The Minotaur

The creature stops, tilts his head, and breathes deeply the fetid air of his home. There is something there, something coppery and raw, something slippery, something racing like a rat through the maze. Something alive.

It must be time.

He has no way of tracing the minutes and hours of his life, let alone the long, long days. The ceiling above him is black, no sun, no stars, nothing but the timbers and crossbeams of his home. He never knows, beforehand, when the time has come. He no longer knows minutes or hours or days; it is all one, the long black night that he paces beneath, endlessly. He never knows when the time has come, until he smells the air of his home, and it changes. Becomes red and slick – the unmistakable smell of sacrifice.

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I've said it before, but I feel the need to repeat it, over and over – I've always felt like an Other. I've never felt like I fit in, anywhere. Interesting, isn't it, how we repeat ourselves, echoing down through the years the same sounds, the same words? Tracing the corridors of the labyrinth, following the endlessly echoing voices until we meet in the centre, again and again.

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They bring him children. Over time they have learned what he likes, what pleases him best and what enrages him most, and they feed him accordingly. He did not care for the taste of flesh at first. There is a part of him, after all, that would never eat the flesh of another creature. But his time circling the maze has cured him of such delicate tendencies, and the other part of him – the part that needs blood and craves the warm, slippery taste of tendons stripped from the bone – will have its way.

It's an unfair fight, of course. Shut up in his maze since he was young, he knows every corner and every curve and every winding turn; the children don't have a chance. And he is strong and hungry and has the power of loneliness on his side. Terrible loneliness becomes terrible anger, especially when confronted with something far more pathetic. Something that crouches in a corner, pulse throbbing warmly at its throat, gulping back a cry, pleading for its life.

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In "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", Milan Kundera writes about motifs. Every life, he says, is but a series of repeating patterns, a cascading six-note melody in a Beethoven sonata repeating itself, again and again. Jung says that we are but archetypes, living the same stories and the same lives, again and again. I think that there is a kind of poetry, a lovely symmetry to our lives, but we are doomed all the same.

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When he has finished his meal, and his jaw aches from gnawing and thrashing and gnashing, he crouches, as he has always done, in the centre of his maze (far from the bone piles and smiling skulls), and he waits. He is a monster, he knows this. He does not wish to gaze upon the evidence.

When he was moved here he met the man and his son who built this maze. The son stared at him with wide blue eyes; he snorted wildly at the boy, but the boy refused to look away. He has little experience with living children, but he recognized that look – defiance, and will. The boy will soar, he knows it.

If only things had been different, he wonders, could he have grown up to be that boy? It doesn't matter anymore, not really.

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It feels like we are slaves to our stories, to our individual narratives of myth and allegory. I'm not sure how this story – the Other, the Monster, the Prisoner – became mine, or why I have chosen to live it, but I can't seem to escape it.

Freud thought we could escape the stories that haunt us, if only we could decipher the symbols and peculiar mythological grammar of our dreams. Once we recognize the story we are in, we can find the end, the elusive escape. In so many of my dreams I find myself running wildly in circles, always late, always lost in the labyrinth. There is only one end to my story, as I have read it, and it is a bloody and brutal one. I am trying desperately to escape the maze, and find a better end. We all are, I think.

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He smells something alive and warm, something still pulsing on the air. It will find its way here, to the the secret centre of his house, soon enough.

For now, he waits (as he has always waited), and he waits some more (as he will always wait), for the man who will deliver him of his loneliness, the man with the string and the sword and the End.