She clings to him now, held suspended over the deck, lost in pleasure, but she won’t forget.

What it would feel like to be ravished by a god, to hold a deity. All weight gone, held now as Jason holds her, but limitless strength. To surrender absolutely and know afterward that in your womb you carry something half divine that will live a greater fate, a shaper of entire peoples.

They lie panting afterward, her arms and legs still wrapped around him. Medea listens to the rudders, the sail, lines and hull creaking and rolling, listens for Jason’s breath and heartbeat, a heartbeat she may need to end, years from now but no less relentless in its coming.

The deck hard. She’s being crushed. So she pushes him off and he rolls to the side. Maggots and rot, invisible, occasional flash of fish scales catching some light otherwise unseen. Blind voyage again in darkness.

Jason leaves her and she sleeps again, too tired to be afraid of what waits below or follows close behind. When she wakes it is already day and they’ve come closer to land. On the same course still, wind behind, still no other ship. They might as well be the only humans, the rest of the world vacant.

The land growing slowly, rounded hills and forest milky in this overcast light, a dark white sky hung low. Medea’s grandmother, if her name was Eidyia, may also have been Medea’s mother. Oceanus the father of Medea’s mother and also the father of Medea’s grandmother, and the wife of Oceanus his own sister. Erasure. Medea comes from water and sun, and apparently that’s all she is to know. The men are the sun and the women are water. Her mother and grandmother the same woman, appearing only to give birth then vanishing again, both Oceanids and born of another sea goddess, the Titaness Tethys, who is the same with simply another name. All of them the same, all melting into nothing and never known. Not one memory of any older generation of woman, and so it seems Medea and her sister could have sprung from water itself, or that only men exist.

The world emptied on this gray watery day, and it does feel as if Medea could be the only woman, or the same woman. She will have to make herself individual.

The shore is without sign. Too far to be known.

Medea eats fish roasted the previous day. The fisherman the one who is keeping them alive. He sits on deck and looks out at the waves, always watching the water. The surface somehow indicating what might lie below, but only to him. Opaque to Medea.