This week, we’re loving this re-envisioning of mythology, with a twist, from Angela Slatter, and we hope you will as well. ~ Fran and Julian, October 23

The Woman Who Married the Minotaur

by Angela Slatter

It was a love match, so they say, but who can ever truly tell?

            There was a strangeness to it, no doubt. She with her witch’s blood that burns like fire, he with his horns—the whole bull’s head, really. They still share tales of the courtship, how she saw him by moonlight, how he ate the flowers she’d woven in her hair. That she loved him for his wild temper, placid one day, savage the next; for the tattoos that ran up and down his torso, stories she yearned to translate. That he was happy enough to let her lead him around by the ring in his nose because her touch was tender and she kept apples in her pockets.

            Yet the truth was more prosaic, more mundane, earthy.

            She’d wandered far from a tour group, past the spot where a ship with black sails once brought bodies and grief, into the labyrinth left mostly hollow by the efforts of heroes, and found the cursed creature roaming there. Lost. Broken, but surviving long after the old world was ashes and ruins. A haunted beast, out of time, yet there he was, still tall and broad. Still a force.

            And she’d never seen anything like him. He was given to few words, which was a delight—no inclination to mansplaining made him irresistible.

            As holiday romances went, it took the cake.