Week 3 Storytelling: Devi

Image information: Juno discovering Io and Jupiter by Pieter Eastman: Source: MythIndex

For Devi the worst period in her life began like all other horrible things tend to—a coincidence, a chance encounter that became so much more. For Devi, it began during a simple trip to the grocery store.

            Sitting in her car with the a/c on full blast, Devi scratched down an increasingly longer list of things she needed onto the back of a crumpled receipt. A bead of sweat began to form and fell along the ridge of her brow and eventually fell onto the paper, smearing her ink across the page. Huffing she rubbed at the water with her thumb and continued to write on the now mostly-ruined writing surface. Throwing the pen into the passenger seat, she reaches down to grab her backpack from the floor and throws her keys, her phone, and her wallet in the bag before getting out and making her way into the store.

            Her first interaction with him is while staring at frozen pizzas. “Dude, you totally don’t want to get that,” and then grabbing a different pizza box from the display, “This one is about a thousand times better and is way cheaper.” She holds the box out to him and smiles as he reaches for it.

            Devi makes to move on with her shopping but the man stops her with a quiet, “Thank you.” She looks back and smiles again, waves and then moves on. Devi doesn’t think about the man for another couple of months and almost completely forgets the interaction entirely.

            At least, until the day that she pulls into her driveway after school and sees him sitting on the steps of her front porch. Putting the car in park and grabbing her backpack she cautiously begins to make her way over to him.

            “Uh, hi. Can I help you?” She comes to a stop in front of him and waits for his reply, fidgeting with her car keys while he stares at her.

            “Hi Devi.”

            And those two little words marked the worst day of her life. After that all she knew was pain and betrayal and being ripped from parts of herself that she once held dear to her. Raped and left pregnant by a man whom she met only once. Left hated by the wife of the man whom inflicted this upon her. No justice, no forgiveness.

            Three years later, Devi turned off her car in a similar parking lot of a different grocery store, wrote her list on the back of a left-behind receipt, turned off her car, and pulled her baby from the backseat. “Hello again, baby,” she babbled as she put the baby into the front of the cart, “are you ready to go shopping?” Then she made her way into the store.

            Her story did not end with redemption or in the stars.

Author's Note: 
I wrote this short story as a response to the struggle faced by both Io and Callisto in Greek Mythology. Both raped by a man and then left to deal with the consequences of his actions alone as well as shunned by their people and hated by Jupiter's wife, I wanted to kind of bring the story into a more modern day setting where being forced to deal with your shame of rape and keep living your life shouldn't be a commonplace occurrence. 


Bibliography:

Callisto story source:  Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Tony Kline (2000).

Io story source: Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Tony Kline (2000).