1.

Kore is dead.

She died of her own, in the Underworld, and Persephone wishes Demeter would stop placing the blame on Hades.

Persephone cannot distinguish the moment when her former self died, but she thinks it occurred sometime shortly after she saw the shade of the little girl clutching her doll and begging for a coin to cross the river Styx.

The little girl said she’d starved to death on the streets, after all her family died of the famine that was ravaging Gaia. She was the last to die and she’d given all of her coins to the corpses of her parents and siblings, but there had been none left for her.

Persephone never saw the girl again, after she’d cried to Hades about the injustice of it all.

But when she asked Charon about the little girl, he was ignorant of the matter.

2.

Whenever Persephone visits her mother now, she is quiet. She cannot speak with the innocence that Kore used to. She cannot look at a man without thinking of her husband’s cold arms securing her to himself in the dark.

She cannot watch the mortals beneath her without wondering when they will come to visit her in her nether realm, wondering how they will die, wondering why they worship the Olympians when Persephone knows that they are all so much more petty than the mortals.

She no longer picks any flowers in the fields with her nymph companions. She will play with them, laugh with them, lie with them under the sun, but she will never again pick flowers.

Because now she knows, she really knows,that all things, except for death, die.

3.

The first time Hades ravished her, she’d been in disbelief. She refused to acknowledge that it had happened to her. She was sure that if it only happened once, Zeus would still consider her one of the Virgin goddesses.

The second time, when she realized that it was no different than the first, she’d fought against him hard. But her fasting had made her weak, and despite his knobbly knees, he could always overpower her.

She’d cried for the entire duration of the third time.

But it is the fourth time she hates to remember the most.

Kore had died a little before the fourth time and Persephone was alone in her room. She’d been watching her pale, pale hands tremble from low blood sugar, fascinated with how her health could deteriorate like a mortal’s, and in her amazement, her shawl had fallen off her shoulders, the straps of her chiton (she remembers it was dark purple with clasps of gold) doing nothing to warm her.

He’d come behind her and covered her shaking hands with his. And then he’d simply held her for a moment, whispered something sweet and inconsequential that she could no longer remember, but then he was kissing her here, there, his teeth grazing her skin, his touch making her shiver more than the cold.

And then she looked at him, really looked at him, at his dark, dark hair, his tan, tan skin, his thin, thin face, his nose that she thought was a little too big for him, and his fingers that would shortly after make her giggle with something akin to love.

Afterwards, she’d felt like she’d betrayed her mother, but with his breath on her ear and his legs intertwining with hers, she didn’t feel the impact as hard as she would have when Kore had been alive.

4.

She’d been so embarrassed at the hearing.

Zeus had asked if she’d eaten anything and she wished, she considered even, thrusting her fingers down her throat and forcing the bile up her esophagus, watching those damning seeds splatter against the stone floor.

She’d felt like such a glutton for those six seeds.

Zeus had asked her if she was still pure, in front of the entire pantheon, in front of her mother, and when she did not answer (could not answer, her shame was much too great) Hades did for her.

Oh no, he’d said, no, no, she was no longer pure; he’d had her seven times.

It was a lie; by then he’d had her far more than seven times but she’d stopped counting after nineteen.

She’d felt like such a whore for enjoying possibly the only pleasure of a forced marriage.

And as she felt her mother’s horrified gaze piercing through her hands that covered her blushing face, she could only remember the fourth time.

5.

She prefers not to think of Menthe.

Whenever she does think of her, she wishes she’d slapped that slut-of-a-nymph much more than twice. She wishes she’d given her a punishment worse than Tantalus, than Sisyphus, than Prometheus even.

Whenever she does think of her, she remembers hearing Menthe (stupidwretchedgirl) sigh in contentment and seeing Hades on top of her and her vision blurring with tears. She remembers seeing Hades groveling on the cold floor at her feet, crying, yes, crying like Persephone had, for forgiveness. She remembers starving herself once more, remembers asking Adonis to take her and the eagerness with which he had (he was growing tired of Aphrodite), remembers ignoring Hades for twenty-five winters, remembers stroking Pirithous’ immobile cheek while her suffering husband was watching with pained eyes, remembers that ugly, ugly nymph shrinking into a hideous, hideous plant.

And she remembers, when the hunger and the heartbreak and the pain she felt at missing the arms of her husband became too much to bear, going to Aphrodite to ask for a love potion to make herself fall back in love with Hades, and he with her.

6.

Hades hates it when they have mortal visitors.

He detested Theseus and especially Pirithous, tolerated Orpheus and begrudgingly allowed Hercules to leave with his cousin, sneered at Psyche and didn’t bother to speak to Odysseus.

But most of them all, he loathed Asclepius.

When she lay in bed with her husband during the time they considered night (they had a superficial mode of daylight in the Underworld) he would rant to her through gritted teeth and she would run her fingers through his hair, stroke his cheek, mutter soothing phrases that spouted automatically from her mouth.

But always, she thought of the little girl that she’d seen before Kore had died, and how Asclepius could one day with his medicines help others like her.

7.

Persephone bears her strange routine well. She stays obediently by her mother’s side and frolics in the sun during the spring and summer time. During autumn and winter she sits by her husband and listens to the stories that the dead mortals tell.

Occasionally, she attends to the festivities at Eleusis, but otherwise, her routine is not marred.

She descends and she rises, every year without fail.

Like the flowers Gaia sprouts, and that she will no longer pick.