I. Rebirth

When the sunken Greek city rose from the dead, so did I. A smash of captive stone triggered a crumbling molt, revived my feral heart, and sent me lunging to shore. I choked out seawater and shook it from my wings. Perched on tilted pier, I spied shipborne scientists dredging more spoils from the deep—vases and gravestones adorned with my monster image. All broken.

I am sphinx. Set me on a marble plinth, polish me to gleaming, paint me black and gold. Silent protection of riches is my exalted fate. I remember my first life—birth in a bloodstained cave under Ethiopian sands, escape from monster mother, riddles and slaughter in the big city. A hero turned my body to stone and got my life started for real. Men chiseled my features fine, shined my lidless eyes—never would they blink—and replicated my shell to forms they found most pleasing. I stood transfixed in a limbo state. To some it might seem a dread dimension of frozen sentry, but my spirit was alive and content inside multiplying glorious idols, and quite aware of the city’s collective reverence. Then calamity struck: volcanic rage, plunder, an epic Mediterranean drowning.

Dripping wet and reborn, I knew I must seek treasure again.


II. Migration

In my renewed life in modern world, I donned black gown to hide my beastly composition. I searched for new guardian post, daring everywhere—fire-eaten forest, putrid grotto, shaking steel cities. For sustenance, I plucked grains from garbage. For companionship, I visited Egypt, where Giza stood silent as ever. He’d lost his limestone nose but still protected the spaceship buried under his front right paw. In Paris, snobbish Mannerists yawned in dusty museums. More sphinx cousins twitched before crumbling urban libraries and rotting tropical shrines.

And the mortals. They stared at my human face, eagle wings, lioness legs ending in paws. My carnal form does defy classification. But no one trembled in terror like in ancient days.

Whatever fate gathered in glowing vapors on the horizon, I had to find treasure and know my place. I needed guidance from the gods.

Zeus had helped before. For one thing, he’d slain my viper-headed father in a thunderbolt bar fight. Father had been the type to descend on the cave with hurricane force and disappear at sunrise. I’d find Mother in the scullery, dragging her lower serpent half through dumped flaxseed, spices, and shattered glass, her green coils speckled with blood. You missed school, she’d hissed one morning, beating barley dough into porridge and slopping it with hot butter and biting red berbere. She summoned a hieroglyphist to document our genfo breakfast, captioned the stone tablet Girls skip day!, had Hermes run it all over creation.

By all the gods, such memories should stay in eons past.

I flew to the highest cumulonimbus drifting over Delphi, drew a number and got in line. At my turn, Zeus’s desires were clear. Punish the mortals again and I’ll get you a fancy new temple to guard. White marble and gold leaf, frescoes of goddesses frolicking in a misty red hillside. Maybe I’ll throw in granite countertops and a three-car garage.

I’d slaughtered before. I would do it again. On a dark city street, I spread my wings wide and barred a man’s way. What creature speaks in one voice and is four-footed in morning, two-footed in afternoon and three-footed in evening?

The man’s smirking gaze took me in. He tapped a glowing device. A human, he said. A baby crawls, an adult will walk, and he uses a cane when old.

Two of my feathers fluttered down to the pavement and turned to stone.

It wasn’t fair. In ancient times, mortals couldn’t cheat. I tried again. Lost more feathers, a claw, part of my left ear.

In the heavens, I slipped beside Aphrodite at the nail salon. Been watching, said the goddess. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of my feline fur. Quit playing by the rules. Kill indiscriminately. I met the joker Momus and power-suited Athena. Become a meme and live forever, Momus giggled. Athena adjusted her glasses and looked me over. Better reincarnate, she said. Turn into an antivirus and guard precious data.

Darkness fell harder each night and mortals, monsters, and gods again freely mixed. Centaurs galloped empty highways and fairies danced in strip mall rubble. There was only one place I hadn’t been: my Ethiopian homeland. The cave wouldn’t exist, but perhaps the old temple might. Mother had been proud of her temple and the adoring priests she’d found to build it. Long-necked fellows with shifty eyes, all of them, burning incense and mumbling chants. I would stick to the rafters, dizzy with the bitter smell of myrrh. I preferred the quiet company of bats and spiderwebs. Come down, Mother said once, raising up a scaled hand, but too distant to touch. Her monstrosity, the serpentine coils of her lower half, conspired to keep her always on the ground. I spit sunflower seed shells at her and slept perched high. Didn’t wake when a giant sneaked in one night and split her skull.

Ghosts may lurk in the old country, but perhaps a treasure lay in wait.


III. Mating

Modern Ethiopia wasn’t much changed from the empire of old. Cattle herds still dotted river lowlands, coffee fields still sprouted in the mountains. Outside a tiny rock-cut church I watched a priest shout at gathering hyenas. I inspected the imperial palace in Addis Ababa and freed an Abyssinian lion held captive on the grounds. When a camel caravan crawled across the salt plains, I trailed after it, eventually reaching Mother’s old temple.

The place lay in ruins overgrown by spiny shrubs and wind-bent trees. In a columned grove of bare-trunked juniper I approached the stone statue of Mother herself, her twin serpent legs spread wide, hands outstretched, her sharp gaze ruling over remnants of this holy place. The desert at my back breathed and I braced myself against a hurling gale. Lightning flashed from red-streaked clouds. Staring at the statue’s stern features, I remembered rejoined screams, the heart-stopping drum of reptilian rattle. A clash of serpent against storm, a venom protector against pure chaos.

Amidst such reflections I lingered and struck an internal peace. I reclined on a crumbling wall and watched a time of drought and locusts unfold. When dying karsata trees dropped their last fruit, a small band of mortals wandered close. They harvested and boiled foul fruit seeds, and I observed a woman different from the rest, a visage quite refined, her shoulder laden with a kit of tools. They called her Makda. It meant high tower, and it was a fitting name because she began to build. She mortared stone after stone late into freezing lunar light. Beholding this work my body pulsed, perhaps emitted a purr. Such preparation meant something precious must be near. I hoped she would hasten. In the distance newly-born volcanoes flung fire at the clouds.

A falcon spiraling low captured our attention one night, and suddenly Makda reached up and touched my own feathers. A mortal’s idle curiosity, I supposed, but such interest shocked me all the same. She toiled in sparse fields during the smoky half-light of day, sharing distress with others at rising sands and haze, and later worked alone as devoted mason under the crushing gloom of night. Her stonecraft began to take form, at first a simple and strong base.

A pack of wolves stalked close one night and my swooping nose-dive intimidated the creatures into slinking off. Makda observed the scene with a glitter in her eyes.

The tribe took shelter in the temple, burning torches that cast more shadows than light. Once Makda wore a wilting tulip tree blossom in her hair, maybe the last in the world, and it withered to nothing in a day. For days, I wondered if a goddess’s wings might burst from her spine. She stayed human, however, always working on her masonry, the night air ringing with rhythmic clank and scrape. Her project took shape: a basalt stele with a pit behind.

I watched the stele rise. My brutish bird and feline strengths battled the winds of Aeolus and fires of Hephaestus, but I couldn’t beat them back. I stretched my wings. Migration was a possibility. Unleash my searching spirit, resume an epic roam. Caution dictated retreat to calm clouds. But atop the heavens, at such distance from ravaged earth, how could I ever watch a moonlit field and mason?


IV. Incubation

Makda built a vault behind the stele. At that point, night stopped giving birth to ashen day. Seething winds swept away the sorghum fields and I watched teff make beautiful flames. My mind went to a fearsome place and I couldn’t help but wonder, is this project just a tomb?

But, no. Against stalking darkness Makda returned again, mortar-streaked arms filled with jars of spices and seeds. Sorghum and teff, of course. And millet, noug, onion, fava, sunflower. Precious sunflower. She saved stinking karsata seeds, as well. Such tangible treasure must be in some way divine. And those living gems were not the only fortune in this place. I glided to the stele and poised on top.

Makda swung the vault door closed, sealing it against the age. The day darkened more, and she edged closer, peering up. I spoke the only words I had, which is to say, my riddle. She smiled, raised blistered hands to gesture at the pitiful band who were left, from young to old. It was there, at that moment, my whole being began another mineral molt. Searing pain eclipsed all as my marrow and lifeblood exploded from cracking bone and hardening skin. I howled a silent scream and my hot dark blood poured down the stele, seeped beneath ever-shifting sand, congealed in glory out of sight from gods and stars.

With a shrill cry, Makda leapt, seized a crystalizing wing and pulled herself close. My being embraced her, and this transcendent touch altered her vitality to matching stone, two strange spirits intertwined, transformed to enduring form that neither wind nor fire could break.

We endured an earthquake oblivion protected by our marble shell. For a tumbling age we burrowed in chasm nest, minds spinning through a sublime geometric plane, pink-hued and filled with floating cats, skulls, and feathers all made of stone. But on a misty dawn we rose again, and I am sphinx with treasure still.