Greg Normand's Story

Demeter's story


Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.

Al andar se hace camino
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.


The rain had been falling all morning, but it was not cold. The grass glistened in the half light of the half morning. The building--Eleusina--was a solid block of Victorian architecture, with deep bays and ceilings much too high, he was sure. Upon arrival he was assigned to a bald headed nurse or minder, to whom he should deffer any questions or problems and who would assign him task or distraction. Neither he nor the management seemed to want him to be there, and it had fallen upon the bald man to manage his stay.
"cup of tea"
"you should make the tea. You're going to have to do something, or you're going to get very bored today"
The boy somehow seemed to end up in the middle of a busy thoroughfare whenever he came to a standstill, even when expressly trying to press himself against the red papered walls or miscellaneous pieces of furniture, standing as close as he could without touching anything. Not having to touching anything had in fact been one of the preconditions he had set himself during the morning's rain, in exchange for not running away. His non-touching rule had been purposefully vague when drafted, being able, if the situation so demanded, to be enacted with reference to the soft skinned old and infirm. He feared the old, their lived lives too visible in their exposed bones and wet eyes.
Tea making proved a satisfactory task, being able--unsupervised--to stretch the time of making one cup of tea over two, or even three cups' worth of time. squeezing, spinning then re-squeezing each bag before adding the milk. He imagined the lives of these people, condemned as they were to spend the end of their lives in a half-world, a sub-society embedded within his. Does bitter tea make one bitter? Or is it bitterness that makes one less sensitive to subtleties?
Give tea, sit down, speak, or avoid speaking, these were the tasks he was to fulfill, angry both at his superfluity and at his unwillingness to really help, really care about these people stuck outside their time. He was sure people were not meant to live these artificially extended lives, you can only adapt and upgrade so much before you become obsolete, then all that is left is a life in storage.
"Here"
"Sit down here, bring the chair a little closer to me so I can hear you well"
Setting down the tea where she instructed, he scraped the chain over the deep carpet and sat. Her--Demeter--hands were soft with visible gristle when the fingers moved. He followed the veins or arteries down her arm towards her hands. Followed them up-stream as they split and split into smaller tributaries, finally going under the surface over her knuckles. He did not look up at her face as she began to speak.
"You know, I have a daughter. She's not your age, not anymore, but being around young people reminds me of her. Reminds me of the pain, as well as great happiness she gave me. She was taken you know"
He lined up each finger tip with its opposite on the far side of the cup, then brought it up to his mouth for a tentative sip. He looked at her for the first time, looked through her thin hair and at her aged face. She was more elegant than the rest of the 'residents', they had loosened, given in, in exchange they had happiness of a sort. She was not happy, she stared out the window at the rain, blurring and swaying, not even noticing that he looked at her. He admired her unhappiness, or at least what it stood for, she had not succumb to being old as the others had.
"My daughter..." she continued "You have a mother don't you?" She said twisting her face around and looking him in the eyes for the first time. The boy nodded. She slowly turned away to face the rain once again.
"She must love you very much. I loved my daughter very much, as all mothers love theirs. But our love seemed special. We were together all the time, she would help me work, planting, harvesting... together we reaped and sowed, we nurtured the young and weak plants during their fragile, tentative early life. Together... nature was ours, and we were nature. We could create the green earth and sweet fruit... grains for bread, grass and small shrubs feed the animals and we feast on the fruit and nuts, the future lives of the plants themselves. That's why they are so good for you... did you know that?"
He shook his head slowly. She had suddenly come alive, she was hot now with memories and emotions running through her body and mind. She seemed suddenly sharper, even her voice seemed to have taken on a harder, more attacking timbre.
"We lived like this for a long time, i don't remember how long, but it seemed to last forever. When something is unchanging it lasts a long time, because your memories get muddled and you remember them more than once. You see? So I can't say how long it was exactly"
She lent over to the small table beside her and brought her tea up to her eyes before lowering it to her mouth. she drank half the cup's contents in consecutive gulps before setting it down again.
"She was taken. She was picking flowers or fruits from trees with some other sweet things when the ground split. It shook and crumbled, throwing earth and stones into the air. The fissure was as deep as anything can be deep, and dark. Light did not come out of it, it could only enter. She was taken down to the world below ours. It screams and throbs, yet cannot utter words. It is reliant on us, on our world for its sustenance, it sucks us, want us as part of it, yet cannot escape itself, cannot become us, so robs. He robbed me of my daughter."
Small balls, like pearls, of sweat or tears could be seen down the front of her face. They hesitated, then rolled, riding over the contours and cracks. Her Voice remained strong though, it did not quiver or thin.
"I did not find all this out until later of course. I spent time, all of time, searching for my dear daughter, the earth died, nothing grew, I couldn't celebrate in life's abundances and pleasures without her. I wished away all that was green, and embraced the dry, the pain, the barren, my nostrils were filled with bitterness, nothing was sweet to me"
Turning to look at him again, he saw the strain on her face, what she suffered to tell her life.
"You do understand don't you? This was never-ending. As the unchanging stretches in our memory, so does pain. All pain is never-ending, is unbearable and insurmountable. And so it was. Time passed, all time passed, and she was returned to me. she was retrieved from darkness and returned to my breast as my world was on the brink of losing all its colour, fading. But she had cheated, or been cheated by another. Before her return she took six seeds and feasted upon them. Had she bought her own return? Her motivation was never revealed to me. She returned, always only to be taken away again, and so my life was lived, in sorrow and in joy, with life and death always close to one another"

Squeezing, spinning, squeezing. Squeezing, spinning, squeezing.
"I see you met Demeter? Sorry to abandon you, ...she's ...well, she can be very emotional, people sometimes find it difficult to talk to her, even some of the permanent staff"
The bald man-nurse had come up behind the boy as he made another batch of tea in the small, yellowing kitchenette. They carried tree mugs of tea in each hand as they walked into the main room, past the reception.
"What... do you know what happened to her daughter?"
He stopped and put his mugs down on a small ornamental table with tall thin legs "She doesn't have a daughter. They... her stories, they are all a part of her life, her past, her youth. We don't really know much about her. We suppose she grew up in the countryside somewhere, but there is no evidence that she ever had a daughter"
They stood in silence for a minute. The boy seemed upset.
"You know... she is a very important character in here. Everything and everyone become very important, and take on special significance if you live in such close confines. For Eleusinians she is very important and will be remembered for a long time to come. Her stories and her person represent for them renewal, they represent the cycles of life that come to be very important as you age... " He bend over taking up his six cups again "Your path is made by walking it, you should take everything you can from it, as looking back you'll see the path you can never again tread... Come"