Flash: In What Distant Deeps or Skies

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In What Distant Deeps or Skies

by Amelia Robinson

March 24, 2013
Spring Fever Short Story Contest, Figment.com

Prompt: In 250 words or fewer, write a story that’s set in springtime.

Description: Persephone, daughter of the goddess Demeter, is captured by Hades, lord of the Underworld.

After the first loaf of bread from the first harvest is sacrificed to my mother, I gather wildflowers from the fields that sweep across our hills and present them to her. It makes her smile, to be brought flowers when she is the goddess of the fields.

There is only the earth’s song to surround me as I hook my basket over my elbow and wade out into wheat stalks that brush the skin of my arms, left bare for the newly warm sun to kiss. With the sound of the waves beating against the cliffs so close, I know I am safe to let my whole arms be free to the air. No one will see.

A patch of crocuses grow in the soft turn of earth left behind by a rockslide. They please me, with their white petals stained with dark purple. I kneel on the rocks, pick the flowers, and weave them, slowly and carefully, in the way my mother taught me, into a wreath.

As I finish, a skin-prickling chill tightens the skin along my back, and arms embrace me, like a lover, from behind. A soft, icy breath against my neck freezes me in place, and two hands, white as bone, close over mine. They slip the wreath from my fingers. The hands lift it slowly and then, so gently, it comes to rest on my head.

“Oh, my darling, yes,” a voice whispers. “You shall have your crown.”