“What you need to know or what you want to know? Because there’s a difference in the two and you don’t need me for one of them.” It hurts. It surprises the siren that it does, the silhouette of the woman dwarfed by even one of her wings, because she knows it’d take no effort at all to snap her neck: one contraction of a verdigrised claw, a squeeze, a pop. But here they are, with the woman grating her palms down to the bloodied bone, feathers like sea foam pooling below them.

“What I need to know.” The woman cries.

In answer, the siren sighs.

I serve them dinner in a room frescoed with blue-white zellige. Fresh mackerel fried with salt and pepper and lemon juice and olive oil so pure it’d make a nunnery look like a bacchanal. Moussaka pilfered from Parthonepe’s oven. Dolmathakia and feta in neon-bright bowls. Stacks of pita, mason jars full of olives. Even taramosalata, beige-colored, beautifully savoury, and a wasted delicacy at that table of timid palates.

Through it all, she watches me.

Moonlight paints the villa opal, a nacreous glazing that seeps into their skin. For fun, I pour them wine from amphoras millennia-old, but they make no mention of the vintage except to ask why their drink is so watery and even then, they don’t press too hard. The first night is always sacred, haloed and hallowed by the understanding such expeditions are once in a middle-class lifetime.

“Tell us a story,” says a hook-nosed man in a coat too big for him, an arm around a woman with hair like the death of autumn, freckles crowding her high-cheeked face.

I oblige and recite them two stories of my beloved Parthenope, the first one a piece of libel, a lionization of that half-wit Odysseus, and the second a truth no Greek historian would put to ink. In that version, the real one, my sister doesn’t die, doesn’t drown because of a liar. Odysseus’s ship docks itself and lovelorn, the crew emerges, six abreast with a dowry of their deeds. They ask her to marry them. Yes, every last one. Even Odysseus, the memory of Penelope devolved into a half a heartbeat’s worth of hesitation.

And of course, Parthenope marries their cook, no sin in the birdcage of his soul, a bit of magic instead, spice-touched and tawny. One day, I’ll tell the story of what happens next and how a siren fell in love with a land.

“Tell us a truth,” says a girl who is all angles and attenuation, the spokes of her bones pressing through blemished skin. She ashes her cigarette into a blue-glassed cup, a shallow layer of sticky-sweet wine already congealing.