Doorbell

The flowered book opens to pages that taste of the future, not as a prediction, but as a trajectory. The kind of certainty that arrives when a design has gained enough momentum to be seen from a distance.

You are making progress, it begins, and a knot in my chest loosens its grip. And you are not alone. Others are excavating their own architectures, finding their daimons, performing the same archaeology in different locations.

Then, a specific instruction, heavy with intent:

When you feel strong enough to fly again, and you will, the remodeling nears completion—go visit that friend who resembles you. The one whose mind operates on your frequency. She has news. Developments that will interest you. Transformations that mirror your own, but expressed through a different medium.

A sharp, unexpected joy pierces through me. Not a warm glow, but a precise coordinate received after a long, directionless search. Someone else is doing the work. Someone who might understand the friction.

I will go, I tell the book. When I can fly.

The book’s tone shifts, turning almost playful.

The relationship with the mysterious man progresses well. You employed his spices with precision. The wild boar you prepared demonstrated an understanding of how botanical compounds converse with protein, how heat can build flavor into an architecture that transcends mere nutrition.

13, 15, and 16 appreciated your work. They recognized the care, the chemical attention, the transformation of ingredients into an experience.

I remember it vividly: the dense, gamy texture of the boar, the curated spices, juniper for brightness, pepper for clean heat, bay and rosemary for their earthy, cutting notes. I had braised it for hours with the calibrated focus of a lab experiment. Their satisfaction was the proof—the look on someone’s face when they encounter food made by someone who sees cooking as applied chemistry.

But who is he? This man who speaks in molecular combinations?

The book anticipates the question:

When you least expect it, he will ring your doorbell.

The doorbell rings.

My heart lurches before my mind can form the thought. Now? It’s now? The book just said

I move toward the door with velocity that suggests excitement I'm not entirely comfortable acknowledging. The mysterious man. Finally. The one who speaks my language through spice combinations, who understands that chemistry is communication.

I open the door.

15 stands there, holding my Tupperware. The container that held the wild boar.

“The boar was excellent,” he says. “Saved some for later, but wanted to return this.”

My brain recalibrates at speed. Not him. Just 15. Returning a container. Mundane reality reasserting itself over expectation’s more elegant geometry.

“Oh. Thank you,” I manage, my hands accepting the plastic, my nerves still buzzing with the ghost of disappointment.

Then, footsteps on the stairs. My landlord, pausing as he sees us. His eyes move from 15 to me, and his face arranges itself into an expression I cannot decipher.

“Ah,” he says, his voice laden with unreadable data. “A family member!”

He continues up the stairs and is gone.

I stand in the doorway, Tupperware in hand, 15 looking vaguely puzzled, and my mind scrambling to parse the code.

Family member?

15 is not family. We are village acquaintances, comrades in the shared discomfort of the square. The landlord knows this. He has witnessed my solitary existence.

So why

Family member.

The phrase hangs in my consciousness, an irregular shape that won’t fit into any of my existing categories. Not a metaphor, his tone was too factual. Not a mistake—he is too observant. It was information. A communication in a cipher I haven't learned.

I close the door. The landlord’s words echo in the space where meaning should be.

It refuses to resolve. I file it away with the other fragments cluttering the edges of my understanding—pieces for a pattern that hasn’t yet emerged.

I return to the flowered book, seeking an explanation for the doorbell’s failed promise.

The final pages offer coordinates, not apologies.

The mysterious man has departed for XX, where he organizes catering for an event requiring his specific expertise. His absence is temporary. Upon his return, you will discover his identity—not through dramatic revelation, but through simple introduction. When the mission completes, you will have time to know each other properly.

Patience. The timing will align when conditions are optimal.

I close the book. He is gone. But he will return. The thought generates a warmth I don't entirely trust. Hope feels dangerous after so many cycles of arrival and exile. But the book’s tone carries the certainty of a report, not a guess.

I will wait, I decide. I can wait if I know the waiting has an end.

The afternoon light softens. I open my laptop and type: Medusa mythology interpretation.

The algorithm serves its curriculum with impeccable timing. Three frameworks emerge.

The Misogyny Interpretation: Medusa as victim of male violence—raped by Poseidon in Athena's temple, then punished by Athena for that violation. Her transformation into monster represents how patriarchal systems blame women for violence committed against them, how female beauty gets weaponized into curse. The serpent hair becomes symbol of female rage that men find so threatening they must turn it into literal petrification, women's anger as thing that paralyzes rather than motivates.

I pause. Yes. This resonates. The way my family punished me for blooming, the way the laboratory saboteurs couldn't tolerate my capability, the way systems transform women's strengths into reasons for exclusion.

The Feminist Reclamation: Medusa as symbol of female power, serpents as ancient wisdom, her gaze as refusal to perform palatability. The lecture unfolds with particular fervor: She doesn't turn men to stone because she's monstrous; she reveals their rigidity, their paralysis before female power they cannot control. Perseus demonstrates how violence becomes the only language, how dismemberment is patriarchy's sole vocabulary.

The professor's voice carries conviction that feels rehearsed. Performative.

I watch with attention that shifts—not toward the content but toward the structure beneath it. Something about the framework feels familiar. The binary persists: man versus woman, oppressor versus oppressed, victor versus victim. Only the valuations have flipped. The structure remains identical.

Woman as beast complementary to man.

The thought arrives unbidden. This Medusa—serpent-haired, petrifying, powerful in her refusal, she's still defined entirely by male gaze, even in rejection of it. Her power exists only as reaction, as mirror image, as inverse of masculine dominance. Dangerous to him means powerful to her. The equation hasn't been dissolved; its polarity has merely reversed.

I pause the video.

Objects on my desk hold potential energy: the closed laptop, the cooling tea, the mythology book with its pages marked at competing interpretations. Everything waits in superposition.

The reclamation narrative presents itself as liberation but functions as different cage, one where woman must become beast to escape victim, where power requires adopting the oppressor's language of dominance and violence. Trading one prison for its mirror image.

What about the woman who wants neither to petrify nor to please? Who refuses both palatability and monstrosity? Who exists outside this binary entirely?

The Liberation Narrative: Perseus's killing of Medusa as necessary transformation—her blood produces both poison and healing medicine, depending on which vein it comes from. Her death liberates both her (from an enraged mind) and him (from quest obligation), but more importantly, her severed head becomes weapon against tyranny. Athena places it on her shield—using Medusa's transformative power to protect rather than threaten. The story becomes about how rage and beauty, when properly channeled, become tools for justice rather than instruments of petrification.

Medusa the victim. Medusa the powerful. Medusa the metamorphosys.

The afternoon deepens into evening. I've been reading for hours, following links, watching lectures, letting the mythology reorganize my understanding of society.

The ritual feels significant, a symbolic completion of a cycle. The book has done its work for now. It is time for it to wait for its next reader.

I pull on jeans, a sweater, boots for the rain that hangs in the air. My hair, unwashed for days, falls in tangled, serpentine waves. I don’t brush it.

Outside, a fine mist hangs in the air. I look up at the swollen, grey clouds. The weather feels unresolved, like a transformation in progress.

I turn back inside. A line of verse rises, unbidden:

"First upon his feet the hero bound the golden sandals, gift of the swift messenger god... winged they were... Then upon his head he placed the Helm of Hades... darker than the deepest night... Invisible he stood, ready to move between worlds as one who belongs to neither."

I grab my hat. I wear my flying shoes. And I run toward the library.

The library materializes through the mist. A single light burns on the ground floor.

The librarian looks up. Her expression shifts through recognition to something else. She sees the flowered book in my hands and nods.

“Finished already?”

“For now.”

She takes the book, scans it, and places it in the return cart. “It will find its next reader,” she says, and it sounds like a prophecy.

I nod and turn to leave, but pause at the door.

“Thank you,” I say, meaning it for far more than the loan.

She smiles. “See you soon. The next book is already waiting.”

Outside, the rain has stopped. The clouds have broken, showing fragments of a twilight sky. I walk home through streets that feel different, not because they have changed, but because I have.

Family member.

The phrase still refuses to make sense.

But for now, I hold what the day has given me: doorbells that ring for the wrong person, landlords who speak in code, and myths that offer mirrors for a confusing present.

The flowered book is returned.

The mysterious man will come.

My friend is out there, making her own progress.

For now, I sit with the fragments, letting them settle into my reorganizing mind, trusting they will eventually cluster into the pattern I am still learning to see.