HUGE TW: violent death/sacrifice of an animal

WE FIND THE PERFECT PLACE to carry out the sacrifice, this nature reserve a few miles down the road from where I stole the goat. Marisol gets us the directions from Google Maps, which I've come to realize is not magic as I've known it my whole life, but a form of heretic witchcraft called technology.

When we get there, we park in a big gray lot out front, unpack our things, and spray ourselves with this stuff called "Off!" that comes out of a green bottle. The chemical scent of it stings my throat. I gag.

We pile our supplies into a wagon we borrowed from Marisol's garage. Dahlia uses the flashlight on her phone, and the rest of us carry actual flashlights. We head off through the winding trees. The goat, who has no opposable thumbs, contributes nothing.

It's noon. The sun still hasn't risen.

As we walk, I explain to them what I'm going to do, and how they can help me. After a while, we find this big, empty clearing. I set up the altar while Ezra gathers sticks and logs for the fire. He strikes a match, but everything out here is so damp, it takes him a couple of tries to get it to light. Dahlia and Marisol, in the meantime, tie the goat to a tree and clean it off with bottled water and dog soap, scrubbing until its fur shines white. Then Marisol sets up a little makeshift spit over the fire.

"I need to get high for this," Dahlia decides, once we're all set up.

"Me too," Ezra agrees.

So they each roll themselves a joint and light it and they sit there and smoke together. And Marisol, gagging, claims she "can't handle this" and walks off to the other side of the clearing. I ask for some, but Dahlia just shakes her head at me and tells me I can't handle a whole joint, so they take turns sharing theirs with me. We all sit there on the ground smoking a lot and not saying very much at all. When we're finished, Marisol returns, and I start the ceremony.

The three of them watch from the ground, leaning back into their hands. The world smells of "Off!" and weed and fire. I tie ribbons around the goat's ears, mumbling prayers beneath my breath, and lead it to the altar. When I ask him to, Ezra tosses a bottle of water at me. I catch it, and pour it over the goat's head. It shakes its head, droplets of water flying off, a move that's supposed to signify its consent, but the whole time it's frantically pulling at its lead, trying to get away from me.

Looking at the goat while high is like looking at a whole new animal. All I can see are its long, curving horns and unblinking eyes, a rectangle of a pupil framed in chocolate brown. Its eyes unnerve me in a way no ritual animal ever has before—I feel like I'm staring into the eyes of a horned god.

Except maybe it's not the creature itself that's so unnerving to me, or my lack of sobriety making it seem that way. Maybe it's the fact that I've never been the one to actually sacrifice something before. In the past, I've only ever watched.

"The gods and the animal have assented," I announce to my audience of three, the same words my mother has always used. The Greek on my tongue feels like home. "The sacrifice may begin."

Dahlia just lets out this high-pitched wailing noise and buries her face in Ezra's side. Marisol does the same. This doesn't surprise me. The vegan and the vegetarian. They don't even eat animals, let alone kill them in a ritual sacrifice. What does surprise me, however, is Ezra, who has so often chastised them about "needing some meat on their bones," tilting his head forward, resting his face atop Dahlia's dreads so he doesn't have to watch either.

I brandish the knife, watching it glint in the light from all our flashlights. Before I can think too much about what I'm doing, I slit the animal's throat. Blood splatters out, much faster than I expected, so red and so warm and so messy. I grab one of the cups we took from Marisol's house and place it under the wound. The blood fills the cup.

The goat lets out one final agonized bleat and tries, desperately, to free itself from my grasp. Then it stops breathing and drops limply to its side.

I lift it up onto the altar and draw a jagged line down its body with the knife. It's so much harder than my mother ever made it out to be, and a billion times messier. Its skin slips off, its guts spill out. I'm up to my elbows in blood. I fight back vomit.

I'm catching my mistakes as I go, too late to fix any of them. I should have let the blood spill over the altar. The goat already should have been on the altar when it was slaughtered. There should have been a procession. The goat shouldn't have been half-starved.

I look at the entrails, expecting to instantly be able to understand them. My mother, she had a knack for this kind of thing. She could look at an animal's insides and know which god was upset and how to fix it, even if she wasn't the god she served, my father. But looking down at all the red and the pink and the blood, I see nothing. No signs, no gods, just guts.

Marisol opens one eye and squints at me. "What are you doing now?"

"I don't know," I admit. "My mother, she—she read the insides of sacrificed animals, for signs from our gods. But I don't know what I'm looking for."

"Let me see it." She peels herself off of Ezra. "I mean, I'm pretty into, like, astrology and stuff, so, like—maybe, I don't know." Her shirt bunched up around her nose, she joins me at the altar. She gags as she looks down at the carcass, her eyes filling with tears. Then she points at it and says, quite casually: "It's good and it's bad."

"What do you mean?"

"Isn't it obvious?" She points at the animal's liver. "Look. The liver's healthy. That's a good sign. I think. But the heart..."

The goat's heart is covered in round, lumpy tumors.

"Cancer," I say.

"That's bad. I mean, that can't be good."

"Is that all you can get out of it?" I was expecting more. Are the gods pleased with us? Is one of them upset, hence all the cancer? Did my sacrifice do anything? Most importantly: have our prayers been heard?

But Marisol is not my mother, and neither am I. She's just a heretic girl that gets gut feelings about things. She's no seer.

"I don't know." She shrugs. "I could be wrong, but..."

"You trust your gut."

"It's never steered me wrong before, when I listen." She pauses, as if giving it a chance to speak. "I think one of the gods heard us, and is going to help us. And I think we really pissed another one off."

"Based on the fact that the sun still hasn't risen, I think I know which one we 'pissed off.'"

My first sacrifice, and this is all we know: Apollo's still upset with us. All we had to do to know that was to look up at the sky. And even then—we could be wrong. Marisol's gut feeling could be off. My mistakes could have completely botched the sacrifice. Worse, the gods could just be fucking with us.

"Are we just gonna leave this all out here?" Marisol asks, looking at the carcass with her arms crossed and her lips pushed outwards. "God, I pity the Girl Scout troop that finds this mess."

"There's still more to the ritual. I'll get rid of most of it."

Marisol raises her eyebrows at me and returns to Dahlia and Ezra, all of them clutching at each other to avoid looking at the blood.

Gathering the innards in my arms—soaking myself to the bone with goat blood, recoiling despite myself at the feeling of raw meat against my skin—I drop them into the fire. They crackle and flare as they burn, sending smoky tendrils up to the gods to feast on.

Being half-god, the smoke from a ritual fire is half-filling, the taste of it maddening, and half-deadly, filling my mortal lungs with fire. I gag, but I want more, want the flames to leap higher, want the smoke to grow thicker, want the whole world to burn in a sacrificial blaze.

I add more fuel to the fire, picking the meat off and tossing the bones in, these long, white, ghostly logs. Then I take the good part of the meat (all that's left of it, anyway) and drape it over the spit Marisol set up, slowly turning it, drenching it with wine and spices.

While the meat cooks, we bury the snake. All of us pitch in, digging a deep hole in the earth, flinging wet dirt over our shoulders. Dahlia cries. I toss the body in. Ezra hands me the head, and I place a little silver coin—a quarter dollar—that I found (and could not find the owner of) on the snake's forked tongue. Then—plop—into the earth it goes.

Even to myself the action was strange—giving the snake fare to make it safely across the Styx and Acheron rivers into the Underworld. Back home, such a beast never would have received such treatment. But if Dahlia and Marisol have taught me anything, it's that animals deserve the same respect we give humans. And if this snake died with a god's name on its forked tongue, if it died carrying out orders from the divine—it has every right to not only enter the Underworld, but enter Elysium as well.

(Besides. If Apollo really sent it, then dishonoring it even the slightest bit would be enough for the god to seek revenge.)

Dahlia is, at this point, crying so hard she has to physically remove herself from the situation. Marisol follows her, an arm around her waist, leaving just Ezra and I to cover the snake's grave with dirt, pack the earth in. Once we're finished, I take the meat off the fire and cut a piece for the two of us.

"Gross, ew, no," he says when I try to give him his. "Antigone, look, I'm not trying to be culturally insensitive, but—I'm not eating a goat you just slaughtered, I'm sorry, that's just—I can't."

So I toss his piece—and the rest of the uneaten meat—into the flames for the gods. Better them to consume than us.

But with all the starving people in the world, that was a waste of perfectly good meat.