Her Hand in Mine
The weight of her hand in mine is more than I had hoped, her fingers gripping across my palm more tightly, more desperately, than she ever has before. I squeeze back, eyes fixed ahead, and start to sing to her as we walk. The shades and shadows, the wraiths and ghouls of all the less-fortunate dead, gather to watch us jealously. All their torments and miseries gather about them, sparing neither lash nor barb, as the song I sing cuts a path through the greys of lifelessness.
They, the dead, cannot lay hands on me, but the chill of their presence as they pass around and about trying to steal some meagre scraps of my essence is nauseating. My wife is not so fortunate, her promised respite not protecting her from their cruelty and as dread hands and stiff fingers grasp and claw at her I can hear her muffled gasps and stifled cries. I harden my heart and fight the need to look back, knowing that it would damn us both.
I raise my voice, pushing back against the tide with a joyous ode to my wife’s return, and any of the dead who retain a scrap of their former humanity are shamed into returning to their rest. My wife’s grip relaxes, her cries cease, and we quicken our pace. The path is clearer now, but all the more horrible for not being obscured. The colour of my vitality bleeds away only inches in any direction revealing a nightmare more horrible for being rendered in brutal monochrome.
The souls toiling and suffering under Hades’ hand are knelt in penance, fearful over the retaliation for Persephone’s scant mercy. A storm of mirrored glass bursts upwards, flaying them over and over again as their skin knits together almost instantaneously, just so they might be slashed again. Their eyes are open, glassy, dulled somewhat to the familiarity of pain and lost in the more subtle tortures that play out in waking dreams. I exhort my wife to close her eyes and increase my pace again.
We walk for what could be forever, or no time at all, until the gate comes into sight. Cerberus stands poised at his post, affixed by chains as thick as tree trunks. Three heads glare balefully at me as I continue to sing, acutely and accusatorially aware of his shame at having been circumvented. Three tongues loll around fierce teeth as three mouths breath clouds of acrid breath and I grip my wife tighter than ever. Cerberus snarls and stirs and we move faster, my wife slips.
I can’t help it, I turn to stop her fall.
I feel her hand fade like smoke from mine, and just like that, she’s gone.
