~ metamorphosis

They lived together in a house which made sense - even though one of them thought it made sense to acquire as many interesting, potentially useful objects as possible and keep them in the house, while the other liked clean open spaces containing as few objects as possible. Enough of the things in their lives, and in their house, made sense for them to agree, most of the time, on pretty much everything. They exchanged things, physical things and things that were not physical, and this was sufficient to make them feel comfortable, loved and happy. In the house with them - and with all the things - lived a daughter who was also comfortable, loved and happy.

But slowly, so slowly at first that it went unnoticed, one of the people in the house began to change. Deep inside her, in the muscles of her heart, a seed of sadness took hold, and it began to talk to her. It began to tell her that the other people in the house, and those beyond in the outside world, had no use for her, no respect for her and didn't really love her. To quieten the voice, she drank soothing nepenthe, but it weakened her judgement and skewed her understanding of many things. She swallowed cool lozenges of euphrosyne and played for hours with her daughter, which the daughter enjoyed tremendously, though she knew something was out of kilter and that for every hour of playtime there would be an hour of unavailability, spent in another room, with the blinds drawn, in deep consultation with the voice of the black seed. At last, in a desperate effort to regain her clear vision of the world and to shut out the voice - which now was louder than all the other voices in her life - she began to take the Milk of Mithras. But things only got worse. The elixir was the sperm of the black seed; it was the vapour of forgetfulness, sweet and lethal, it gnawed at her vital principle and soon what was left of the person she had been shriveled to the size of a pea and - somewhere deep inside where even a master surgeon could not have found it - slipped into a profound coma.

Her friend and their daughter no longer knew if she was the same person. She looked the same, if a bit worn, but on some days the sweetness inside was replaced by bitterness and anger - and on other days by by fear and misery. Soon they began to hide in the other rooms of the house, for even the brief glimpses of the person they had once known, which appeared with increasing rarity, were painful - because they were reminders of what they had lost.

For years, they woke of a morning hoping that everything had returned to normal, only to be disappointed. Sometimes they wondered if it had been some fault of theirs. If there had been something they could have done. But these were questions to which they would never know the answers.