The Sacrifice is Yours

I am on the edge.

My mother told me, as her mother and grandmother before her—if you stand at the shore and offer a sacrifice—the Lady of the Lake will answer.

She rises from the depths in a pillar of tears. Not on a scalloped shell, blown by Zephyrus winds. No, this enchantress is dragged into harbor by a fishnet—a decomposing matriarch of subservience. Her gift is greater than pearls, than love, than fertility. She presents Excalibur—the most valuable gift of all—motherhood without compromise.

She will meet you in your dreams. And when you die, the sea will reclaim Excalibur. Flesh becomes sand, scattered like ashes—meat for the new generation.

I walk to the water’s edge.

I fall to my knees to pray.

I hold my breath deep in my chest

And let the blood rush across my face.

I believed the stories my mother told me, as her mother and grandmother before. I visited the Lady of the Lake. I climbed her tower. I witnessed the world through her hollow eyes. I prayed—for her forgiveness, her kindness, her company. Most of all, I pleaded for a family. Only silence answered; tears that shriveled and calcified.

I will turn to stone on this shore.

My mother never warned me of failure. Instead, she retold the myth again and again—a childhood fairy tale, stroking my hair as I drifted to sleep. She implored the Lady of the Lake for wisdom: to choose the right husband, to raise a strong child, to seize her independence. In return, she sacrificed her spirit. Now, she wanders the shore, summoning a name she can’t quite remember.

I watched my mother fall apart when I was a child. Stubbornly bound to the myth despite the dream never realized. Bottle in the drawer. Hand on the trigger. Her downfall was my burden, not the Lady of the Lake, who only speaks in riddles. I was my mother’s disgusting failure, masked in pink frills. The sacrificial succubus who bled her dry. And who stitched her soul back together? No Lady Lazarus, but a Freudian sadist with a penchant for shock treatment.

It wasn’t my mother’s fault. My grandmother trained her to keep her mouth shut: trust in your destiny, earn it through suffering. What can psychology heal that the tide cannot?

My grandmother spoke to me through the voices of worms as I patted three shovelfuls of dirt upon her grave. She too had invoked the Lady of the Lake. She made the wish of an innocent child.

Born to Jewish immigrants in an Alabama shithole—a town of pig farmers where Jews were deemed swine. Condemned to hide their beliefs, her mother sent my grandmother to dream instead.

At thirteen, she traveled to New York City, riding the train toward her destiny. When she gazed upon the Lady of the Lake—the Statue of Liberty—she beheld the face of God.

I don’t know what my grandmother wished for, but I do know what she sacrificed. She went to college. Got married. Had babies. The little girl once mesmerized by the world’s infinite possibilities became an endnote to an academic’s biography, her aspirations tucked into the folds of his laundry.

She hated my mother like my mother hated me. The seed of her undoing, her firstborn, built the funeral barge that returned my grandmother to the Lake—pierced in the heart by Excalibur’s deceit.

It wasn’t my grandmother’s fault. Her mother fled the old country across the Atlantic. When she met the eyes of her savior—Lady Liberty—she did not know her family would burn in the camp at Birkenau. Her sacrifice, the Holocaust—her “burnt offering.” In return, she asked for a safe haven to raise a family. Instead, she was exiled to a pig farm in clan territory—forced into hiding once more.

I am on the edge.

“Take it back!” I cast Excalibur into the sea.

The Lady of the Lake’s myth ripples one final time before the tide reclaims it:

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother…

Take your flea market, spray-painted silver sword,

Take your torch-less flame, no better than a tourist trap lighter,

Take your magic wand, rusted green by barnacles,

And never show your face again.

That is my wish, tossed into the fountain of your miserable harbor.

Today the sacrifice is yours.

Mother—I renounce you.

*this piece includes an excerpt from the poem The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus (1883).