couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if someone discovered who he truly was.
The stranger came when the storm broke. Eumaeus stood in the threshold of his hut, the fire guttering in the wind, the pigs restless in their pen. The man on the path was hunched and ragged, his tunic stiff with dried salt, his hands black with road-dirt. Eumaeus had seen beggars before. He knew them by the slant of their shoulders, the hollow hunger in their eyes. He knew them by the silence that clung to them, by the way the world had already forgotten their names.
But this one was different. There was something in the way he held himself, even beneath the grime. Something in the way he stepped into the light, the way his gaze flickered too quickly, assessing, measuring, searching. Eumaeus fed him. Because the land had taken so much from him, but this, this, he could still give. The man spoke in riddles. A lost king, a fallen house, a war fought over a woman across the sea. Eumaeus listened, but his pigs shifted uneasily in the mud. The hills were old, older than Ithaca, older than any kingdom men had carved into the earth, and they knew when something was not as it seemed.
Eumaeus, who had spent his life listening to the hills, knew better than to ignore their warning. And when the man finally lifted his head and the firelight caught his face, Eumaeus knew. The sea had come back. But this time, it had not come to take; it had returned to reclaim what was lost. In the quiet that followed, Eumaeus found his hands trembling. The beggar’s face was familiar now, shaped by a thousand stories told around Ithaca’s fires. The scars that webbed across his brow were like fault lines in the earth, remnants of wars that had stolen men from their homes, leaving women and children to grow old without them.
This was Odysseus. The king who had sailed into legend, who had been swallowed by the sea and spat out onto foreign shores, only to return cloaked in rags and silence. The man who had left Eumaeus behind, a forgotten prince tending forgotten animals on a forgotten hill.
Eumaeus knelt, not out of duty, but out of the strange, spiraling understanding that fate is a river that circles back upon itself. Odysseus reached out, his hand heavy with the weight of years. When their fingers clasped, Eumaeus felt something shift, as though the earth had tilted beneath him. He was no longer just a swineherd. He was a guardian of secrets, a witness to the return of a ghost. Odysseus spoke in low tones, weaving a plan that would undo the men who feasted on his legacy, who devoured his house like carrion birds. Eumaeus listened, his heart thrumming like the wings of a sparrow trapped in a snare. When dawn bled across the hills, Eumaeus led his king to the palace gates, their steps careful, shadows slipping between the columns. He did not flinch when Odysseus revealed himself, when the suitors fell beneath his arrows, their blood pooling on the stones like spilt wine. The boy who had sailed away on a Phoenician ship was not the man who stood beside his king. His home was not in royal halls, but in the mud and bramble, in the low grunt of pigs, in the earth that drank deeply of rain and blood alike.
And so he returned to the hills, to the quiet life that had shaped him into something more than a prince, more than a servant. He was Eumaeus, swineherd of Ithaca, and in his humble tending, he had become the keeper of the island’s soul.
Eumaeus had seen beggars before. He knew them by the slant of their shoulders, the hollow hunger in their eyes. He knew them by the silence that clung to them, by the way the world had already forgotten their names.
Winning 10th grade submission, 2024-2025 NJCL Creative Writing Contest
CREATIVE WRITING · Summer 2025 · Torch: U.S.
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