chrysalis

Diatribe was too gentle of a word.

Diatribes themselves meant nothing. They were a ghost of the feeling, a sliver of an eyelash. As weightless as the poisoned gown on her body, a venomous green made of silk and chiffon and lace and ribbons tied too tight at her pretty throat.

Diatribes were merely a whisper through her pale lips when what she really wanted was a storm — when what she really wanted was to curl back her lips, bare her teeth, bite down and taste and destroy.

Words meant nothing.

Words burned to ashes in the fire in the grate — in the blaze of her stomach. She choked on them in the damp, narrow hollow of her throat and she spat them up onto the pristine, bleached tablecloth and she watched His eyes curve and flicker and mock her and she was fury, darkening every doorstep from hell to the high heavens.

So — with her blackened nails and bruised knuckles — she used that fire.

One matchstick after the other. She lit them with a cruel jerk of her wrist. She lit them with a twist and imagined her fingers around a neck and a pulse and skin slick with sweat and she saw a tongue — gone purple and bloated and hanging out from between sharp teeth — and she relished in it, reveled in it, gasped at the thought of bones breaking beneath her childlike-hands.

The matches danced. She flicked them, lighting them, one after the other. They tumbled through air that was so thick with the stench of blood she thought the smell of it would never leave her dark hair.

The matches flew. They tumbled from her fingers and they fell like angels cast from heaven, set ablaze… but they did not reach Him.

They landed instead, amongst the food. Amongst the spoils and the gluttonous extravaganza set before her.

Pomegranates, full to bursting — dripping, bleeding, smearing red over all of that white fabric. Oysters pried open to reveal fleshy, slimy, grotesque insides and the carcass of a deer, stretched out from antler to hoof with a glassy, dead eye turned her way. Cakes and sweets, covered in sugary floss, glistening and melting in front of the fire’s heat and oh, how she felt herself warping alongside them — how she felt her innocence on her tongue, tasted it sweet and soft before it was lost to the ash and the smell of blood, dribbling warm and saccharine down the wetness of her throat to her deep, dark stomach.

She was changing. With every match she felt something give. A tug, right beneath her breastbone, like she was being unwound.

Still He did not burn.

The empty matchbox dropped from her bloody fingers, crescent moons left in the soft flesh of her palm from eclipsing nails.

He raised a hand of his own. He gestured to the mulled wine, pools of darkness like His eyes, and He asked her to drink. Drink deeply. Eat too.

She would not. She refused. She crooked a foot up onto the table instead and she got on her knees and she crawled, spine bowed like an animal’s, towards Him over the table.

If she could not use matches, she would use her teeth.

She would use her teeth and she would win… with the smell of blood on her skin and the taste of it on her tongue, drowning with the sugary sweetness of her childhood.

Her gown rustled and whispered as she moved and that poisonous, venomous, sacrilegious green whispered to Him and it told Him her plan.

Her fingers caught and tangled in the deer’s fur. Her fingers clawed at its dead, glassy eyes and she was crawling over it — draped over its carcass — when other hands dragged her back.

Those hands — those hands, they pulled her back, away from Him, and they were rough and demanding. They were invasive. They threw her back in her chair and how she laughed then, eyes widened as she watched Him smile.

No fire. No teeth.

No escape.

Nothing to do but run, her bare feet sliding and slipping over a tile floor as cold as death.

Running to the doors, banging and shouting and screaming. Running to escape those hands and His smile and the sweetness on the table… to escape the dull, mauled eyes of a creature taken like her. Snatched from the flowers. Snatched from the sun.

Snatched from it all and dressed in green in blatant, horrible, disgusting mockery.

Back into the chair. Back she went into her destined throne and the edges of her spine caught so painfully on the wood she couldn’t breathe.

Those hands held her back down.

They held her down until the transformation was complete.

They held her down until her innocence was a memory, a fever dream lost in the haze, lost in the strands of her ebony hair hanging down over her face, shadowing her darkening eyes.

They held her down until her name was no longer her own and the screams of it up her tattered throat were replaced with something different, something new, and she grew silent and still — the calm before a storm.

And when they let go… when they let go, she was quiet. She was grace. She was power.

Her body fit her throne. Her tongue slid down over her blood-red lips to lick up the plump sweetness of pomegranate — so different from the thin sugar of cakes.

Her last match was thrown, not tossed.

Her last match soared over it all… over all of that death split open and bleeding over the white tablecloth… fire flickering, bursting, blooming to life under the heavy press of iron… and finally, finally, it came home…

… and He smiled as she looked on with narrowed, crepuscular, pleased eyes. He watched her with pride as the flames burst over His skin. He laughed as He burned… and then he grew still and silent.

He watched until the end.

He watched Her — Persephone, bringer of death.

Queen of the Underworld.

#shortstory #mythology #greekmythology #persephone #hades #anger #love #revenge