Harbor Prayer

My skirts just brushing the surface of the water, waiting for the tide to rise, to rise at least to my stomach (so said the witch), and the moonlight gleaming all the while. I've poured the libations, recited incantations, tossed the awkwardly scrawled runes into the water, and all the while I'm praying to Artemis for signs of something exceptional, something to blazon these ill-aching and leaden days, something to invigorate the seeds germinal of any lust aspirational, anything lofty enough to escape this burdened lot, this face-painting harlotry, where one feels only surface-timbres, where only shadows show and no love subsists:

"Like the painting of a sorrow
A face without a heart."

And everything all calumny everywhere, everything foul that harrows and weighs down seems to stick, while all good is all seeming and show-play. The cruelest mockery is of someone that promises the smallest trifle and delivers not even that.

And the tide does reach my belly, and the hours have passed, and I have shivered with cold as the witch foretold ---- and nothing showing. Artemis is out on her hunt after all.... or else she had to defend her chastity (again) against that surly phallo-maniacal pantheon and she has no time to care for the pleas of this sad drab whose chastity is the least guarded thing about her....

And where the saving light? Where the deliverance in this haggard dock, stinking of fish and roaring betimes with the rumble of a drunken sailor's snore? Moon goddess! Dainty huntress of the night! Where are you? Stars glimmering in the sky (as she said), moon in full radiance (so spoke the witch), tide at its highest point (the hag said it was necessary), and.... Nothing. Nothing portending heights immutable, no ideal to carry beyond damned days and hours of a whore's life. The water is a cold, cold surface gleaming.

It is my own fault; only the desperate or stupid consult prophets (I must have been a little of both)! These mountebank soothsayers who see into the future not so clearly as they see that gross human absence amalgamate, that common vacancy in life that breeds such stubborn ennui, disillusionment immense enough to perpetually fabricate new illusions.... A great drought of the soul here withal.... the well-spring of life has been stopped.... dank residue in the pipes.... heaven on a holiday.... all that bile that I've been spewing all the while....

Avast! To my room again. I shall have the day for myself tomorrow, at least. That is enough.

Thanks, false prophetess. Thanks, O forgéd counsel! May you ever prosper in your counterfeit conceits and clever promises, unfulfilled and fiberless though they dribble from your imperious lips!

[This is a dramatic monologue by a prostitute named Odessa, set in my fantasy world and written for my fantasy/science fiction writing workshop class where we had to do an exercise on conflict. She had asked a fortune teller/witch to give her some method to escape the life that she loathes but has no apparent means of escaping, and this ritual she describes here - standing in the bay of the harbor while the night tide rises up to her belly (to its highest level, but the fact that it refers to her belly implies the most important fact - that it must rise above her vagina). She prays to Artemis (Diana) the moon goddess, also goddess of the hunt and who often defends her chastity against other gods and mortals, but realizes that no sign giving her an insight into how to find some happiness everlasting is forthcoming - "Nothing portending heights immutable". She decides to go back to home and at least not do her work tomorrow.... the last phrase is an sardonic denunciation of the witch.]