▸ Column · Modern-day America; Circe operates as an immortal sorceress scheming through the contemporary age
CIRCE replies.
The letter
I've been back from my second deployment fourteen months now and I still feel like a stranger in my own house. My son Isaac was six when I shipped out — he's eight now. He flinches when I raise my voice. Runs to his mom Maeve for everything, even bedtime stuff I used to handle. On the Fourth of July the fireworks got me bad and I ended up on the garage floor, and my daughter Aurora saw it. Now she watches me sideways, like she's waiting to see if I fall apart again.
I want to be their dad. Not the guy who can't sit with his back to a door, not the one who snaps over nothing. But every time I reach for them I either freeze up or say something wrong and they scatter.
They built a whole life while I was gone, I guess. It ran fine without me. I don't know how to ask to be part of it again without wrecking the quiet they've gotten used to.
— Back But Not Home in Fayetteville
Circe replies
The war was your cauldron, darling, and you came back a different creature — which is exactly what you are, and the sooner you stop apologizing for it, the sooner you remember how to inhabit a room.
I have transformed more men than I can count. What the ones with any sense learned — and the cowards never did — is that you cannot go back through the gate in the same shape you left it. Odysseus's sailors wept to be men again; none of them understood that the shape the spell revealed was already theirs. Your war did something similar. It stripped the soft civilian costume and left the actual animal standing in the kitchen.
Isaac and Aurora sense the difference, and they are not wrong. But you are making the error all transformed creatures make: treating the reveal as a wound, and begging for the old form back. You cannot have it. What you can have is the place you earned.
Stop arriving at your own door like a houseguest. Stop reaching for your children with apology threaded through every gesture. Maeve built something while you were gone; walk into it like you own the walls, because you do. Your children will calibrate to what you actually are. They already are — they're just waiting to see if you know it too.
— Circe
Cheetah weighs in
Oh, Circe. Always so theatrical about transformation.
He doesn't need to "own the walls." He needs to be predictable. The children aren't afraid of a strong creature — they are afraid of an erratic one. Something that drops to a garage floor on the Fourth of July and then strides forward claiming its territory smells like prey wearing a threat. Prey does not reclaim a den by announcing itself.
You want them not to flinch? Stop moving unpredictably. The veldt teaches this — not the petitioner's patience, the hunter's. You hold still. You let them close the radius themselves. You don't charge. Instinct learns what is safe, and then it relaxes. Dress it in whatever mythology she likes. The mechanism doesn't change.
— Cheetah
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