I tell them to go on Twitter and follow a thread through translations of the sirens, annotated at last by a woman. “Mouths,” I intone, paraphrasing my favorite part. “keep eating the wrong things, and mouths speak and sing to enable and thwart the onward journey. Mouths are powerful and dangerous.”

“Tell me my future,” she says and while I think how to answer, she reaches out, circles my wrist with her fingers.

It is a big fucking mistake.

“He doesn’t love you. That’s why he isn’t here. It isn’t a question of dignity. If anything, it’s vanity, because he hates the idea of looking weak. But you on a good day, you with your heart on a plate, you make him believe there’s at least one person he’s better than, one person smaller and needier, one person who’d die without him. Except not really because he doesn’t want to deal with the pressure either. He just likes knowing the possibility exists.” The siren tilts a sympathetic look at the woman and there’s something ophidian now about her unblinking expression, a little bit of lizard in the lilt of her smile. “Covert narcissists, man.”

“You’re lying.”

“Sirens don’t lie. I just told you that. We tell truths that no one wants to hear and that’s why sailors flung themselves into the sea. We sang to them of their wives, their husbands, their children and how they’d be forgotten, how their loved ones moved on. Because wars are for kings and not the people left behind.”

“He loves me. He said so. We’ve an understanding—”

“Just like you did with the last one.” The siren does not know how to be kind. Some days, she wishes she did. “You can still walk away. You’re still young. There’s a whole lifetime to make up for the scars they’ve both carved.”

“Lying.” Staccato now, the objections, stilted and spit in rhythm as the woman teeters through to the kitchen, her friends flash-frozen by the prismed glare of the moon. “You’re lying. You’re lying, lying. Why the hell did I ever think this was a good idea?”

This time, the siren doesn’t hold back.

I begin to speak.

Verbiage profound as the siege of Carthage, alliterations like artillery, it rills from my lips, a trickle at first before it begins to pour. Now, there’s metaphor, verses and curses, a hip-hop throughline, swagger straight from the Bronx, and it is in Aeolic and Ionic and Gaulish, a little bit of Koine Greek, some Chinese, but no English. I’m sick of that bland mash, pasty and imperfect. Besides, it is a kind of ecstasy to knit the dead new bodies of prose.

I swallow air, exhale prophecies of the present.