Hercules Strangles the Nemean Lion
by Max Mitchell
Parallel geometric planes, each plane a hologram of an ocean’s surface, the holographic slices of ocean stacked vertically like the storeys of a building, in infinite series. All motion here is frictionless, inarticulate: you can glide over the surface of a plane until the shadowed horizon recedes or pass through each hologram to the ocean above or the one below. The oceans have a cloudy translucence in which phosphorescent filaments of blue, white, gold, red, orange, and violet glint like the scales of fish. Often the iridescence synchronises across whole tracts of water and you can make out proto-forms in the glimmering churn. But look now yonder: islanded by the fluxing swell, a membrane of water is lighting the rude outlines of a landscape, an encoded mathematical memory of events from eons past: irregular spits of pitchy rock forked in the gritty, weedy soil of an olive-hued scrubland beneath a bleached, cancelling sky.
Extruding ribcages of mauled oxen sticky with congealed blood and swarming with blue-green flies lie between tufts of wild grass, and a shepherd’s dog is barking dementedly, and bubbles of blood inflate and deflate on the lips of a shepherd boy who is still alive, his eyeballs, brow, and the bridge of his nose torn from his face, and something is loping in the periphery, its mane and head dark umber and slick with blood, and it has been chased twice on horseback and pelted with arrows and stones back to its cave a league distant from the nearest settlement, but it smells the sweat of the livestock on the breeze.
His greaves jag into the flesh of his ankles as he pounds uphill, the loose chalky topsoil giving way underfoot and scattering backwards in dusty cones. In his right hand is a truculent wooden club honeycombed with dull nails, the weighted end pointing downwards like a third leg or a pendulum, which he periodically drives into the earth whilst climbing to keep his footing. Nearing the crescent lips of the cave mouth he relaxes his pace, uncords his vast shield from his back, and rights his club. The entranceway is hooded like a monk’s cowl, and he sidles through it while his eyes adjust to the grainy darkness inside. Amid the black organs of the chamber he sees two golden zeroes hanging in mid-air, and with its long, shadowed, rutted face it is as though the luminescent eyes of some minor rustic deity are peering from behind a carved wooden mask. He rushes it with his shield, hoping to lame its front legs with his club before it can react, but it is lying atop a flat-topped, chest-high rock, and as he raises his club it throws itself at his head and lands on his shield and clings to his shield’s top edge with one paw and with the other paw swipes at the arm holding the club, and ribbons of flesh open on his forearm and he drops the club, and its claws lacerate his bowed neck and shoulders as he carries it clinging to his shield like some monstrous baby and slams its back against the cave wall. With its limbs pinned and splayed under the bronze oval, he starts thumping its head with the bottom of his fist like a shipwright nailing planks into a ship’s hull. After twenty blows it writhes free and with its bloodied head makes for the white pool of the cave mouth. He throws aside his shield and jumps on its back. He reaches around the soft underside of its huge neck with his right arm and with his left hand palming the back of his right hand grapples it into a chokehold, and it struggles demonically, but null its face and claws it is nothing but blind, striated ropes of muscle pulling on rods of bone, and his face is pressed into its matted mane and he breathes the hot musk of its body as its life ebbs away.
Max Mitchell is currently doing a PhD in Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. His research is focused on mindfulness meditation, peak experiences/flow states, and the nature of ethical truth. His favourite novel is Lolita. His favourite poem is “Ode to a Nightingale.” His favourite old, boring classic is Madame Bovary.