The Closed Doors

by Pauline Albanese

Do you hear my echo? He touches her through the white dress, on the hollow star where ribs join, where breathing is born. He looks at her without flinching; she listens very carefully. She doesn’t escape his gaze. HADES You came to answer my echo. You heard me calling. You couldn’t bear to hear the lies of the sun and of the earth anymore. It was a game of hiding, hiding from your soul and from your mother and from the world. You weren’t a child anymore. And so you followed the six pomegranate seeds without hesitation, without slowing, and you broke them on your tongue to taste the flavor of the awakening. You had fragile legs and vivid eyes. You didn’t scream when the earth collapsed. You knew I was coming for you. PERSEPHONE I couldn’t imagine it. She knows. She doesn’t know. She will know. HADES Maybe you did, just a little. Already, you knew the crystalline, ivory skulls glowing in human dust and the blue and grey plants we find here in sooty corners. You heard about the millennial throne, the translucent river, its unalterable lament. You had perhaps read that we bathe in the warm blood of fallen warriors, brush our hair with rodent teeth, that our jewels resembled glass eyes, gold-filed molars, broken arrowheads found sunken in corpses; didn’t you? You could already feel the damp, soft river bank that the souls graze and stroke, the arches of the great tunnels, feel the infinite labyrinth. You understood that we held between our innumerable, entwined hand...