“Then what are you afraid of?”

I wasn’t about to admit it to her, but she was right. Me, the guy who doles out the torture on the Fields of Punishment. Me, the guy who guards Tartarus, the place Zeus locked up our parents when he realized he couldn’t really kill them. Was afraid.

I had nothing to say to these people. My world was so much different than theirs. Where I come from parties are things where you hold chilled glasses of champagne, bitch about the newest fads, and snipe at those who annoy you. The people here were… genuine. They came because they wanted to, not because they thought they had to. They ate the crappy Jell-O salad and didn’t complain because they knew who made it. They told the same stories over and over and laughed anyway because those were their stories. They were honest and direct and they didn’t always agree but they never intentionally hurt one another. They were family.

How could I possibly be amongst them? They were afraid of me too. No one wanted to hang around an undertaker and constantly wonder if he was sizing them up for a coffin. I was a bull in a china shop. I had no idea how to relate to these people, how to avoid hurting their feelings. What would we talk about? The artists they never heard of, the shows they’ve never seen, or the restaurants they would never eat in? Would they be jealous? Think I was bragging? Think I’m a stuck up snob?

Better that I be me and they be them and I stay where I belong.

Hekate kept silent, obviously getting what she wanted. Getting me to think about it.

“Trust me, they don’t want me around,” I said as I downed the wine she’d given me and grimaced at the sweetness.

“Maybe that’s true, but she does.”

My eye twitched and that empty place in my heart, the one I thought Persephone had filled, tore open a little bit wider. “That’s where you’re wrong.” I thought I at least had the bitch on this point. “She doesn’t want me here. I can’t and she knows it. What she wants is me there and her life here.”

Persephone was the only woman I had ever met that understood the value of both lives. To have a family and a home, and yet to see the beauty in the skyline of Necropolis at night. She loved the flowers and the mountains and the blue sky. And she loved the thrumming electric lights and those who presented their essence on canvas and on the stage. She appreciated the fact that you had to be dead in some way, dead to your past, dead to society, to family, in order to truly let go and create art in its rawest form. She understood the ecstasy in losing yourself, to the dance, the drugs, the sex. Those things that your family couldn’t stand watching you do because they loved you and knew the risk. That you may never come back.

Which would Persephone choose? As I looked around at the smiling faces and felt the warmth coming from them and the joy in their company, I thought I knew the answer. I was fucked.

“She can’t have both,” I said.

– Hades, Underground

Underground is a modern retelling of the myth of Hades and Persephone, part of the upcoming Mid-World Arts Christmas Collection