Sonya Taaffe has a confirmed addiction to myth, folklore, and dead languages. A respectable amount of her short fiction and poetry can be found in
Postcards from the Province of Hyphens and
Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), and she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Classics at Yale University. Her favorite fruit is the clementine, on which she subsists, by the crateful, during the winter months.
Of "Crossing the Line," she says,
This is not one of my stories. In 1968, the year after she graduated from college, my mother backpacked across Europe: she waded through a bog in Ireland, looked out over nighttime Vienna from a Ferris wheel, and wrote a postcard home to her parents from Paris that read simply, "Dear Mom and Dad. Did you know that tear gas is good for the sinuses? Love . . ." And when she was in Greece, she threw silver into the sea for Poseidon, and a day later a watermelon washed up at her feet. She always told me that it came from the sea-god. I have since learned that watermelon is also the favorite fruit of Yemaya, one of the three ladies of the sea -- the sunlit waters where the fish breed, rather than sweetwater Oshun, or Olokun, the abyss -- so I no longer know whose gift that particular melon was. But that my mother ate it on a beach in Crete, that year she traveled like Odysseus, is true.
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