“The Me of Perfect Sight”

The hall of the Abzu-temple was impossibly vast, and impossibly full. On shelves to either side, on tables down the center, stood the holy me: the decrees of Anu, the supreme god of the land between the rivers, which made all things of the world come into being.

As you may have noticed, this is not “The Me of Perfect Sight” in the sense of I, me, my. Instead it’s about the me, a term used in Sumerian mythology to indicate . . . well, it’s complicated. Physical objects, apparently, because they could be stolen, but physical objects which represented or embodied concepts. All kinds of concepts, from the mundane to the mythic; the existence of the me seems to be why those things exist.

I don’t remember why I thought up the me of perfect sight (which does not, in fact, appear in any of the lists of me). I just know I was thinking about how Inanna stole them from Enki, and then a little while later I had a flash story of the sort I sometimes write, that sideswipes as many other mythological and folkloric traditions as it can en route to its destination.

Appropriately enough, “The Me of Perfect Sight” came out in NewMyths, in their Spring 2022 issue! You can read it for free online.