Category: Prose

Persephone

Mollie Williamson

ouls swim by as I make my way to my husband. I can see why many people would fear or at least dread coming to the underworld. In its simplest form, it is nothing but a cavern with various tunnels that bring the dead to their rightful resting place. Stalagmites burst their spiked heads up from the cave floor, offering a precarious path for the river of souls as the rocks spurt out of the water causing chaos. But my boatman knows the way, so I lean against the velvet cushioned seat and watch the dead go by.

When the boat gently taps against a flat stone landing, I wait for it to steady before rising. The boatman bows as I disembark. My sandaled feet crush against the grey granite. Wisps of fog clear a path as I glide forward. Despite the perpetual chill of the underworld, I feel his heat long before I see him. His voice floats on the cool air currents and nestles in folds of my curly brown hair before spiraling into my ears. He needs me today. He always does.

“—so honored you could make it ladies,” he says.

He hides in one of the offshoots of the river, though this one is dry of any water. It is the plateau upon which our thrones reside. We rule from this room. I enter the large domed opening and get the strangest sensation that I am entering a mouth and getting swallowed whole. Heat ripples in the waves towards me both from the simmering torches about the room as well as from his actual presence. The air becomes stuffy and just as hard to breathe in as the cold. His back is towards me, so I slide up behind him and rub my hand over his back. My hand burns through his cotton robe. He is like touching the sun. I feel the slightest tremble go down his spine. My cool touch singeing his fire.

“Finally,” Hades says, turning to me.

He takes my hands, bringing them to his lips. His kiss sends scorch marks across my skin. The heat leaves red tattoo welts on my hands, but its warmth is quite tantalizing. Indeed, his power only fuels my own. His amber eyes look like they have been set ablaze. Molten lava appears to brew in the depths of his irises. They are just as enchanting as the day we met in the meadow. My mother will never admit how handsome he really is. She would then have to acknowledge that I willingly left her for I was not taken. She spread that lie far and wide because she didn’t want me to become queen of the underworld. My mother could never fathom her precious, pure daughter wanting power. According to her, it is not in the nature of women to be ambitious. And yet here I am. Queen, indeed.

“Forgive my tardiness, ladies,” I say to the three women standing before us.

What a sight they make. One is young and beautiful as a freshly blooming sunflower with long golden hair to match her bubbliness. The second one is middle-aged and has black hair. She is cautious, though her expression is neutral. The woman still shines with beauty despite her older age. And the last, an old hag, too wizen and temperamental for anyone’s good. Her white-grey hair comes out like curled snakes from her scaly head. The Fates are a triangle of the passage of time that mirrors the lives they create, grow, and eventually kill. Though I hate to admit it, they control everything. Even the underworld. Even my power.

“We were just discussing your fates,” the old crone whizzes.

“I would expect nothing less,” I reply.

The youngest giggles, the middle-aged woman smirk, but the old woman doesn’t even crack a smile. Tough crowd. I take my seat next to Hades. Our thrones are an equal match. Both made out of cold black marble with large white veins cutting through it. The path of the white marble veins is uncannily similar to the river of souls just beyond these stone walls. They are pulled along by the might of the river while still managing to make their presence known in the watery depth.

“And what, pray tell, is in our future?” I ask.

The Fates glance at each other. Their quiet deliberation sets my nerves alight. Nervous energy tingles through my body. I am a spark that only needs an ounce more of fuel to make me the fiery queen I am known to be. I tap my fingers tirelessly on the arms of my throne to smother my blistering temper. Hades covers my left hand with his right to steady me. Though it feels as if my hand is resting under a smoldering log, its burn soothes my tension. It is almost as if I absorb Hades’ heat. The warmth of it burns my skin, yet journeys beneath its layers and feeds my blood with passion, with life. Eventually, the middle-aged one steps forward.

“You will return to the world above, Persephone,” she says.

“Impossible,” I retort.

“It is unwise to question the Fates,” the old woman chides.

I huff. My temper and annoyance flare like my nostrils. It sends heated flames licking up the back of my spine until it curls around my neck and crawls up my cheeks. To most, my rosy face would make them believe I am embarrassed. But I am anything but that. I am a crackling ember.

“What could possibly make me leave here?” I snap. “I am queen. No one can possibly dethrone me.”
“It has nothing to do with dethroning you,” the youngest says. Her light, honest voice tries to calm my temper. “But the world needs you.”

“Why?”

“Your absence has greatly upset your mother. She has taken away the fruitfulness of the land. But you can fix it. You are life, Persephone,” the youngest continues. “Even you cannot thrive with the dead eternally.”

“I will not—”

But the old woman cuts in before my anger can best her. “You will do as you are told, child,” she says. Her words are cool enough to counter my rage. They send pinpricks of ice stabbing into my chest. We are both stubborn but, in the end, only one of us will get our way and unfortunately, I know who it will be.

“But,” the middle-aged advances again, “you will return to the underworld after your long stay above.”

“Long stay? I wouldn’t doddle more than a day up there.”

“You will return to the world or else we will deny you our offering,” the old crone says before breaking out into a hacking fit. Spit flies into the air as do clumps of her white-grey hair.

I wrinkle my nose. Taking a deep breath, I glance at Hades. His hand has clamped down so hard on mine that it’s like I’m locked in a burning iron chain. I can barely flex my fingers. The circulation is slowly cutting off. I feel numbness crawl into each finger. He is worried. Like I said, he needs me. He cannot live without me.

“And how can you ensure my wife will return?” He asks.

“Fret not,” the middle-aged one says. “All she has to do is simply eat a pomegranate.”

Bile immediately surges in my stomach. The acidity singes my throat. It is all I can do to stop myself from vomiting. That is the one fruit I simply detest above all others. “You couldn’t force that damn thing down my throat,” I hiss.

“You will eat it should you wish to return,” the hag says. A gaunt smile spreads across her face. It is cruel and reveals piles of chipped and yellow teeth. Not a reassuring gesture. “I’m sure your throne will miss you,” she adds.

The jab hangs in the air around all of us. It has a life all its own. It pulsates with frenzied energy in the cavern. It fuels the fire that erupts in my stomach replacing the vileness of vomit. A viper wishes to be released from my core, but I cage it and contain my poisonous tongue. It is a test, pure and simple. Do I love my power more than people? That is the question I am forced to answer. Without a word, I extend my hand towards the Fates never once breaking eye contact with the crone. The youngest approaches dancing on tiptoe and places the dreaded fruit in my free hand. Hades squeezes my caged hand while his molten lava eyes freeze over.

“I will return,” I promise him.

“Yes,” he nods, “because you are a queen in your own right.”

He brings my hand to his lips once more. The scorching warmth flames my blood and body into action. I take a large bite from the fruit so no one can dispute it. I chew it deliberately slow so the old woman can see me swallow. Now my fate is sealed.

Mollie Williamson

Sitting in Ash

Sean Riley

I had almost five thousand followers at the time of the fire. The account at-fridge-magnet-poetry wasn’t exactly an influencer, but I felt like it was a worthwhile artistic endeavour and I had turned it into something slightly more than a hobby.

The irony of photos in the digital world, streamed across the sky and interspersed with text messages, social media posts and porn videos; but anchored to one physical place – my refrigerator – and one physical set of magnetized scrabble letters, made me happy. It gave me a feeling of crossing over, of connecting different worlds together.

A new person walking into my kitchen would have thought I was pretty crazy. The lighting setup around the fridge looked like a movie set. Silver reflectors, flashbulbs and tripods were mounted in between fruit bowls, knife racks and hanging frying pans. I could have built out an actual photo studio in the garage, but then it wouldn’t be my fridge, it would be a prop; not the real thing anymore at all. It had started with the fridge that contains my groceries, and it would continue that way. Anyway, the garage had been converted into a dark room to develop the photos from my antique Nikon DSLR, so there was no room out there for a fridge.

I posted every day. Blobs of text, artfully arranged and creatively photographed. The project had a surprisingly wide disciplinary scope; a convergence of literary snippets, analog execution, digital composition, and true modern-day social media marketing; an art of its own.

“Tuneful Idiocy makes me cry,” was the entire poem one day. Photographed in the early morning, just before sunrise with sharp shadows from the streetlamp outside, I used a long exposure that captured some ambiguous reflections in the chrome of the fridge handle. The posted photo itself I left naked, but my story that day overlaid it with an animated “Feels” sticker and mood hashtag. It got some comments asking if I was okay. I was fine.

This morning, I was poking through the burned-out rubble of my apartment. I crossed the line of yellow do-not-cross tape and felt unidentifiable somethings crunch under my boots. Those could be the remains of anything in my life. I didn’t want to know. There was almost nothing left that came up above my knees.

Standing alone in the space that used to be my kitchen was the husk of my beloved refrigerator. The door hung open as if something had burst out from the inside. I picked my way through the ash-covered remnants and stood before it. There was a poem laid out in scrabble letters. Well, a fragment of a poem anyway.

“Feeling Like Death,” it said, angling down further with each letter as if the phrase trailed away into silence. Pretty cliche technique, I’d gotten over that trope years ago. But I hadn’t written this one. I pulled out my phone and checked my photo log just in case I was losing my mind, but no. I never wrote that.

An alert popped up on my feed. I reached to swipe it away, but then stopped as I recognized the thumbnail. I tapped and my eyes widening as it opened.

“Feeling Like Death,” the tiles on the photo said. A photo in my kitchen of my fridge with my letters in my lighting in my house. Tagged last night. Not taken by me.

I sat down, or rather I slumped down to the kitchen floor, raising a cloud of ash. Oblivious to my now-filthy clothes and coughing from the crap entering my lungs, I tapped furiously at the screen to find out more. The account was new, zero followers, zero description. One post. One message. At-Feeling-Like-Death was also my latest follower. Involuntarily, I looked over my shoulder.

Sean Riley

Torque

Kiira Rhosair

You have travelled a thousand miles and, as I stir coffee in my kitchen, pheromones are swirling between us, concrete enough to distil and scent; huge, round molecules invading nostrils and breaching blood-brain barriers, turning us into bodies. I take in all of you with half a glance, and it starts a whirlpool that will spin in torques, and plunge us deep into that sinkhole. So I breathe, blink the thought away and ask if you will have milk. You don’t take milk. Maybe, you say. You step forward and, you have never done this before. You touch my elbow and look at me. Torques reel and madden. Sinking feelings are fates written. We will plunge again and be flung a thousand miles apart. And you say, we should talk. I don’t want to talk. I want to say hello to the hairs straggling from the dip in your shirt but, I have never done this before. I put the coffee cup on the worktop and step back.

Kiira Rhosair

Taylor Stein

Max Eichelberger

I write this story for my friend Taylor Stein. I don’t need to tell you how strange memory is or that I can’t remember when I first met him. I have no idea where those words went but then neither do you.

In my earliest memory, he’s sitting in the lobby of the Georgia Terrace Hotel holding a magazine. His face is staring slightly up and to the right as if hooked. There is a small frown on his face and his eyebrows are raised fractionally below his preternaturally thinning hair. It’s an expression of apathy and disillusionment. I’m tempted to explain that he always looked that way, but those who know how he came to die cannot help but believe he had his numbers and their already apparent consequences burning in his mind.

When I walk to him my shoes wrap silently against the terra cotta tile. Everything is still except for my breathing (or is it his?) but I know this cannot be true. In fact, there is a sense of unreality about this memory, a small but charismatic difference between what it should be and what I remember it to be. An overwhelming impression of brightness reflects off the white marble, white grout, white blinds and white ceiling. Yet he is sitting in an armchair that seems extremely dark, even more than can be explained by contrast.

Like an ore’s vein, the feeling emerges discreetly. Yet in spite of how diligently I bore, and no matter how many times I turn the moment over in my head, I find nothing missing. It is immensely copacetic down to every detail. The concierge’s name to my left is “Jacq!” exclamation point and all. The couple behind me is arguing about the differences between a cup of doppio and lungo. A young girl is telling her friend that if you find half of a dollar bill you can return it to the bank for the other half. “What bank?”

For this reason, I know the memory to be fraudulent. At first, I imagined that this recollection was a function of reality, a gap that I perceived only in retrospect. As if among the architecture of the world there is something designed to whisper back that not all is at had seemed. This horrified me. With time it now reassures me because even if the universe may change this moment will not, which is a sad but certain hubris that causes no one any trouble as far as I can tell.

When I sit next to him the memory disintegrates. He tells me to look in the magazine at a small picture of an English princeling, a blurry bodied man pointing a flintlock in our direction and concealing himself behind a splendidly aristocratic shrub. “There’s so many stupid pictures, but this is one of the stupidest,” he says. Yet when I sit down he also doesn’t say anything but a Midwestern “ope.” Suddenly it is minutes—days, months—later and I am the one saying to him “There’s so many stupid pictures, but this one of the stupidest.”

I never, however, say “ope” in any of my memories.

Perhaps he explained his work that first day. When I think back to all the times he explained his work there is no beginning. They simply begin, typically at the bar. This is not unusual, there is never a beginning to anything he says, but as far as I know, the explanation begins halfway after I’ve sat down at the bar. If it was on that first day I met him, I wouldn’t know. Whether this is a failing on my part I can’t say but the absence strikes me as a sincere or true absence rather than a contrived one. That is, a habit of Taylor’s and not a habit of mine.

“It’s like a vast warehouse of data,” he says. The rest of the words he used I can’t, or won’t, recall but what I remember is that it constantly updated itself, compiled reports of impossible complexity and tracked meticulously changes to its own calculations. These reports it categorized according to a framework that was sensible in the haze of that late morning light though that’s not how I would describe my understanding now. It was for his doctoral thesis, which had been stretched to an impossible ninth year.

As an idea it was a solution in desperate need of a problem, but since I hardly cared what he talked about while I drank I said it seemed fine. This small encouragement was all he needed to sputter another paragraph so needlessly weighted by technical terms I didn’t let him finish before telling him that it had immense promise. I even muttered something about the practical importance of these infinite calculations, though I had nothing in particular in mind.

I don’t know what interrupted us or when. Maybe it was a waiter concerned with Taylor’s wide eyes leaning over the bar, shoulders scrunched like a gargoyle, neck visibly strained as he enunciated his mumblings. Perhaps we simply got too drunk. I have to consider that we didn’t get interrupted at all and that the dregs of that day are lost. Again, the details blur.

The day after I remember nothing. The week after I remember only one scene but it’s another moment to another story. In fact, if I attempt to remember what happened with Taylor chronologically I have nothing for you. It’s a jumble of brunches, of phrases, of recycled explanations and inebriations. The warehouse came up, as evidently it must have, and just as quickly is submerged underneath fried chicken, waffles, eggs benedict and mimosas.

Remembering the hotel itself is useless. When I try to gather around myself all the memories of those mornings in the hotel or its bar they become too innumerable to share. Every moment bleeds into the next in a preoccupying murmur of half-remembered perceptions that are neither the weight of a perspiring glass in my palm nor the kitchen’s endless aromas (though they are there, somewhere). The best I can do is write that I associate it with a feeling of belonging that is invisible but not imaginary.

I know I messaged him encouragingly afterwards, almost goading him on. He replied that he was adding new performances to hundredths of already improbably small measurements of time. This developed into weekly briefings, which I understood dimly. In these, I noted a handful of preoccupations. First, a treatment of van Helmont’s Lurianic theosophy as a theology midway through a long documentation document concerning π, and Helmont’s theory of “corpuscular” light-adapted for his array’s dynamic runtime memory commands to OS. “If he had lived among the Greeks, he would now be numbered among the stars,” wrote Leibniz.

There is a lurking question here about why I let this happen, why either of us let this happen. We found each other’s company complimentary. For me, drinking doesn’t describe how pitilessly I treated the bar. To have a sober anchor in my life was required. For him, he needed someone to explain himself to, a way to flee his loneliness.

Every new topic he explained to me ended up relating back to the program’s core ability to categorize and sort through vast amounts of data and that as the program tracked this data it could use that function to track itself in an infinite itemization. As we exchanged messages he became more and more grandiose. A message boasted that he could fill Fort Knox in “sixteen minutes and change.” By comparison, Edmund Gettier’s paper on knowledge concerns only three equations. Abel’s proof of the Abel-Ruffini theorem, first theorized by Babylonians, is a mere six pages. Simple math, he concluded, tells us whose genius has produced more.

I didn’t know what to make of that, and I still don’t, but I know I assumed a little pomposity was inevitable. Some people said they were visionaries just to say it. It gives a personality to the way they live. He wasn’t like that so I didn’t let it annoy me.

I don’t remember when we lost touch. Perhaps I don’t want to. It’s easy to say that the bubble burst and reality kept out by an unfathomable lye crashed into us. We grew up and became different people and it’s very hard to forgive someone for changing. The temptation is there but I can’t say it because we didn’t. I didn’t even realize it was happening.

The last I remember of him is his hands waving from underneath the bar’s finish. I mean this specifically. I don’t remember his actual hands moving, but I remember the distorted reflections of his hands slamming again and again into the barrier between him and me. Why I remember this more than what I saw when I raised my eyes ups up, as I must have done for hours, days and even weeks at a time, I can’t say. Perhaps his hands waived the whole time and I don’t remember it. But those hands remain, only partially obscured by the white rims of old pints and the red circles of cocktails.

Naturally, I might have been more present if I had known it would be the last of its kind. But I did not so I was not. Weeks, or months, later at a crowded brunch the conversation turned to who had last seen Taylor. I didn’t say anything because it didn’t occur to me to say anything. Someone spoke up and told us that his thesis defense failed. There were hard questions about his program’s value. He replied with fascinating but irrelevant details about Judaic Kabbalists, Seventh Day Adventists of Waco and numerology.

I imagine his face, staring upwards and to the right as if caught by some hook, barely acknowledging the faculty. But perhaps this is the Georgia Terrace Hotel infiltrating into places it shouldn’t be. When I imagine him again there is another picture but no less imaginative, a living sculpture of Pilate (Aetius’s adapted for this purpose) muttering “Quod scripsi scripsi.”

But even this is too dramatic. He went home to cut along his wrists’ brachial arteries and write a suicide note. When he tried to write he was distracted by a Netflix documentary about plastic lids. His note started well but segued into a list of archaic Greek poleis with seventeen well-drawn American flags at random intervals along the page. Using my friend’s login I noted that the documentary stopped at twenty-one minutes and forty-five seconds. It’s paused on an image of Jack Clement’s Solo Traveler Dart Container Corporation plastic coffee lid. A bleeding Taylor calmly pressed the green ‘A’ to await whatever might come is an image that will not leave me.

The note begins “For when there is contradiction, of the two proposals only one is true.” It’s a temptation to read into this something of his coming death but the superstition about last words is the result of absent-mindedness. There are no words that do not turn over in our hands every time we look at them. I mention this because I cannot contradict any divergence by other readers and listeners who sat there in silence but I know any difference if held to be absolute is a lie.
For the record, I don’t blame the faculty. The failure might’ve been productive. Even Newton complained that defending Principia took away from his other studies.

But history also tells us what Newton’s other studies were. After Principia Newton built off of the Clavis Apocalyptica, a numerological interpretation of the Bible, and Francis Potter’s Interpretation of the Number 666 (whose six hundred and sixty-six page is blank and it is written on page three “[666] is an exquisite and perfect character, truly, exactly, and essentially describing that stet of Government to which all other notes of Antichrist doe agree.”).

I see his suicide as part of a system we cannot escape, a naturally-occurring centrifugal governor correcting irregularities almost before they become evident. Imbalance in creation can never reach a conspicuous magnitude because it would make itself felt by extinction. He and his program were no exception. There was a regulator, an apparent one, though this was not obvious to him. Perhaps this is why all three monotheistic religions claim that the spider’s house is blasphemy, since it assumes that human beings are self-sufficient. (That this is a landscape of the mind and not a true landscape is irrelevant since many imaginary landscapes, like a San Diego postcard, are evoked as a true landscape: longboards, palm trees, sand.)

What I do know is that Taylor erected vast and evidently inextricable parentheticals, in which brevity and practicality seemed like scorn. With monastic persistence, something that no machine or business could adequately reproduce, he made an instrument of numbers and subjected it to intense scrutiny. He saw a structure that if it fell then it would fall like the sky smothering us all.

And this is why I volunteered to help clean out his apartment when he killed himself, to honor an echo of something faded by impulses I saw from a critical distance. Death comes with a lot of chores and I felt responsible.

As I sorted through his things, I saw the alkahest myth underlined in John Webster’s Matallographia, Philalethes, Milton’s “arcane mystery” of musical spheres and an imagined court transcript from Chrysomalus’s posthumous trial for Bogomilism (whose body was disinterred for the occasion in 1140). In equal parts naturally and gratuitously were pages of Newton’s heretical history of Rome (where an angel describes a Copernican solar system into Numa’s ear) made into paper mache balloons with PVA glue and fabric decoupage.

I noticed a mirror took up the top third of his west and east walls. Without any real insight, I thought about my friend and whatever impulse might have prompted him to put them there. As my thoughts wound down I let myself see the mirrors for the first time. Between the two angles, nothing was falling in but only reflecting their own beams of light in some horrific descent. Something about the repetition made me realize what I was remembering like breathing–beginning and rebeginning, over and over, again and again. It was Taylor’s words. They came back to me. They were not a koan, a parable, a rune or incantation; much less a croon or hymn but very close to a chant. Then it struck me as a mantra. An inculcation of his obsessions and perfections and imperfections that followed me out of the room like an epiphany.

Max Eichelberger