The Fall | epics of scale
So close that she would feel her breath, Polina caught her whisper —
In tumbles. Polina caught Iya’s perfume flood past her face in a brilliant haze. As a low-flying swallow, swept from the firmament by a pursuing rook, tucks its gleaming wings, bracing against the slipstream, and tumbles down the sky in a darting arc — so Iya whirled past her lover. Hair tumbled in tousles. Dress whorled at her knees, the white lace fomenting at her ankles like rushing wavelets.
Polina’s breath rushed from her lungs. She held out her arms in skyward suspension. Eyelids fluttering shut. The last image of Iya and her lace-hemmed dress plunged into the watery darkness of her mind — Polina braced for a fall.
Iya was the first to turn around. And Polina was collapsed on the ground, her pale cheek flushing red and gleaming with tears. Injured, she gathered herself inward, shoulders caved and lips trembling — as Asterion did in the labyrinth, gored and bloody, he cowers in the shadow and cringes at the sound, at the glint of the Theseus’ blade, raised over his matted hair — so Polina hid her face in the cavern of her body. Iya swiftly knelt beside her.
So close that she would feel her breath, Polina caught her whisper —
Oh Polly, Polly — where does it hurt?
In the Iliad the world of the similes, with their scenes from ordinary life and vignettes of nature, contrasts with the harsh reality of the battlefield.
Just as heroes have their battles to fight, ordinary man is engaged in an unending struggle to survive in an often hostile natural world.
— Irene F. J. de Jong
