- Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, "Women in the Aegean: Minoan Snake Goddess"

Fertility

6/10/08

She's separate from her body, she is open eyes and a heart that has a pulse. She's a contradiction in herself. Take the time to see her, to see past her. This is where the outside ends and the inside begins.

They tried to tie her arms down, to symbolize her by sculpting her legs just so, they worshipped the fertile fields as if the dust might breathe again somehow. They stole her heart only to take something out of it and place it back inside her chest, unbeating. They opened her where she would open, while she closed the door to her soul. Let no one find it. Let no one deserve it, ever again.

And her eyes crusted over, and her skin cracked like caked mud on her shoulders, and slowly time made her a statue, the sum of broken pieces, the awful detritus of nature. After countless centuries of weeping, her tear ducts found that they had lost their value and couldn't reproduce. But the auction price went up, considerably, for the parts that could. She is a rarity. A vessel that won't shed tears. Quite the admirable specimen of its kind.

So many hollow figures like her, lined up on cobwebbed shelves, their tears long dry. Small gods for the treatment of a man's emptiness, price tags stuck on their breasts. She will be somebody's fortune, indefinitely, or she will give into a timely decay.

The eye moves and you can see them, all of them, more of them stretching far back into the shadows. It's practically infinite. It's practically endless. Both ways at once. I blink. I'm standing still. My arms are bound. My shoulders are cracked.

I'm one of them.