The night feels pregnant. Something in the humid summer air. Not a whisper, no, it’s more of a heavy silence, pressing hard against my eardrums.
I just want a beer. Just for one night not to think about anything and anyone. Pretty please?
Of course, the Editors have their own plans. I can feel their little schemes, I can feel how they arrange the patterns, whispering in the wind, nudging things. Doing everything so that work finds me at the unlikeliest of places.
There is something about liquor stores. A vibe, you know? Slight aroma of desperation, a tinge of borrowed money. Aftertaste of regret.
The shockingly generic “Alko” squats on the corner of two streets going nowhere. Fitting. It’s a slow night. No bozos around. Too early. No late worker bees, buzzing by on their way back home. Too late.
There’s just me and the girl. She’s sitting in a windowsill of this faux minimalist booze dispenser, eyeing anyone who walks by. By the looks of her.. fourteen years old, give or take. I have seen her somewhere. I know for sure she’s in my mental database.
Fucking Editors.
“Yo!” her voice sends chills down my spine. That’s the weakness of our species. Whenever gods speak, our knees get all wobbly in a hurry.
“Yo, mister! Buy me a bottle? I have dough. And a pack of cigs. Please?”
I know her. Of course this is not a coincidence. Fucking Editors.
A respectful bow is in order: “Of course, goddess.”
For a moment she seems startled that someone recognizes her. Then smiles.
Kore.
Kore’s the name. The forgotten half.
Half a year she’s the summer girl, living in the world of skateparks, malls and outskirts of gas stations. Fourteen forever. Give or take.
The other half she’s the queen of the land of the dead. Persephone. Ereshkigal. Nephthys. The wife.
Her shopping list is simple. It’s just the quantities that are industrial. Seven bottles of “M. Parajanov Semi-Sweet Pomegranate” and a block of “Marlboro Gold”.
Good thing she has money. A thick wad of cash is what I take, and a cheap plastic bag full of goodies is what I emerge with from the shop. She waits for me outside, clearly relieved; rips open the cigarette block right away. Nicotine is a bitch.
Inhales the tar, exhales. Ooof, I can feel the hit just by standing nearby. It’s been a while, it seems.
“Thank you, mortal.” I just nod. I don’t like gods much but Kore is… different. I can’t help but feel for her.
She was just a kid, you know? Imagine being in your teens, your mom the goddess of all things chlorophil. Harvests, plants, life. And then your uncle, the ruler of the Underworld comes by, gets a boner, kidnaps you. With the blessing of Daddy Zeus. Tell THAT to your therapist. Fucking gods, the entitled pricks.
Her mom… I can respect. Lady had some balls. Demeter got real moody, upon finding her daughter was now a child-bride to her own brother. Said “fuck you”, and just dropped her harvest-lady act. Nothing grew.
Fuck you. Nothing blossomed. Fuck you. Extinction moment. About 250 million years ago. Permian-Triassic Extinction, almost did all of us in. Triple Fuck You.
Caused some stir, let me tell you.
“May I carry this bag for you, Lady?” She puffs a relieved drag from her cig and just nods. I hope she doesn’t live far. The bag is heavy.
Her mom’s flora strike led to some compromises. Dudes had to come up with a solution. Half a year Kore spends in the Underworld, being the trophy wife of Hades. Different name. Different duties.
First lady of the dead. That’s why you and me get seasons, you know? Half a year Demeter longs for her daughter. And sulks. Cold autumn rains, freezing winters, black ice. Resigned sorrow of a goddess.
And then the spring comes, and mommy glows, dreaming of her visiting daughter. Kore. Kore’s back. Time to bloom, everyone. Time for shorts, volleyball, and lazy joints in secluded parks. Kore is back.
A daughter stuck in time, always fourteen. Give or take a million years.
“Is it allowed?” she frowns, when I tell her of High Strangeness zine. I shrug. I genuinely don’t know. But I don’t care, and neither does she.
Millions of years of a goddess, compressed into this little girl, flipping a cigarette butt across the street. It lands perfectly in a trash bin, causing a mild flame burst.
“Interview…” she muses to herself, while pulling the next cig from the pack and lighting it up. “Sure, whatever.”
That’s how I end up in her apartment, disturbingly minimalistic, as if no one lived there. Just some rentable for someone with money. A place that does not remember you by design.
People know her by her work-name. Persephone. Persephone. Persephone. No one knows her vacay name.
The maiden name.
Her true name.
“It’s not that bad,” she slurs, wine glass in her hand like a suave weapon of mass destruction. “I’m used to it by now.” She takes another sip. “Social life can be a bitch, though.”
I nod. Half a year you’re away, in a realm of death and the eternal. And half a year you are just this teenage girl, trying to make friends with apes who are millions of years younger than you.
“My friends think I’m a rich brat who runs away to somewhere with a warm beach at the end of the summer. Gosh, I wish I could see winter again. Just feel snow landing in my palm, just once again.”
I point at her fridge. Monet’s “La Pie” is taped awkwardly on its bulky door. Kore lights up and starts going. she just goes on and on and fucking on about how Monet was the only painter who got the snow right.
“It’s not white, right? All those textures and shades of pink, blue, green even, what the hell? Why can’t anyone else get the fucking snow right?” She just can’t stop won’t stop. After a while I regret bringing it up. I try a smooth segway: “How is Monet faring in the land of the dead?”
She flinches.
The dead are not as they were in her winter domain. Ego stripped away, dreams and desires bleached out. Recognizable, yes, but only just.
She turns all monotone talking about it, as if she herself was one of them. A pattern with a faded face, barely remembering her desires and longings and hurts. They are there, sure.
They are also so insignificant it hurts trying to recall them.
“He still paints,” Kore sips and descends even deeper in the Land of Moody.
“They all do.” she gulps the wine juice. “You can’t get it out of your system, even after.”
She pours me a glass. It’s not a kind gesture. She is determined to get me as drunk and miserable as her, pronto.
“But it’s all mechanic. The other side has no desire, you know? No pain. Just..stillness. They brush lines in the forever sand, scrape little doodles on foggy window panes, arrange pebbles in patterns they don’t understand. Going through the motions, that lot. And they never talk.”
She shudders. Now I wish I had stayed with 754 shades of snow topic.
“How is family?” I ask, trying the sweet Armenian drunk-juice, dedicated to the late Sergei Parajanov, wizard of hallucinatory cinematography that Soviets jailed cuz the guy was just too weird. A warning to us all.
Kore groans. “Mom’s getting older by the minute. Says she wants to retire, says you fuckers just don’t appreciate her work.
Hubby…” she downs the wine glass and doesn’t finish the answer, eyeing an invisible spot up in the air. “Siri, default playlist,” she says out loudly. Soft Moon starts blaring in the speakers.
Room reverb sounds like a neogothic postindustrial cathedral.
I've become the lies"
Perhaps it’s a warning. Someone’s always listening. I shudder at the thought that Hades might be evesdropping on us. I wonder if I have the right protection. The Editors can reach far, but they have their limits. The lord of the dead might be above their paygrade.
Awkward pause. The song fills the room so neither of us has to. I should leave it. Perhaps I should just leave.
Instead I press on: “You didn’t answer. About your husband.”
She doesn’t look at me. She refills the glass, slow, watching the dark wine climb. “What’s to answer.” A long pull. “He’s nice. That’s the thing nobody gets.
Everybody wants him to be a monster, the big bad lord of the dead, dragging the girl down screaming. Makes a better story.” She shrugs, one shoulder. “He’s just quiet. Tired, mostly. Works like a horse.
The business of the dead is stressing. Yet he never once has raised his voice at me. Waits for me all winter. He’s patient. He’s kind.”
“That sounds—”
“Sounds nice, right?” She finally looks at me, and the eyes are far too old for the face, and I have to work not to look away. “Kind. He’s kind to me. You know what nobody tells you about kind?
You can’t leave kind. If he hit me, if he locked me up, if he was cruel — I’d have something. A reason. A door.
But he’s kind, and he waits, and he lets me go every spring, and he’s there every autumn with the lights on, when I go back. Every fucking time.”
She shrugs. “I didn’t choose him. But I keep choosing him, a little, every year, and that’s worse.”
I ask — carefully, because I’m a fool who pokes — what she does down there. The other half. The job.
“I’m a trophy wife, buddy. Hades works. I just…wave, you know? The good, supporting wife. Argh. And it’s so quiet down there. You can’t even imagine.
First thing I do whenever I come back in the spring, I just put on the music To The Max, man! Freaks out neighbors every time.” She laughs. Soft Moon laughs with her. I raise my glass to her.
“You’re being nice to me,” she says, suspicious, a kid catching an adult in a white lie. “Why are you being nice to me. You said you don’t like gods.”
“I don’t,” I nod. “But you didn’t ask for any of it. You were just a girl picking flowers.” I shrug. “And you want to touch the snow.”
She goes quiet. The Soft Moon grinds on, a dead man singing about being compromised in a room that sounds like a drowned church.
“That’s the joke, isn’t it,” she says, mostly to the wine. “I’ve got forever. I’ve got a throne. I’ve got every soul that ever stopped breathing, all of them, mine, I’m the queen of the biggest country there is and it never gets smaller, it only ever fills up.”
She turns the glass. “And you lot. You’ve got, what. Eighty years if you’re lucky. You spend half of it complaining about Mondays. You hate winter — you scrape it off your cars like some mold.” She looks at me.
“I’d give the throne for your Mondays. I’d give the whole quiet country down there for one bad cold and a winter that freezes my butt off.”
She closes her eyes dreamily. “You don’t trade up to forever. Nobody tells you that. Forever’s just where things go to stop happening.”
I don’t have a nifty come-back. She’s right, and we both know she’s right, and the worst part is I can already feel myself forgetting to be grateful for it by the second.
“Siri,” she says, after a while. Quiet now. “Stop.”
The Soft Moon cuts out mid-grind. The cathedral collapses into ordinary silence, a murmur of the fridge, a far-off car alarm throwing a tantrum somewhere.
“Play the old one.”
Siri obliges. You don’t say no to a goddess. Speakers crackle first — a needle-hiss, a woman’s voice from before the Spotify lists, before the electric cars, before insta likes. The voice is warm and worn and long gone.
Dearest, the shadows I live with are numberless"
Kore keeps her eyes closed. The bratty teenager is gone. An old, old grief in an old, old voice, and she lets it wash over her like she’s standing in it, the cold rain of early winter that will turn into wet snow any moment now..
I let myself out. The girl sleeps on the sofa, legs up, the empty wine bottle lying next to her.
Outside, the night is warm and stupid and alive. Somebody’s laughing two streets over. A moth is killing itself against the Alko sign. It’s summer, and it’s going to end, and I’m going to be cold in a few months, and I’m going to hate it, and complain about it, and scrape it off my boots and curse.
