Portal

My blood has been speaking to me a lot lately.

I don't use my gifts much beyond listening to the most periphery parts of the spidey sense. It says, "Take the train today", and I miss the traffic heading into work. It says, "the boys are sick of pasta", and I suggest curries and rice for dinner. It's just the most basic, workaday way I can use it. I listen to the phone ring, and the sense tells me which ones are telemarketers. Soft, slatternly uses for such a skill.

But its been singing to me, of the Great Work, the things that only women can do. The blessings and the curses. The new life, and the cutting down of the dead. I wish sometimes I still lived in times when people died in the home, and all and sundry gathered round for the laying out of the dead. Now, the best I can manage are the dirges sung in the darkest corners of the most olde-skool of my goth clubs, the decadent songs praising passage and decay. It's a poor substitute to laying out the newly deceased, washing their cooling flesh and dressing the stiffening limbs. These are rites of passage for wise women in times past, and sometimes I feel robbed of it. I am only admitted only to beginnings, something even an alley cat can manage. Any woman can become pregnant, but not all can lay out the dead, and I will never know if I can close the circle.

Those beginnings, though, they call to me, and I want to feel the turning of new life in my belly. I know in some way that it's almost entirely a product of my age and station. I'm approaching thirty, and my beloved is a little past it, and we've been together long enough that the raw biology of our gonads are in sync. It's only logical and entirely animal that I want to breed, I want to nest, I want to bear his young. But it's more that that. There's a hollow, suggestive of gateways and sacred caves, of Delphi and Elesius, that demands it. The divine whispering to me, suggesting, promising. The yoni, held deep within, demanding satifaction.

Who hears the gods but madmen, really? Who pays that much attention to the matter of stories and myth?

I feel primal, fecund as a wheat feild, and the practicalities of all this mean nothing to me. And the new fledglings that feed in the yard will entrance me for hours, and the wee new possums are hand fed carrots and lettuce leaves, and the full moon draws out my envy.