The poem lay dead on the page. Each word tired of its neighbor.Demeter lifted her tortoiseshell pen and chased a small teardrop of black ink across the the poem’s final short word. Gone. I have blotted out the moon today she thought. I have made it black. Painted it away like him.
She waited to see if the poem would come back to life, if it could reform itself. Sometimes when things were lost to her she tried to rearrange them a little, to remake them and sense their secret shapes. Demeter pulled at her amber ring, taking a long, slow breath so that she was propelled again along time’s helter skelter corridor bathing first in its orange – now its purple swirling light, aware that her human edges were blurring away; giddy, heady on the taste of this raw orange unknowledge she was crumbling away from her old life. It fell sadly: discarded and unloved.
And then before she crumbled too far , she glimpsed darkness, a final unblinking darkness too deep for return, and she stopped , letting go of that orange breath. What had been once her head seemed to catch fire. Her hair seemed to burn, all sense of where or who gone.
Demeter was melting. Dark orange pleasure. Sticky particles in resin.
‘Any thoughts Demeter?’ asked Simon Jenkins hopefully. She was such a strange girl. But hot he admitted to himself each day in the shower. Cooking ******hot. Sighing, he nudged Emily Watkins instead and they both started to make careful notes together. Bullet points too.
Freeing her head out of the walled -in darkness, Demeter climbed back to life. And then having no idea how or why, Demeter drew a large circle in the middle of her page.She attached long fingers to it, all reaching out in spirals around this empty space. What could she place inside it ? What would hold all the other ideas together? What would she dare to know?
She took her pen and stared to draw a face. It was the mouth she most wanted to see. The mouth. The ancient face was molten grey and seemed to disappear as she drew, but the mouth was full, sulky, red as old strawberries . The lips were slightly parted, as if they were trying to speak. Demeter drew a forefinger across the strawberry mouth and smiled. Never mind. Never mind for that was the key. They would speak to her, because they must, and then she would listen because she could. 