Prometheus, at the End

by Lia Swope Mitchell

The man lies stretched across the rock, naked torso revealed to the morning sun. His skin clings to his ribcage, sagging and striated over absent muscles, bruised and tattered over the organ that daily swells and grows anew. He waits. A hundred years shackled to this mountain. Maybe a thousand. Nobody’s counting.

The eagle never fails to come. Often at noon, when its spread wings offer some respite from the sun. Lately in the evening, already sated, reeking of whatever offal. Then it picks at his liver daintily, uninterested in this rich dessert.

Today it’s early. Already its shriek echoes up from the vale. The man shades his eyes with the three fingers on his untethered hand.

With a sudden rush of wingbeats, it lands. A massive bird, dark and gold-limned feathers folding, talons like small curved daggers. Yellow eyes. Yellow beak. He can’t help staring at that beak, the hooked knife set to rip at his innards.

“You must be hungry,” the man says.

“I am,” says the eagle, taciturn as always.

“Surely you could catch a nice rabbit.”

“I could.” The eagle hops forward, strangely awkward on land, and settles at his side.

The conversation is a repetition, almost a ritual. Today it runs aground. The eagle sits poised in its usual spot, no doubt ready to fulfill its sacred purpose. Today it hesitates. The hard stare drifts off on the wind, perhaps tracking some smaller bird too distant for the man to detect.

“Is my liver no longer succulent?” the man asks, wanting the ordeal finished. “Would you prefer some bony scrap of sparrow?”

“Lovely crunch in the beak,” the eagle answers. Still it does not move.

The eagle is in an odd mood, evidently. This is rare, but not without precedent. In the early years the bird had no moods at all, nothing but cold, predatory hunger. Over time, though, the long, steady diet of divinely regrown liver must have affected the creature. The man had never expected any answer to his exhortations, observations and bitter asides; but one day, in an odd, creaky voice, an answer came.

Some decades ago, after a similar silence, the eagle wrenched off his right little finger, gnashing the bloody digit with such a stupid stare that the man did not understand at first that his hand was thereby freed. He could smack the biting flies, scratch himself, shield his eyes from the sun; had he the slightest desire left in his wretched body he could have masturbated. He could have even tried to grab the eagle by the neck and throttle the thing. But if he were successful, he knew, another bird would take its place, likely some idiot vulture not given to small mercies.

“What detains you?” the man asks.

The eagle watches the wind.

“What do you see that I cannot?”

 The eagle fluffs and replies: “For many years, as I flew here, I saw a man pushing a boulder up a mountainside. Every day what I passed over he was there, pushing. I wondered, would he ever get to the top? But now the boulder is sitting in the valley alone, and the man is gone.”

The man blinks thoughtfully. “What else?”

“I flew, looking,” says the eagle. “I flew over mountains and islands and seas. I saw the gods rotting underwater. I saw little fish what picked their bones clean.”

“They are dead?” the man says, realizing that he knows already. For a while he’s suspected something, felt some lack. A diminution of violence in the light, an absence of figures among the stars.

“Yes,” the eagle answers. “We are the last divine beings.”

The wind unsettles its feathers, sends dust into the man’s eyes. He feels like crying, feels like laughing. Feels another thousand years old. Kept alive by a curse after the god who cursed him is gone.

“So I have thought—we need not continue.” The bird twitches, ruffles. “I am god among birds, now. So—I may choose.”

The mountainside seems to spin into the plummeting distance below, the green vale the man has so long imagined—shading trees, running streams, soft grass. The rock digs into the sores in his back, into his wasted spine. He watches the bird, its face as expressionless as always. “You’d give up a ready meal?”

The eagle lets its attention catch on some faraway rodent, bobs as if considering takeoff, then settles again. “For a long time,” it says in its high, gruff voice, “I have not been like other birds.”

“You miss them.”

“Do you miss your humans?”

The man thinks about those few happy nights long ago, when he built fires for his people, and told them divine secrets, and watched them sitting in awed circles around the flames. They adored him; he loved their adoration.

“I don’t know them anymore,” he answers.

“You will find them much the same,” the eagle answers. It edges close to his shackled hand, cocks its head above his splayed fingers, takes aim at the small one.

“I will miss you,” the man says.

“When I am hungry,” says the eagle, “I will find you.” And like a flash its head descends.

Lia Swope Mitchell is a writer and translator from Minneapolis. Her fiction has appeared in magazines such as Asimov's, Apex, and Terraform, and her translations of Georges Didi-Huberman and Antoine Volodine have been published by the University of Minnesota Press.