And Then They Saw the Minotaur’s Daughter

“Neither cheerful / nor even sad, she just stared into space.”

JUNE 3, 2025

And then they saw the Minotaur’s daughter. She sat there, on a

solitary chair,

with her noble, horned head in her hands and a red dress.

Neither cheerful

nor even sad, she just stared into space; at times she acted

like a visitor,

that had walked into the house insouciantly as a queen, not

caring if anyone had invited

her.

She was sitting in the living room.

The two boys watched her from behind the long tablecloth.

Two little,

well-behaved boys—somewhere between childhood and

doubt,

between the desire to obey and to scramble into a hedge and

from there

try whether bad things work the way they should. The way

they imagine.

There were long white columns in the living room that served

instead of a window.

From the outside

pressed inwards a steel-grey darkness, scored with some

unknown handwriting.

A huge white figure loomed in the middle of the living room,

but differently

from the Minotaur’s daughter, it had just blown in there. In

a corner there danced

the Spirit of a dancer and the dogs, too, were white.

Behind the long tablecloth, the two boys deliberated what to

say. What to say

to the daughter of the Minotaur, who’d visited them with all

those attendant visitors.

At length they decided not to say anything: they just listened

to the black music of Nightwish, to the sounds of the wind-

like dancing in the folds of the

clothes

of everyone present, to the murmur

of a fallen rose, lying on the floor, to the rattling

of glass balls which were all over the place.

They stood there and just watched her. This somewhere

between childhood and doubt

scratched deep in their throats.

✺ Published in “Issue 29: Fathers” of The Dial