A modern translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
Helen used one hand to hold the phone to her ear, the other running through her thick, greying hair. The wrinkles in her face folded into their habitual creases as she smiled. Once Helen had hung up the phone, she returned to her lunchtime routine. Sitting in the Red Hen Diner in her booth beside the kitchen, she listened to the radio and ordered her classic breakfast. Helen knew she would miss the grumpy ladies, the smell of bacon grease, and the fatigue of the employees, but she carried on and picked up the Coffee News. Helen’s heart leapt at the first joke on the bottom of the back page. It read, “What do the moon and dentures have in common?” She pondered, trying to recall her knowledge of dentures. Flipping the page over, she traced her thin finger down its length. “They both come out at night.” That’s a good one. Barb at the front desk is going to love that one, she thought. It might just soften the blow.
The sun was shining by the time Helen shoved open the ice-crusted door of the coffee shop, heading back to the office, with her head held up. She could see a little girl holding onto her mother’s hand wearing a bright blue and pink jacket and a smile on her face that lit up the whole street. A lovely day.
Barb was getting older, Helen noticed, back in the office. Over the last five years, more of Barb’s hair had turned to grey and her fingers had become bent. Helen couldn’t help but think about this loss of dexterity alongside the spinal crunch that were both inevitable factors of age. “Hey Barb! What do the moon and dentures have in common?” Helen asked as she approached the reception desk.
“Dr. Dontia—I really don’t know,” Barb said dryly, glancing up at Helen for a moment, then quickly directing her gaze back down at her computer.
“They both come out at night!” Helen replied, her eyes gleaming, hoping to evoke a laugh from her soon to be ex-employee. The response was silence. Helen flashed Barb a large apologetic smile and retreated into her office. Clearly the joke had not softened her up enough. It would have to wait until the end of the day.
Before Helen was finite space: the blue walls of the dentist’s office and closed white door gave her privacy to look over the X-rays of her next patient. She looked down at the name messily scratched on the page. “Denis Campbell.” The chart said to monitor growing cavities between his teeth—characteristic of a person who didn’t floss. She had a feeling she was going to need to book Denis in to get these cavities filled. The small, gnawing cavity would have to be ground out, but not by her.
Helen could smell the coffee Denis had drunk as soon as he opened his mouth, and she spotted the little bits of Shreddies. Helen scraped and took X-rays, saying, “There seems to be a lot of plaque build-up on your teeth, Denis. And I can see a couple of cavities starting in quadrant three. Call back in about two weeks when everything is settled down here and book an appointment for a filling.”
Sometimes when Helen was grinding out decomposing tooth matter, she could see a glimmer of light shining from within her patients. Her coworkers told her it was the glare of their teeth, but Helen had faith that it was an inner immortal godliness that she saw in her patients. She would scrape and scrape until the blacked tooth was gone, just as her father had before her, until she could see a glimmer of light that served as her source of hope for all her years as a dentist. Helen wanted to scrape away the impurities, but she did not want to cover them with a porcelain filling. Helen wanted the golden light to shine like clementine-fingered sun.
After several more patients, Helen checked the clock. The hour hand had just passed five. She put on her coat, gathered her belongings, and approached the front desk once again. “Bye Barb,” said Helen shakily, guilt growing. She turned back to her faithful receptionist, “I have been meaning to talk to you about something important, do you have a minute?”
“Yes. I was just packing up for the day, can we talk on the way to the car, Dr. Dontia?”
So, on their way to her car, on her last day of work, Helen told Barb that she had sold the practice, and that it would be shut down for two weeks until the new management came in. “But Dr. Dontia—Helen!” Barb exclaimed. “Have you been planning this long? I’ve been working here 35 years, I worked with your father before he retired! You’re leaving?”
“I am leaving, Barb, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I thought it would be easier like this. The new practice taking over owns several other dental practices, so once you get a handle of the new filing systems, I’m sure you will be just fine,” Helen replied, her hand on her keys, brows furrowed, feigning empathy.
The wind had begun to pick up and the piles of leaves in the parking lot stirred. Helen couldn’t stay at the dentist office for 35 years too. So, after a pensive moment, Helen clicked open her car, flashed Barb an apologetic smile, and drove off. In the rear-view mirror, she could see Barb looking particularly old and sunken. Hunched, possibly from 35 years of service as a receptionist to her family, or maybe just protecting her face and neck from the wind. Helen drove westward, fast, and didn’t look back.
The wind hit her face and deposited bits of sand in her hair and onto her glasses as she stepped out of the car. The field Helen had chosen was vast with only a silo and a distant forest on the flat horizon. She could see for miles and the wind glided smoothly over the flat, barren land. She unloaded her materials: shiny tinfoil that reflected the sun, logs to lay on the green grass, rocks to prevent the flame from spreading to the little shrubs and bushes nearby, an egg timer, and a bottle of golden nectar. The structure was just six or seven logs on top of the grass, surrounded by a ring of stones. Helen lit the fire. The grass under the logs sizzled and turned to black dust, like charred earth. It was not long before the orange wind-licked flames began to swirl wildly, intimidating the untouched grass that surrounded the fire. Once the fire got roaring and the wind had died down ever so slightly, Helen set her egg timer for 25 minutes. The fire was growing larger as Helen took off her clothes and felt the cold air on her body. She wrapped herself in a tinfoil blanket and stared into the flames. Crouching naked on the damp earth, Helen could feel the heat emanating upwards. She eased her way in, as if entering a hot tub.
It wasn’t a simple task to burn out one’s mortal parts and live forever. The mortal parts are bound so tightly to the godly parts. If you cook even a little too long, you risk losing it all. In her long career as a dentist cutting out the cavities in the teeth of her patients, she had never had such a task. There was leeway with teeth. If you grind out too much of the cavity and remove a bit of the tooth, you can fill it in with porcelain.
Helen’s 40-year-old body was engulfed in flames in a matter of minutes. The smell of burning hair and the sizzle of roasting flesh carried through the wind. Ten minutes passed, then 20, then 24. It is difficult to say what happened on the twenty-fifth minute, but from the roaring flames in the middle of that barren field flashed an astonishing light followed by the scent of ambrosia. Some particles escaped the fire and traveled upwards like a flock of birds taking off toward the clouds. They formed and reformed in the sky until they were completely diffused by the wind into the atmosphere. Then, out of the roaring flames came a hand that reached and poured the bottle of nectar over the glowing fire and embers. It was not a suicide—quite the opposite, really. The mortal flakes did float towards the heavens carried on the rose-fingered winds, but what stayed was the godly core that Helen had been certain rested at the center. Lying on the ground among the embers, barely visible through the ambrosia steam, the mortal eye could just make out supple wrinkleless skin and flowing golden hair splayed over charred grass.
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