That Night in the Library by Eva Jurczyk

Author:Eva Jurczyk [Jurczyk, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

III

“You’re not even chanting!” Mary said. Faye could hear them until she couldn’t. She went back to the arena first. The way back was familiar; there would be light when she got there; it wasn’t so bad, going there alone.

The Persephone myth, the one they were meant to be reenacting in the ritual, started a little like this, with a maiden who wanders off alone. When she read the story in one of those library books, Faye was surprised that she didn’t already know it. If Demeter was the goddess of agriculture, shouldn’t Faye have grown up with the story? She thought that may have been why Davey invited her. It was all wrong though. Real farm people were too practical for stories and prayers. They knew that the thing that made the corn grow year after year was work.

The story didn’t start with Demeter, but with her daughter. Persephone was abducted by Hades, god of the dead, as she gathered flowers. As far as Faye could tell, the Greeks were always writing about maidens being abducted as they gathered flowers. It was like they thought the trope lent a little romance to their rape stories.

Demeter searched the world, or Greece at least, for her daughter, and then finally in her grief, she wandered to Eleusis, where she disguised herself as a mortal. When the Eleusinians learned there was a god among them, they were filled with awe. They built her a temple to honor her, but she didn’t want honor; she wanted her daughter. She was too aggrieved to move from Eleusis, to rejoin the rest of the gods in the heavenly realm, and in her grief, she caused a year-long period of sterility in the harvest that threatened to starve the mortals throughout the world.

Zeus tried to bribe Demeter into returning to her place among the gods, but his gifts were as little use to her as the honors of the Eleusinian people were. She wanted none of it; she only wanted Persephone. So Zeus went to Hades instead. Not with gifts but with threats. And it was those threats that finally freed Persephone. Hades said that he’d let her leave the underworld to go see her mother, but before she left, he tricked her into swallowing a pomegranate seed, and that morsel of food tied Persephone to the underworld forever.

Faye was starving. Her eyes watered at the idea of a mouthful of pomegranate seeds.

Demeter was devastated that she’d found her daughter only to lose her again, so Zeus and Hades struck a deal. Persephone would be tied to Hades forever, as he intended. She’d spend part of the year in the underworld with him and part of the year with her mother.

Faye had made a choice to move across the country from her mother. No one tricked her, no one forced her. But she was still devastated by the distance every single day. She’d arrived in Vermont with a bout of homesickness so intense she thought it might swallow her whole.

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