Work Text:
persephone has always been persephone, at least to herself. she knew the story before she could read, picked it up through psychic impressions of her downstairs neighbor who was a classics professor. she knew more about gods and monsters from thousands of years ago than the world around her, and made her reality fit the formulas and tropes that her soul knew before she could speak.
persephone’s last name hasn’t always been poldma. she walked to school every morning with a girl from the brick building on the corner of her block whose entire extended family lived together in a two-bedroom apartment that always smelled like cabbage. the girl smelled like soap and starch, and she had a ruby red headband she wore everyday. on saturdays, they sat on her stoop together to look at strangers and escape the smell of cabbage.
the neighbor kids teased that they were boyfriend and girlfriend, even though when persephone was alone they teased that she was a pansy and a fairy and that she didn’t like girls at all. they weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend at all. the girl on the corner just liked to hear the stories persephone told her about the strangers that walked by, liked the way that they never seemed like strangers after she was finished.
when they were very small and had only just met and secrets passed like penny candy between them, persphone had whispered in the girl on the corner’s ear that she was a girl just like her, and the older they got, the less they talked about it. but she never called persephone a boy or teased her for her long hair or talked about her with any other name but persephone.
in high school, the girl on the corner liked her typing lessons best, liked timing herself as she hit the right keys over and over again, creating perfect recreations of the letters and passages the teacher gives her. persephone was torn between liking english and science best, but she knew that they didn’t teach the things she liked best at that school and that no one believed her when she talked about the thing she was best at. even the girl on the corner called it storytelling, said persephone should be a writer like carolyn keene, her favorite.
the summer before persephone started her new school, where she got to study the things really worth knowing about, she and the girl on the corner moved to a tiny closet of an apartment together. it never smelled like cabbage, just incense and pie, things they burned together. the girl on the corner was not the girl on the corner anymore, she was the girl who shared persephone’s bed because they didn’t have enough money or space for two. at night, persephone listened to her steady breathing and still privately thought of her as the girl on the corner. sometimes, she thought about kissing her and didn’t know which of them the thought came from.
the girl on the corner worked in a tall office building uptown, typing up letters that seemed important for a lawyer who seemed important while persephone went to school downtown, typing up rambling papers on rambling subjects. she always knew what her professors wanted to hear, but she only wrote the things that interested her and that the girl on the corner wanted to hear about: how the universe was expanding like god was slowly filling a bathtub and one day the plug would get pulled and they’d all get sucked down the drain, how every mirror was a world of it’s own and how those worlds stopped existing when no one was looking in the mirror.
sometimes she got tired of typing and whispered her thoughts in the girl’s ear instead, the stubble on her chin making the girl shiver until she laughed and had to kiss persephone to get quiet again. persephone privately thought that studying the frequency of the girl on the corner’s snorts within the time frame of her giggle was the most important research she ever did.
the next time persephone left school, they left the city too, moved into a cabin in the mountains up north with a grant someone had given persephone to have more thoughts and put them on paper. instead of typing them herself, persephone thought out loud while making pie and the girl on the corner typed them up to look pretty and important.
at night, persephone hole punched each page individually while the girl on the corner slid them into a giant binder full of other hand-typed pages. then persephone would feed her pie while they rocked in a porch swing made for two. there were no people to watch, so the girl on the corner made up the stories instead. sometimes, she lost her breath or her train of thought and persephone would pick up the story for her, exactly the way the girl had planned it.
she lost her breath more often in the mountains than ever before, so they moved to a flat place with lots of trees, even further away from the city they were born in. persephone used to drive the girl a long, long way to see a doctor once a week, but she knew that he was lying about the options and she got sick of the way the nurses stared at her long, swirling skirts and the bump in her throat. the girl on the corner insisted that pie was the best medicine, but persephone felt like a china cup on a sharp ledge the entire year they lived in the woods. at night, she listened to the girl’s grating wheezing and privately bartered that she would spend the rest of her life in an apartment that smelled like cabbage if her pies really could make the girl on the corner all better.
in the spring, the girl on the corner tells persephone to dig a hole behind the house by their favorite tree, and watches from their new porch swing as persephone splits her palms on the dirty handle of the shovel. she can see the girl lying in the hole the entire time she’s digging, and she has to look back and forth between the ground and the porch over and over to remind herself which one is real.
in june, there is only one girl on the corner, and she isn’t sitting on the porch swing anymore. the dirt falls back into the hole much easier than it came out, like it wants to go back home. there’s a small person-sized hill in front of the tree when persephone is finished shoveling, a person-sized amount of earth displaced. the earth whispers a story to persephone that she knows is true, and she runs back into the house to start packing immediately.
she finds the papers under the girl’s side of the mattress, right where she knew the girl on the corner had hidden them while persephone was in the bath last week, supposedly unaware. a typed letter addressed to a “mrs. persephone poldma” sits on top, tied in a bundle with a birth certificate and a social security card and a dozen other documents that persephone knows are important but doesn’t know what to do with. a small handmade envelope holds the girl’s great aunt’s ring, the only valuable thing her grandmother had managed to hold onto when they were chased to this country a long time ago.
persephone slides on the ring, packs up the papers, a typewriter, and her pie tins, and leaves the house in the woods behind her. she walks for an unclear amount of time, for an impossible amount of time. she sticks to the side of the highway, where no one glances twice at her swirling skirts or the bump in her throat because they are roaring by at sixty, seventy miles an hour. if she’s walking, her eyes stay dry and her heart beats faster instead of slowing down and cracking in two. the highway stays busy until it’s not, until she gets off to get a bottle of water and gets back on to see two women standing in her path, right where she knew they would be.