by Taylor Catalana

Content Warning: References to Domestic Violence

They say he is the one who fathered me, the one who slips and slides around this island, through dark shoals of fish and atop the white, foaming crests of waves. So powerful is he, holding dominion here between lands, that no one has seen his real face. He changes shape as easily as the sun touches earth. So ancient is he, his real name has never been spoken, not by anyone still alive.

I know—because I know all—that when the stranger comes to us, my father will be called Proteus. A new name that will be carried back across the wine-dark water to take root among the stranger’s people, to sprout in their stories and songs. Proteus, a deathless old sea god. I can taste his satisfaction with this in the air, in the salt I lick from my lip as I scan the horizon.

I must be this elusive old god’s daughter, for I, too, have flicked names from my skin like tangles of seaweed. Surely I had one breathed upon me at my briny birth, back in some age past all human remembering, but I cannot recall its shape to my mouth. Instead, over the eons, I have emerged from the depths at the call of Amathaounta, of Nammu, of Atargatis, myriad names that mortals have cried in stirring supplication only to eventually have them wiped from their minds by the tide of time. Leaving the beach where I stand silent of adulation.

Such silence is what sends my father skimming across the sea, learning new shapes to take, new tongues to speak, so that the worship is washed up anew here on this island.

I myself never cared much for the stuff.

Worship, I have found, is no different than the treasure I watch spill like a bleeding wound from the belly of a wrecked ship. The gold winks as it dances through the darkness, pirouetting glimmers through the depths, and I marvel that something so small, so fickle, is what humans value so much. It is no more than a curiosity to me before it falls to the bottom of the sea, buried, forgotten. I do not need their praise; their praise simply crosses my path on occasion. I am here on this island, molded to its every dune and exhaling its every wave, and I will be until the stranger arrives.

He will be a king. He will be rangy and scarred from many years of warfare, but he will be flush with fresh victory, not just of the great war that kept him from his kingdom, but of all the spoils gained on his journey back to it. His ships—those that have not been claimed by the hungry sea, unfed during these long years of battle—will be fat with the riches pilfered from the continent at my back. But men such as these, so confident in their greatness, so bolstered by the blood on their sword, they make mistakes more often than most. They are blinded by their own prowess and believe that they are as invincible as the gods who grip their lives. They forget to make certain sacrifices. They feel they don’t have to appease gods like my father, who have all of eternity to feel slighted by a calf not slaughtered and all of eternity to make that known.

But the king is not my concern. No, as I gaze out at the stark, faultless horizon, I am waiting for the wind that will bring her. The king’s wife. The one about whom every god from the top of Olympus down to the crevices of the Underworld has spoken. Whose beauty, they say, is worth more than all the paltry gold mortals can mine. The one the mortals all blame.

Her husband will look at me and call me by the name Eidothea. But she, I know, she will give me the last name I’ll ever don.

𓆟

In the humans’ estimation, it was many years ago, but I feel the passage of time only like the touch of the faintest sea mist. She passed by my island on another ship, helmed by a different lordling. Transported down in the hold like cargo, and wasn’t she? A beautiful queen taken away from her kingdom, though whether the matter was forced, perhaps not even Mother Aphrodite knows. But when they floated by our beach, the sun was decadent in its illuminating, and the prince who had spirited her away felt it a waste to not bring his new jewel out to shine. He led her up onto the deck with a grip I could see from my place on the slick rocks, surrounded by my herd of equally slick seals. I could see how he possessed her, ready to have her shaped down and fitted like a gem for his crown.

𓆟

Of course she was beautiful; even for the gods, who know only perfection, she caught the eye, caused a pause in the unperturbed divine perusal. But I did not sit up among my glistening seals because I was drawn to her beauty. For I know all, and when I looked across the water at Helen of Sparta, I knew what I was actually looking at: a brightly-petaled curse fully flowered. Those slender shoulders would soon be made to bear the weight of a war fought in her name. Her face would be immortalized, but her name would be thrown at all women after her like the first rock at a stoning.

𓆟

Pale, trembling, light-starved little Helen, blinking out at the turquoise sea—a guiltless vessel made to hold all the untoward urges of men. Their rage. Their greed. Their lust.

All around me I sensed the sand and the gulls and the seals shifting toward her. I could even feel the tide pull back in her direction, drawn in, hungry for her. No different than all the men who had looked upon her and gone mad with longing. How the island desired her. And from the way she gazed out at the island, I knew, in that moment, that she longed for it in return. She looked at our untrammeled land and thought of how lovely it would be to walk free of palace walls, of unshakeable guards, of possessive men. More than she even wished to see her abandoned child again, she wished to be left to her freedom, and with each day of her long voyage to Troy, she sensed greater and greater that freedom might not be what Troy held for her.

With a toss of my head, I threw my gaze toward her like a length of rope, feeling her catch it even at a distance that should be impossible for mortal eyes. Through me, she could hear the island calling for her. It was so strong and seductive a song, lingering so long in the air, that when the story of Helen was later told, some would say that this place kept her safe while a mere likeness was sent to Troy and the Trojan prince’s bed. But go to Troy she did. I watched her sail on. I swam out into the wake left by her ship and could taste her disappointment in every ripple.

But I consoled my unsatisfied island. I knew that she would return. And when she did, I would be ready.

𓆟

They say he is the one who fathered me, the one who keeps the red-haired king stranded on our island. I watch him elude the desperate man, frothing the sea in his giddiness at playing such a game. The orders have come from on high, from the lord of all gods, and from down below in the oceanic halls: this mortal must be punished for his lack of reverence. The winds necessary to bring him back to Sparta must not blow.

And while he sits miserably on the sand, eating through his stores, counting the treasure that mocks him in its uselessness here on this foreign shore, I watch and I wait. I look between him and my father and smile at what neither of them know.

While diving under the waves scalloping my island, I have caught snatches of tales in the wind. There once was a witch who betrayed her father by teaching a hero how to steal his most prized possession. There once was a princess who betrayed her father by teaching a hero how to make it out of his labyrinth alive. Clever girls, House-defying girls. Girls who, for their troubles, for their sacrifice, were then cruelly abandoned by those same heroes. I imagined how, if they had prayed to me, I would have felt more than a mere flicker of interest. I would have scooped them to my bosom and said, and how shall we seek revenge on them all, all the men who strive to own us but fail to love us?

I become these girls as I finally approach the poor king raging in the dunes like a child whose toy has been taken away. I know his people’s stories. I am the shapeshifter’s daughter. I know what I should look like, what I should sound like, when I allow him to see me. Here, a helpful goddess sympathetic to his sad little plight, rounding out her sea-green eyes and saying, I know the way to trap old Proteus and make him give you what you want, O Menelaus, besieged son of Atreus.

Oh, and how they struggle out under the sun, the deathless old sea god continually, futilely changing form, and the determined man who has killed hundreds just to get to own his wife again. And while they do, I slip beneath the sea that is no different from my skin. I climb the ship’s hull with an octopus’s dexterity. I descend into the darkness of the hold with all the self-possession of one who knows every contour of the deep, black ocean, who came all-seeing and all-knowing from its womb.

And I look once again into the eyes of Helen, who is once again a prisoner, who has once again been snatched into the jaws of Fate like a flailing fish in the maw of a pelican. But when she and I look at each other, she knows as startlingly clearly as I know things. It is the scent that comes off of me. I am a goddess of the sea; I am freedom given shape.

She knows that the island waits for her after all this time. Her husband, the brutish king, will leave this place behind. But she does not have to.

I breathe the salty tang of the deep against her skin as if to free it from the grip of so many undeserving men. Helen, my sister, for she also does not for certain know who fathered her—a man? A god? Does it matter? It does not. I daub my blessing against her fluttering pulse. You are your own. You decide, Helen.

Proteus, defeated, tells the hard-breathing king what he wants to know. How to atone. But that, that is the easy thing. To worship according to prescription. The difficult thing is to love someone enough to let them take any shape they please, even if it is not a shape you can hold.

When this king sails away, I go with him wearing Helen’s face. The island has what it wants; it needs me no longer. It, too, will soon bear a new name: Pharos. I have left a Greek in Egypt, the first of many who will hear its song and find it irresistible, who will seek to possess it. A new story begins there, only bearing traces of me. But I find that I need not linger in anything more than the footprints of a woman walking across the beach, into the water, free.

Taylor Catalana (she/her) is a museum professional who received her graduate degree in art and theology from Kings College London. Her forthcoming debut novel will be published in Fall 2026. She currently lives with her dog in Brooklyn, New York.