Alexandria J. Miller
December 11th, 2002
836099126
Bryn Mawr School
109 W Melrose Ave, Baltimore, MD 21210
(410) 323-8800
Sarah Miller (Gilman School)
Hestia sat at the edge of a precipice, her legs dangling down into the skyline.
This had been the first time in a while that she had sat away from her hearth,
rather than towards it. Something had been born inside of her–a desire to see
what the people below were up to, maybe.
She had never meant to be curious. Her place was one of stability–unshakability,
even. When tremors shook the earth, when fires grew in size and the ocean
engulfed the land: Hestia remained, even if her buildings didn’t. Even with her
temples destroyed, whether by malicious intent or the slow erosion of time,
Hestia remained. No matter the circumstances, the outcome was clear: the world
changed. Hestia didn’t.
She swung her feet. Somewhere, below (and above, and with) her, the wind shifted
its course to account for that. It would be a steady yet slow wind, not destined
to wreak havoc anywhere. The most danger it would provide would be blowing a hat
off, if Hestia was lucky.
For all that she stared, Hestia knew she would not be able to see anything, as
unlike some of her family she had not been blessed with particularly sharp eyes.
Even if the layer of clouds did break apart, unveiling the Earth below (Gaia, in
truth. Hestia had never forgotten her grandmother that laid beneath them, even
if she didn’t always check in on her in a timely fashion), she wouldn’t be able
to make anyone out. The people below would appear to her as mites did to them:
slow, crawling things, that could burn in the sun’s kind light.
With this said, Hestia could still connect to these little creatures in some
way. She was the goddess of the hearth, after all, the focal point of family,
and could sense the bonds that tied them together. Some of new and golden, other
times frayed like old rope knotted together long ago: they were there. Billions
of them, extending across countries, continents even: some even reaching up
above her, past the sky and into space, where humans orbited the planet. She
felt their struggles too, when she chose to: could sense their state of mind,
for little else could affect a family like the people in it.
Hestia looked down at the world, and its billions of bonds, and its billions of
people. She looked down, and picked only one to examine.
There was nothing special about this bond, and the people in it. An ordinary
family, for the most part, with just the level of abnormality to make them even
more standard. The youngest, a girl of about seventeen (she knew that much, felt
the girl think it as she drove a bit too quickly on the highway) had a troubled
mind: a weight was carried by her, apathy and misery combined into one
It was a feeling that Hestia was familiar with. Being the oft-forgotten
Olympian, hers had been born of a sense of abandonment. But she knew that the
people below now had a term for it: depression. It fit well, she had thought,
even as she herself grew out of her solemn state, conveyed that feeling of
sinking it the earth and not having the will to lift oneself up.
But what was she to do? This girl (Sophie, Hestia thought, was some degree of
hesitancy. Her name was Sophie) was too far from her, both in distance and in
rank, for her to help. No, she resigned herself to her helplessness, watched as
those ties (to her parents, her brother, her friends) flickered and faded into
thin string, ready to snap.
As she prepared to turn back to her hearth, she heard a slight crack. Looking
up, she saw a barely visible line in the floor, just a few feet away from her.
That’s not an issue,
she thought to herself, slightly amused and mostly unworried.
Floors like this, those created by the
gods–they don’t simply snap in half.
The floor snapped in half. Its quartz-like surface gave way, a clean cut, white
exterior giving way to the inside of the polished stone. And with this section
of the floor that was plummeting to the ground below, came Hestia. Not through
any will of her own–when she felt it break she had pushed herself towards what
still remained of the ledge. The front pads of her fingers had just reached it
when she had at last fallen too far for it to be of any help.
Gods were not supposed to fall. Such fates were left for mortals–disobedient and
cruel ones at that. The one exception had been Hephaestus, who millenia ago had
watched the rapidly approaching earth just as she had. He, who had fallen
through the clouds, and she, who had just done the same and was watching with
both horror and fascination as the mites slowly grew in size, and the fields
below her became not flat patches of color, but sprawling colossuses of grasses
and wildflowers.
She landed, but didn’t stop. Not until nearly fifteen feet of ground had given
way. While immortal, Hestia was not immune to injury, a fact that she had
finally been reminded of after years of comfort. She hadn’t experienced pain
like this since they had fought against her father, Kronos (since she had been
eaten by him, becoming both eldest and youngest, the throughline of the family).
Even as her bones were broken, her divine healing tried desperately to keep up
with them–her spine, as soon as it was broken, was fixed back into place. As her
arm shattered, the structure beneath it was mending. Though skin was torn, no
blood had the chance to be spilt, being sewn back together before evidence of
her injuries could ever seep into the dirt beneath her. Finally, she stopped, in
a crater of her own making, in the middle of the grassland.
She, lying down, could see nothing but the open sky above her, clouds dotting
the blue with their white and gray. No sign of her home could be seen. No sign
of her family, nor her hearth.
So, she rose. What else could she do? Supposedly, she had the option to remain
face up in a crater for the rest of eternity, but it didn’t seem like a pleasant
way to spend that time. With her normal cautiousness, Hestia brushed what dirt
she could off of her garments. They had, surprisingly, stayed mostly intact. The
back was a bit torn up, but they had survived better than she had. Wobbling on
her feet, just slightly, she began to rise up out of her hole. She had caved the
earth in, providing an incline to help her up. Toward the end, she was forced to
use her hands to support herself, but Hestia hardly minded. Her domain, while
limited, assured that she was a practical person, unashamed of dirtying her
hands.
She stood in the center of a field now: a ways off in the distance, she could
see a long gray path, winding through the countryside. A bit behind that, a
short wooden fence, keeping cattle in as they grazed. Slowly, from the corner of
her vision, an automobile began to come down from the slight slope that guarded
the rest of the land from her view. As it raced along the asphalt (that was what
it was called, right? She knew automobiles, but hadn’t been keeping up very well
with the details. Travel, and hence things related to it, had never been a
matter that she concerned herself with that much) until, as it approached her,
it began to slow, finally coming to a halt just as it was in line with her. The
driver side door opened, and a young man stepped out of the car.
“Hey,” he shouted her way. “Are you alright over there?”
Joshua Walker hadn’t really been having a bad day or anything. In fact,
everything about this day should have made it pretty good. He was on spring
break from college, and his little sister (who could drive now! She seemed at
least a bit happy about it, which was good considering how down she had seemed
recently) had picked him up from the airport. They’d caught up a little on the
nearly hour long drive home, and had been sitting in a fairly comfortable
silence when, as they came up over a slight hill, they both noticed a woman
standing in a floor-length dress in the middle of a field, next to a huge ditch
in the ground.
“That wasn’t there when I drove this way,” Sophie said, quiet enough to just be
to herself. Then, a bit louder. “Should we go help the strange lady, or pretend
we never saw her?”
Joshua had always liked to consider himself a good person. Whenever he passed
someone asking for money, he always dug around a bit to find some spare change.
He tipped well. He didn’t yell at his sister, even when she stole his video game
handheld when she was seven. But helping some random woman standing in the
middle of a field sounded like a great way to get involved in a horror movie
plot. So he had no idea what possessed him to say, “Yeah, we probably should.”
It was as if a foreign urge had invaded his voice, forcing him to welcome a
stranger into his home.
He slowed the car down, pulling off to the side a bit so traffic could still get
by (like there was ever anyone on this road asides from themselves). Then, with
a wave– “Are you alright over there?”
The woman looked towards him, and Joshua felt as though his feet had frozen over
to the ground. Maybe that wasn’t quite the right term–more like the earth had
closed around them. As if in a trance, she moved towards them, carrying her long
white gown in one hand as she did. As she grew nearer, Joshua could make out her
features then–she seemed Greek, maybe Italian, but had a quiet air of regality
about her.
She paused just a few feet in front of the car. “I’m well,” she said, with a
gentle smile. “Could I have some shelter for the night?
Once again, he felt strangely compelled to nod. A mist settled over his head: it
was like agreeing was the most natural thing in the world.
Again, she smiled. “Excellent,” said the woman. “I’ll sit in the back.”
After a moment’s struggle (Joshua awkwardly watched her, unsure whether to offer
assistance to her or not) the woman opened the car door, slipping into the back
seat and lifting up some of the cloth trailing behind her into it too. Sophie
turned around to face her as Joshua too sat back in the driver’s seat.
“Wait, we’re bringing her home? Will mom be okay with that? No offense, Ms…”
“Hestia,” the woman said, waving back at his sister. “I’m Hestia. Who would you
be?”
Sophie looked at the woman. Joshua could catch the once-over out of the corner
of his eye, even as he put the car back in drive and began to once again
accelerate (and Hestia, it seemed, was a bit startled by the movement. Maybe she
wasn’t used to riding in the backseat). “I’m Sophie Walker. And if he–” she
gestured at him “–hasn’t introduced himself, he’s Joshua.” His sister waited to
see if Hestia would say anything. “Also, I swear we aren’t like, serial killers
or something,” Sophie continued, after it became clear that she wasn’t
responding.
Hestia laughed. It was not a particularly gentle sound, not exactly what Joshua
had expected. It was full, a bit rough, and would not have sounded out of place
at all in his family’s living room. “I wasn’t thinking you were,” she said. “You
seem like decent, honest people.”
Moments passed without any of the occupants of the car saying anything. Unlike
before, with only Sophie in the car, the silence seemed to carry a bit more
weight. Then, their unexpected guest spoke.
“You two,” she said, not without a heavy dose of consideration. “There’s
something you’re not talking about.”
Joshua stiffened a bit as Hestia said the words. How could she know? Sure, she
was a bit unnerving, from what he had gathered of her, but was no mind reader.
Was the tension really that obvious?
Sophie, it seemed, had a similar reaction, which didn’t exactly put him at ease.
Had she really been hiding something from him?
“I won’t pry, but you should probably talk about it soon.” She finished, and the
silence that the small car held only seemed to grow after that. It encompassed
them, settling in their lungs and in their heart.
It was no longer comfortable.
They had gotten home without much issue, with Sophie’s parents nearly instantly
accepting the woman as easily as they accepted the return of their own son. As
soon as she thought she could, she slinked away from the commotion, giving a
tight smile to Hestia, who was observing the rest of her family from a careful
distance. Then, she walked up to her room on the floor above, the door opened
with that rusty squeak that’s impossible to hide (she winced) and collapsed upon
her mattress.
At some point, outside of her notice, a strangle-vine had grown around her
brain, made its home there. It produced a thick tar that dragged her thoughts
down, a rot that only grew and seeped into every crevice. Slowly, each movement
and thought felt as if she was moving through that sludge: the slow drag of
disinterest, of apathy, of depression. That last bit–it was something that
really had taken hold of her. Slowly, she cared less and less. Her grades
faltered. The relationships that she had fostered over the course of years
slipped away. Her fingers curled into her sheets; it wasn’t that she thought she
was fine. Quite the opposite, really: she knew that she wasn’t, and had no clue
of how to find help.
And then, a knock sounded at her door.
She sat up immediately, and (with that pitch still surrounding her, working
against each muscle in her legs) walked towards the door.
When she opened it, Hestia stood there. “May I come in?” she asked, as if she already knew the answer.
Sophie made a grandiose gesture to her slightly cluttered room. “So long as you
watch your step.”
The woman did, stepping her way across the floor and sitting at Sophie’s desk
chair. “There are thorns in your mind, child,” Hestia said. “The same kind that
has claimed some of my siblings as their years have increased. Pry them out
before they do the same to you.” She paused for just a moment, as if letting it
sink in. “Your parents, your brother–they care about you, though I know that you
cannot currently see it. At least confide in them–allow yourself that
vulnerability.”
Sophie gaped for a second, before deciding to accept it. Something about this
lady was strange: even before this conversation, she had known there was
something a little off about her. And you know what? Sophie wasn’t one to deny
advice from strange women that seemed to know the inside of her mind. “I’ll try
that,” she said, a bit nervously. “Thanks.”
“It’s of little consequence,” Hestia said. “You brought me into your home.”
“I think my brother was the one to let you in.
She gestured at the room around her. Sophie’s posters, Sophie’s bed, Sophie’s well-loved books. “I know. That isn’t what I meant.” With that, Hestia rose. “I can take my leave now. But truly: speak to your family. Though you may someday find that those you were born to aren’t your true family, you should at least give them that chance. They are bonds that can last, if you give them that chance.
Sophie nodded, a little eager for the woman to exit. “I will.” And then, a bit
more earnestly: “Thank you.”
Hestia would be gone the following morning. They would go into the guest room
and find nothing but empty sheet and a small bundle of wildflowers, the kind
that had grown in the field they found her in. That same day, Sophie would talk
to her parents. It would not be an easy conversation, and they would be slow to
understand. And yet eventually, they would sign her up to see a therapist. They
would accept that they could not be the only people in her life to support her,
especially when they couldn’t always give her the support she needed. Years
later, when she would graduate from college, she eventually would go on to
support children in similar place (after all, it wasn’t every day that you got a
nudge in the right direction from what Sophie highly suspected was some kind of
witch or fae queen).