Things are colder, now.
Mothers and daughters, strawberry juice and pomegranate seeds.
TW: allusions to assault and mild gore.
This is a very loose retelling of Demeter and Persephone’s story, originally told as part of my ‘Mythstake’ newsletter series.
It aches to love her. In every breath, in each day that passes, I think about our fates — rooted in flesh and fruit and blood — and rend myself anew. I think about her entry into this world. When she slipped from me, red and screaming, in the depths of that great, golden garden.
I remember it all.
The swell of pain, knife-sharp and shuddering until you cannot bear it any further, twisting, howling, heels set to the mud and crying out for the girl who only wanted to feel the grass between her toes.
I was sobbing long before she was laid at my breast.
“It’s a girl,” one of the Meliae whispered. Her knarl-knotted fingertips were the first to grasp my daughter, wrapping her strawberry limbs up in linen (a month prior, the wind had caught it from the line of a farmer’s wife and swept it into the branches of the nymph’s ash tree) — and pressed her to me.
Oh, to cradle something wholly yours.
