Demeter

Persephone’s scream echoes through the balmy air; its high note quivering in the golden-hued stillness. It reverberates across the lush slopes of the rolling mountains, startling birds from the leafy tops of the trees, carrying on the warm currents of the breeze all the way past the slanting rays of the late-afternoon sunshine, into the hazy blue skies.

In my home on the highest peak of them all, the cloud-cloaked Mount Olympus, I hear the last disappearing gasp of it and I pause mid-conversation, the laughter dying in my throat. When she was small, I was attuned to that sound all the time, any cry or shriek that she made alerting me at once so that I’d