I am Achilles.
Okay, no, I’m not. But I am channeling Achilles. Maybe. Or maybe I’m clumsy and/or out of shape.
I slipped on the old falling apart shoes I keep by the door for errands. And started walking to the car. And my heel hurt. Not sole of the foot heel. More back of the calf heel. It hurt with every step through the grocery store and when I got home and every time I stood up and went into another room and then the next day alllllll day at work and now still hurts this morning.
After 4am research online I’m pretty sure I pulled or otherwise was unkind to the tendon. Hence, Achilles.
And I thought about it like you do when you’re simultaneously trying to not put weight on one foot and not slip while in the shower.
Achilles really had a bum deal. Not because his mom had to hold something when she dipped him the Styx so he had one and only one vulnerable spot and thus died in possibly a cleverly planned maneuver but what was probably really just a stray arrow in the thick of battle that someone (I don’t remember who and I can’t be bothered to look it up, you have web access so go for it if you care so much) with a great sense of PR claimed was done on purpose.
Anyway, Achilles. He didn’t feel any pain his whole life. Swords and arrows bounced off of him. Puppy teeth and kitten claws — the next items down on the piercing pain scale — couldn’t penetrate either. Not a scratch, not a bruise, not a stubbed toe all of his life. Never slept wrong and woke up with that crick one his neck, you know the one, where you try to joke that you’re fine as long as you don’t have to look left. Never grabbed the car door handle wrong and it smacks back and your fingertips throb and go numb at the same time. Never bumped his funny bone and grabbed his arm and cursed. Never noticed a bruise on his leg and could not, for the life of him, imagine where it came from.
The only pain he ever felt (after having his humanity burned away ad an infant) was an arrow through a tendon. Think about how much that would hurt for anyone. Then put it on the pain scale for someone who has no frame of reference because he’s never felt pain before. It’s a 700 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Could he feel anything, any touch on his skin? Could he feel the grit of sand and dirt, maybe the tiny scrapes of pebbles, at least on that one spot of skin? How would sex work if your skin is essentially numb and you can’t feel a caress, a kiss?
I think there’s another non-Greek legendary warrior whose mom held him by the big toe when she dipped in — you know, I think it was a magic fire. (Polluted rivers, fires — where was Child Protective Services?) I think he died of snake bite on the toe. At least he would have known the excruciating childhood pain of a stubbed toe, thus softening the blow, as it were, of a sudden fang in one’s big toe. Venomous or not, that’s gotta sting.
p.s. I’m not sure if that really is a legend (the toe guy) or something from a Tanith Lee novel.
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