Plain bulb in her hands, same as for any other flower, but holding a liquid that would loosen everything inside. Medea tried only a small amount in Colchis. At night, alone, in Hekate’s temple, wanting to learn the use of each root and bulb and growth.

Nothing at first. She waited and became sleepy, thought it must have been the wrong flower, then woke with her mouth and throat burning. Dry flame. Water had no hold, passed her throat without effect. Then the burning moved lower, deep in her bowels, and everything fell from her, all liquid, more than seemed possible. She threw up until she could offer only a thin red drool, lay curled on stone in her foul mess fevered and sweating, even her eyes leaking, as all turned to mush inside her, even her lungs, unable to breathe, and all felt not like water but like flame melting.

She could not straighten, could not stand. Deep cramp and pain in pattern like the serpent skin of these petals, always moving, impossible to locate, exquisite and beautiful pain unlike any she’d felt before or since, an excess beyond what she could recognize, and her only wish was for death.

But the poison lasted. Agony without end. When daylight came, she crawled away from stone across fallen leaves gold and red and yellow, mosaic of the forest floor. Veins of each leaf raised and pulsing, slack mottled skin sagging, rough hide, fevered visions as she crawled across the back of some great beast. Feeling the heat of it below cold air. A breeze and shadow, her body shivering and still leaking, draining away behind her, and she began to think the air was the poison, because her lungs were rotting. She tried not to breathe.

Platelets of skin as large as her hand. She worried what might emerge at the edges, from the cracks, between the yellow and red, wanted to stand and run. She would have died, easily, of thirst as all water left her, or of chill as night came, drenched in sweat, but she was found somehow, rescued, carried to the citadel where water was poured inside and she was like a river, passing liquid in torrents and sudden gushes. Four days of fever and burning, and on the fifth, when it subsided, when she was able, finally, to hold water and even small bits of food, she was still too weak to stand, but in another two days she was walking.

She never told the cause. All believed her consumed by a malign god, price of worshipping Hekate, and this suited her power. Feared by all, because was this god still in her? Was she Medea or something else? But here in Korinth, all think she is nothing more than a spurned wife, unhappy woman. They believe she can be ignored. They think her pain will have no consequence. They think they are safe.

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