Persephone looked so beautiful that day. My eyes on her, hers on the flowers. All she wanted was to pluck them, wreathe them, adorn herself in their shredded multicolour. And, gods help me, but I wanted her to wear them. I wanted to see soft petal against soft skin. I wanted to see that look of delight in her eyes when she bejewelled herself in nature’s gifts, plundered from the ground to clothe her with their temporary radiance. I couldn’t see their lifelessness, only how they gave her life. Hollow life, but we didn’t think about that. Not then.
At first she knelt in meadow grass, I close beside her, my nymph skin shimmering in the late spring sunlight, hers pale as milk. She gazed upon the daisy-like chamomile as upon a banquet, then her quick sharp nails severed their stems, one, ten, twenty. I wove a necklace to adorn her narrow clavicles, looking only for her red-lipped smile, the flash of teeth revealed in revelling. She kissed me lightly on the cheek, then laughed, while my heart stirred.
She rose and danced, thinking her feet light upon the soil. I watched each toe tap, every plie, the wide sweep of her arms. She reached high to snap long stems from fresh-sapped trees, low to pillage fronds from the windswept ferns. Her summons came to me upon the breeze to help her build a bower, as though the spreading tendrils of the willow above my riverbanks were not shade enough.
Beneath its shelter, she gathered a rainbow of plucked blossom. Clusters of betony, purple amid scalloped leaves. Yellow-budded trefoil, curling its pods towards untimely death. The first of the cornflowers reflected the bright blue of the cloudless sky. She enclosed her fingertips within the pink caress of foxgloves, giggled, cast the flowers, once-used, into the grass at her feet. The bees were denied their clover, looping away into the air to watch their treasure-troves stolen from beneath their tiny feet. Her fingertips crumpled wood sage to release its scent. Handfuls of vernal grass transformed into a toy, from which she could wrench seeds and watch them fly.
Forget-me-nots heard her whispered wishes and fluffy-headed dandelions revealed the time of day. Thistles she complimented for their bloom, chastised them when they pricked her bare ankles. Violets, irises, meadow lilies. Dark-hued ivy ripped from enclosed trunks to become a coronet.
Poppies drew her last, their brilliance like blood. Earth blood. She snapped their stems and laughed, even as the plants cried out their silent screams. She had me weave them with the ivy, then lowered her head to let me crown her with her scarlet spoils.
The earth is wealthy. That is why they called him rich, the Prince of Darkness, who lingered beneath the roots, listening. He heard her dancing feet pound down into his realm, the rhythm percussive against the mourning of the flowers.
‘I like this girl,’ perhaps he thought, a rare smile playing on his sallow lips. ‘She takes such joy in the dead. She thinks nothing of taking what she wants. And I, too, can play that game.’
Persephone and I lay together on a bed of her treasures, I fingering her long hair, she oblivious, her eyes transfixed by her riches. We had no warning until the bower above us trembled, its fading greenery no protection against the forces we had unleashed. The earth began to quake. We sat, she clutching at me in terror, only now offering me the hands I’d longed to hold.
A great rift split the meadow, the sulphurous smells of deep Tartarus swirling upwards, clouding high Helios with darkness. In a split second we saw him, his chariot wheels carving through ravaged soil, the horses heaving, panting, recoiling at the sudden daylight. He whipped them on, his eyes never leaving the frightened girl beside me.
May the gods forgive me, but I fled. One leap and my watery home had engulfed me, my blue-green hair whirling round in the seething stream. Barely able to keep afloat amid the torrent, I seized a great rock, even as it writhed against the quake. I couldn’t leave, yet wouldn’t help. I only watched.
He seized her, her arms flailing, hair flying free of her crimson coronet; it bounced, useless, across the grass towards me. One scream and then his horses turned. The earth, still shuddering, consumed them.
The trembling of the ground subsided, second by second, but my trembling went on. I crouched within polluted water, my eyes filled with death to left and right. I crawled away and hid, holding on only to that fateful garland, as the poppies faded to brown and grey, then crumbled at last into dust.
It couldn’t heal, the pasture plundered once by greedy hands that lured the King of Death himself. The doom-filled canyon still reeked with rot, the river I had loved first poisoned and then dry. Abandoned Demeter denied her gifts, and nothing grew. Those flowers we’d picked as though their lives were ours for the taking retreated into the ground until barrenness consumed every acre. I wept for Persephone, for myself, for the little world we had destroyed, yet still I hid. My tears fell from my eyes, then my whole body began, inch by inch, to join them a final torrent. I melted away, cascaded into water, and sank into dried-out soil, nothing now but a libation to the dead.
The story of Persephone, retold here through the eyes of the nymph Cyane, has meant many things throughout the ages and can still mean many things. In this retelling, I was inspired by my grief at the effect of a human-made climate crisis, the ramifications of which are making themselves so clear at the moment.
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