THEY DIDN’T SAY A WORD by Sarah Cipullo

“You’re going to meet the Sirens. They’ll have all the words. In their voice you’ll find every past and the discoveries that no one has yet made, and in their throat you’ll unearth a distant and incomprehensible land that will make you foreign forever. It exists beyond the Pillars of Hercules," Circe said.

Then she recommended that his companions plug their ears with wax and tie him tightly to the mast, strangling his hands and feet. And so, bound to a piece of wood, Ulysses waited to glimpse them on the horizon.

When he finally saw the Sirens on the smallest island, no words reached his ears. Such was his desire to bite their every syllable that he could hear the waves breaking on the sea rocks and the enveloping water invading their wrinkles, their cracked cavities. But he heard nothing more. He passed in front of the Sirens’ eyes and realized they were giving him the absence of every known language. Ulysses felt like collapsing in the center of the earth and was suddenly certain that he would fail in everything and that there would never be any home to return to.

“They didn't say a word,” he would tell Penelope later on, longing to leave Ithaca again.

Sarah Cipullo lives in Turin. She writes both in Italian and English. Her work has been published in New Reader Magazine, Fantastico!, Hook Magazine and The /tƐmz/ Review. More is forthcoming in Crack and FRiGG Magazine. She was selected as a finalist for the InediTO prize.