a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
W
alking in the ravine has always felt like walking in the belly of some slumbering god. Below her hooves she can feel each bone of the forest, each jaw of a fallen fawn, each hollow socket of a fox trapped in a forgotten landslide. For one mile her knees ache with the feeling of walking through mud, and mire, and melted snow. The next mile has hunger gnawing at her belly as she passed over a flock of song-birds that a winter had taken. And the last mile has her blood screaming in agony and her flesh turning tender and frail. Danaë feels like the forest ravine, and the belly of the god, are digesting her down to meat and flesh (and though she should wonder if this is how a stag felt with Isolt’s teeth at their belly, she does not).
At first she is too consumed with the feeling of being consumed. All she can see is darkness, and bones reaching for her with begging prayers caught between their broken teeth, and mud with a universe of worms building cities in it. But when the bellow of a caught and dying thing breaks through the darkness, suddenly her world is not full of being consumed but the sight of a predator being consumed as she had been.
She does not notice the pegasus above or the way he’s peering down instead of flying (and she would have cut a line of disappointment in his side if she had). Every inch of her focus is consumed by the raging wildcat in the brambles. For each cut the cat makes in the bramble a lilac blooms, fat and soft, until the animal is surrounded by flowers instead of thorns. Around them, in the fallen trees and rotten weeds, Calendula and yarrow and aloe start to grow.
Her breath makes the same hush, hush, hush sound that she makes at her sister when she gallops off to eat the world in her dream. And Isolt is far more dangerous than any animal caught in a bush and so Danaë does not hesitate to approach and start to cut away the brambles with her tail-blade.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
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