Our Infinite Fates

I WOULD LOVE CALLIOPE until the sun devoured the earth; that much I knew.

The air around the amphitheatre was smudged with dust and haze, my fingers sticky from dates and nectarine juice, my blood slow and sleepy from the wine, and Calliope’s laughing head on my shoulder was the most sweet and perfect thing in all the land. We had been to watch a new comedy about a peasant from Thessaly, and she was alight with it, with the feeling of tapping into the great current of human art.

‘Have you any new ideas for your own play?’ I asked as we stumbled home through the Athenian streets, for Calliope had been penning a tragedy for as long as I had known her. She would ink the story on any surface she could find – parchment and papyrus, shards of pottery and rags of fabric, even carving it into segments of peeled tree bark, her mind iridescent as the sky’s bright ether.

And still she would not reveal the plot.