When he was a child, he insisted to me that if I beat him, he would never scream. "Master, do not trade me," he'd told me, as a boy, "Flog me if you like." He was then, and always was very good at hiding his suffering, at not screaming under the rod. He had been taught as a child, before he came to me, that keeping his true feelings secret was a virtue to be praised, and he suffered in silence from a fear of being thrown away.

As he grew older, he became withdrawn. He would pick at himself sometimes, at night, at his skin. I wrapped his fingertips in white cloth so that he couldn't bite them, and wrapped his hair so that he couldn't pull it out. When he begin to pick at the rims of his ears, I began to slap him.

Why did I do it? What did I care? Sometimes I sit and think about it, and it worries the ones who care for me. I know it. Sometimes I sit and think about him as he was then, sitting on our bed, crying because I had struck him, and telling me that he could not bear it. He would tell me the things that a teenager says, of running away, and anger, but you will understand that a seventeen then was as good as grown, and certainly, he was grown by that age. I would like to think I thought him beyond my tutelage, though of course he was subject to my whims still, and loving of me, and hurt. And I hurt now over what I did, and have for many years, and I can sit for quite a long time, reliving it.

Sometimes, I would slap him reflexively, if I couldn't remember who he was. Yes. You saw it in his last years, what not taking blood does to us. Sometimes he would come into our bed, if he had been missing awhile, and say, "Atta," and I would blindly strike him, confused. And he would be virtuous, and say it didn't hurt him, and say that he loved me, and hold onto my shaking hand until I believed him. "It's me, Escha," he would say. "It's me, atta, it's Escha," and sigh. He would touch my forehead and under my chin, as if I were human like him, and ill in a way he could understand. Occasionally I would wake up, having fallen asleep on the floor in my corner, and rise to get into bed, and find that he had come home while I slept. And it was like that, that day.

He woke at the sound my voice, and turned over, and saw that I didn't know who he was, and he put his hands out, stretching his arms out on the thin mattress.

Without a word, I climbed him, head turned to the side, curious. I was aware that I was confused a lot, so knew that he might be someone known to me who I had forgotten. He smelled slightly sour, like unbaked bread, and of sweat, and horses, and something floral, a sachet of crushed flower petals tucked beneath his clothes earlier. I drew my hand through his hair, so light, bleached white-blond in the sunlight, but well cared for. When I moved my face past his neck he swallowed, and began to breathe deeply. The same sunlight had darkened his complexion to a honeyed color, freckling his shoulders, and I rested my head against his chest. Listening to his heartbeat, I knew him instantly, which relieved me, and brought over me a gentle calm. He pressed his welcome hand to my hair, his palm against my ear. I listened to his body's secret language, the heartbeat with each stroke's secret gasp.

"Somebody has beaten you without regard for your life," I hummed to him sadly, without parting my lips. "Malicious beating."

"Don't worry," he said. "You didn't do it." He breathed out, chest rising and falling under me. 

"Assured?"

"Some other," he said. He shook his head and gasped a little air, as if dizzied by any small sound or movement. 

"You are concussed." When had he grown older? I stroked the fine linen of his tunic, feeling his fine stomach beneath, the muscles in his taut abdomen. 

He said, "Tell me about how it was, because I can't remember," and he meant his childhood. 

A bruise is warm to the touch, and I could feel them beneath his tunic, the flushed skin. There were fingermarks around his neck, and when he opened his eyes, his left was bloodshot from a slap that had left a bruise on his cheekbone the size of a palm. "Oh, Escha," I said, "why do you let them hit you?"

He bit his lip and put his head back, "You wouldn't understand."

"Understand what?" I asked him, shifting and resting my head against his stomache. I said, "You were five years old when you came into my house. You touched my face and asked me little questions. There were others I saw that day, but they cowered and clutched each other in my presence. Your voice was gruff for a child, as if in your throat there was the soft tickle of wheat chaff. I wanted to be near you."

"Yes," he said, softly. 

"I know that you feel badly about what happened. But I worry that you like punishment, that it relieves you. You want to be beaten. I know it. You want it for your brothers' fate. I understand. But if they kill you, what will I do? Escha. It would be an accident," chattering my deep fear.

"It's not only for them, no," he said, eyes shut. He made to turn under my touch, painfully, and I helped him.

When I touched his back, I found more bruises, long ones, marked of blood, where he had been lightly whipped, and felt the shape of a hand on his backside. There were bruises on the backs of his thighs, which I knew to have been made by a human mouth, human teeth, and when I touched these, he shivered. "Escha," I scolded, sighing out the breath. 

"I'm good at this," he said. 

I didn't say anything. How I wanted to fix him, to make him understand that he didn't need to be hit, that I loved him, and couldn't stand to see him that way. "You tell me you fear death," I said, "But you are flirting with him like a toothless whore."

And why did I say that? How could I say that to him?

But he wasn't angry, because I heard him laughing, this terrible mirthless laughter, cheek pressed against our mattress. 

"Stop that," I said, because he sounded as if he had gone mad, and I couldn't hear it for another moment. But it went on. "Escha," I whispered, "I love you. You are my little brave boy, you are the better part of my body, you are my flesh and my," I lost my breath. "Without you I am lost," I said, gasping.

He said cruel things to me. He accused me of wanting cruel things of him then and said such things to me as I couldn't bear like that I wanted to touch him or to fuck him or that I wanted to drink blood of him, or any of those things which make a soul back into only a body to be used and cast away again, until I crawled off him and to the floor by myself and covered my head. Because from his voice I could not tell if he meant it as a cruelty or because he believed it, and I cried for a long time after he left, because it is true that without him there is nothing else, and because I knew that even if he didn't mean it of me, these were his secret fears, and written on his body was mine, that some accident would take him away from me. His heartbeat was my own, part of me. I beat for him with my whole body.

But know this, that I loved him for himself, and not for what he could give, and no matter what he ever said to me, or did, he could not break that love, so when he came back in the small hours of morning, and spoke to me as if he had forgotten it all, everything he'd said to me, and asked me to kill that man, I said yes. I said, where? 

He let me hold him, not telling me. He slept in my arms, curled up, as if to make himself smaller. As he slept I thought, yes, I'll kill anyone you want, do what you ask. I thought, even if he asks me to move among the living as serpent, I would do it. I thought, if he wanted me a creature of blood, let it be so, knowing, deeply, that it was actually myself who wanted it, and it made me afraid not to fear it at all. It was not only Escha who felt the need to take back control of his life through destruction. And what a mess it was, in such a small room, in such a small world as our lives were. I missed the way he had smelled as a child. I have never stopped missing it, and I am afraid I have made him feel very badly about losing his innocence, and that it drove him away. Oh, Escha. In the morning he was gone.

I had not left that room in fourteen years. I had not felt sunlight on my skin for all of that time. I thought, I want to see the sea. 

There was a tunic, which Escha had brought to me in some other year, hoping that I would rise. And I took this, new and cotton and light as if it were nothing, and covered my trembling body. For some time, I stood shaking, hands resting on the wall, and I thought again, the sea, just the water, to see the water, and know myself for Faya again, and not want to be the snake, to take control of myself and be Faya, see the sea. I thought, draw breath, and when I pulled the air into my body, it pierced flesh like a dull knife, splitting me. I pulled it in and then pushed it out again, and the blood which ran from my eyes at the shock of that pain ran into the white cotton of my tunic, which I ignored. There was only one needful thing in that moment, and it was not of earthly cares. It was my very self, and I thought, get from the door, and from there the path is known to you. Alexandria, Rhicotis, the harbor, the water which has known you all your life. I heated kohl over a candle. I slipped gold onto my body, onto fingers, and forearms. The sea.

I wished for a white cloth to cover my hair. That is all I thought of, walking the long walk from our quarter towards the Sun Gate, through the marketplace, with its smell of baked bread, and spooked chickens, and coppery animal blood. The heat licked at me like swirling veils, like a den of serpents, turning and twisting over my skin, undulating their smooth scales, which made me open my mouth and pant, from so much touch, so much sensation. I crossed my arms behind my back, guarding my body from the assault of an accidental brush against some overwhelming textured thing, softness, roughness, anything at all. When the smell of the harbor reached me, I sat for a moment on the steps of a small shrine to Isis, eyelids trembling and head flickering in and out of consciousness. The musk of water, the subtle perfume of lilies, the sour punch of sulfur. The light picked at my skin, as if its fingers were made of tiny spines, opening my skin to its tasting mouth. I hid my head against my knees.

There was a necropolis near. I could smell the dead. And then there was Escha's voice, and I looked up. I heard, "Whore", and a sound come from my child like the cry of a tortured dog. 

I looked skyward as a crowd of dirty pigeons took wing at a commotion, and when I looked down there was the sound again of a dog screaming, and I crossed the Avenue Aspendia, weaving through the midday crush of the market road, listening and breathing heavily in the heat, suffering, and searching for him, head empty, without mind. And then I saw him, at the top of a bathhouse's marble steps, and that man he wanted me to kill tossed him down them as if my child were nothing more than rotting garbage, and my body knew what to do with that, still knew, after so many years without killing, still knew how to find that man after nightfall, and press my fingers against the bottom of his chin, and hiss a curse at his spirit, and push and push on him until my fingertips touched his hateful brain, and tear, and whip away head from body.

And it knew how to drink blood, and shudder, and lay me out on the floor in its trembling splendor of pleasure, rolling and twisting on the marble.

When I went home splattered in the end of that man, how Escha screamed then, and tore at himself, and said that he had never known me, and that he would run away, and kill himself, and how I lit the end of my bronze hair pin, and burned the F into his face for "Fugitivus", runaway, fugutive, and wailed that he was mine, and love me, and Escha, isn't this how you wanted me to be? And he said, dominus, and I struck him, because I did not recognize this boy, who loved abuse, and yet I recognized him so well, and he cried to me that he wanted to be a corpse in the water, with his brothers, who he had dreamed of, not who he had become, not here, not in Egypt, not living, and not with me. When I went to floor and prostrated myself in front of him, overwhelmed, he lay beside me, too exhausted to speak.

In the night, as he slept, his fingers found the cotton of my tunic, and he curled against me as he had done as a child, and it took my breath away.