen watching what happened to this beautiful city as a result of her absconding with Paris. Or perhaps, ‘you’ is the gods themselves, who in the battle of Troy, as written by Homer, get injured by human actions and weapons more often than they do in any other legend from ancient Greece. I hope you all enjoy this dark, dark reimagining!