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She is too young, still, when she takes her father’s hand in hers.
When her mother swings from a rope and she can taste tainted blood heavy on her tongue.
Her brother grips her wrist tight, fragile bones shifting beneath her skin, his skin warm as the sun on a spring afternoon. She wants to reach out. Wrap her arms around his neck like she did just days ago. Let him pick her up and spin her around like a bride on her wedding day.
Instead she looks into dark eyes, fury-bitten lips. Instead, she pulls loose her aching wrist and leaves him at the altar.
She leaves a past, coloured golden in sunlight and rushing river water. She leaves a present, blood soaked and aching. She leaves a future, an expectation and a promise. A gentle marriage and children from her womb.
She walks instead beside her father, feels his gaping eye sockets on her hunger-drawn face.
Her feet ache from long walking days.
She was raised on riches, silks and honeyed wines. Her feet which once ran down gentle river banks now twist on steep rocks. Her hands bleed and filth gathers in the cracks until she can no longer wash them clean. Until she carries their curse like a child in her body and men turn their face away when she passes.
She has not touched a loom in years when he dies.
She thinks that she would not remember how to work the threads. The rhythmic song of weights and wood sounds foreign to her. The easy connection that flows between weaving women has never been hers, has never felt easy as tumbling past river rapids or chasing her brothers on bare feet through the fields.
The linens the dressed her father in were not from her own hand, woven by a woman whose face she will never know. She wants to hate this woman, for taking a duty that should be hers. For clothing her father in his last moments. Foreign hands all over the robes that hold him close in death, that cloak his fragile, aching body in a rough spun embrace.
He had pressed a kiss to her forehead, before he stepped away. His hand warm and heavy and aged on the back of her neck, trembling slightly.
He had felt so big, once, larger than life. Immortal like the very gods themselves and warm as the sun.
Now she looks down on him, stooped with age. Now her hands steady him as he turns away. Now she walks her father to his final altar and she hands him off to the man who will take him away from her.
She wants to scream. She wants to cry like a child and hide her face in his robes.
She stays quiet instead. Takes her sister’s hand and turns away from this waiting tomb before it swallows them too.
She sits by her brother’s side, knees pulled against her chest, fingers digging into her own legs until they draw blood.
Like their father, he had once seemed so big to her. He had picked her up easily, held her close as they waded into the river. He had never let her go, hands warm on her shoulders as he held her up in the rushing current.
He looks like nothing now.
Like carrion.
Like the thousand corpses he spilled before their doorstep. Across the fields they once played in. Into the river that was theirs. Blood so deep and thick it chokes the rapids and washes up the banks.
She stares at his hollow face, bruises painted up his throat and under his eyes. His expression is almost peaceful, slack jawed and empty. His eyes fixed on distant Thebes, drawn home even in death.
She likes to think he saw her on the walls in her very last moments. That he took the memory of her dark hair and tearful eyes into Hades with him. That his very last thought was of her.
She reaches out, ghosts her fingers across his lips, tries not to shudder at the waxy, ice cold feel of them. The night has chilled him, while she slept warm under blankets her mother wove her years ago.
She feels selfish. She feels lonely and broken apart.
She should have brought him a blanket.
She should have walked out into that battlefield and thrown herself between her two brothers. She should be cold and decaying on blood soaked mud.
She wipes mud from his face with numb fingers, sinking too deep into soft and bloated flesh. When the dirt doesn't budge she licks her fingers and tries her again, the way their mother would wipe soil from her cheek before she entered the palace again, scolding her in soft tones.
There are so many duties she must bear, and so few she can fulfill.
His wife hides away in Argos, bringing no soft woven tapestry to cover the funeral bier. Her gentle hands, skilled at weaving, will not cleanse his bruised skin. Will not pour sacred libations.
It is only Antigone, and the memory of a blanket.
It is only Antigone and mud stained hand wiping foolishly at the decades of filth in their blood.
It is only Antigone, pouring out her tears as holy offering. Baring her throat like a lamb to the slaughter.
It is only Antigone who lifts a handful of soil over the bloated corpse of her brother.
The soil is not enough to cover the bruises, the blood, the deep gaping wound in his gut. She prays it is enough to them. To the Grey-eyed watcher and the king of the skies. To the kindly ones who press heavy on their blood. To the queen of the underworld in her verdant garden.
She prays she is enough.