The first time she brings you back from the dead, all you can do is stutter her name over and over and over and over and over and over and—

The second time she brings you back, you’re relieved to find yourself speechless. It seemed like it might be easier to just start again, she says, the sceptre in her hand tinged red at the top. Your head throbs in time with her words, you want to lift your fingers to your temple, but you don’t. Your tongue tastes the way a garden smells after the earth has been turned over to make room for new seeds. Charon said you insisted he bring you to me. You must have been very convincing. You think of the ferryman with his dark eyes. You risk opening your mouth. I was hoping I could come work for you, you say. She looks at you as though she is seeing straight to the heart of your desire. How are you with plants? she asks.

She gives you your own bedroom. It has a vermillion carpet and an open archway in place of a door. She says goodnight to you at the lintel and you walk through the arch by yourself. Your feet sink into the carpet, your footsteps make no sound at all. Am I a ghost? you wonder. Am I real? Maybe all of this is a creation of your dying mind, maybe you are lying alone in your dirty apartment, the bottle of pills empty. You think, no, I didn’t do it, I came here instead, but you are so afraid, suddenly, that none of this is real that you hurl yourself against the nearest wall. You rebound off it in a clatter of solid body and pain, and you lie in a heap on the plush carpet, looking up at the ornate molding, thinking, ow, thinking, thank god, thinking, no, thank Persephone.

In the morning, you wake in the four-poster bed in the center of the room. You are naked because you don’t have any pajamas and you couldn’t bear to get into the bed, with its bright white linens, wearing the dirty clothes she resurrected you in. Your body beneath the sheets feels like Antarctica—expansive and empty and cold. The absence of pain is almost identical to pleasure. You stretch so hard your joints crack. Then you get out of the bed and slip your dirty clothes back on, wondering if she will appear. You walk past the archway to her room—dare a glance, but her bed is empty—then tiptoe down the staircase and into a kitchen filled with light. She is sitting at the table. She is older than you imagined, her black hair laced with silver, delicate crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. Cream of wheat? she asks, smiling as though the two of you are old friends.

She hands you a bowl heaped with pomegranate seeds. They catch the light, gem-like. You pick one up with your fingers, roll it around on your tongue before biting down. It bursts in your mouth, tart and sweet at once. While you eat, she discusses the terms of your employment. I need someone to take care of my garden during the six months I’m up above, she says. It isn’t the easiest, growing things in the underworld, but I’ll teach you. You nod emphatically, you are ready, you will learn anything.

Do you like dogs? she asks. I love them, you say, thinking of your mom’s goldendoodle who once jumped in a stranger’s lap at the park after hearing a loud noise. Perfect, she says, her face bright, this is going to be a great fit. You thrill at the words. Finish your breakfast and I’ll introduce you.

The third time she brings you back, you’re dazed, the memory of bared teeth shimmering like an oil spill through your mind. He gets a little overexcited sometimes, she says apologetically, just when he meets new people. At her side is an enormous, three-headed dog, drooling vigorously from all three mouths. He’s gorgeous, you say, trying not to notice the blood—your blood—on his fangs. She rewards you with a wide, relieved smile. Isn’t he? His name is Kerberos. Technically, he belongs to Hades, but he likes me better, don’t you, Kerb? He’ll keep you company while I’m away.

And then, at last, the gardens. They circle her home, a haven of color and light against the murky backdrop of the underworld. They are feral, tangled, a riot of the senses beyond your wildest imaginings. You trail behind her as she introduces you to the plants like they are her closest friends, and you think, for the first time, that it must be lonely, this divided life of hers.

Bleeding hearts, she says, pulling back a string of heart-shaped flowers each the size of a fist, blood-red, teardrops of white dangling from their tips. They’re prima donnas, she says, they always want attention. She traces a finger over one of them. Yes, you’re very beautiful. She shows you bells of violet wolfsbane, dark berries of deadly nightshade, dainty white clusters of hemlock. Gentler than you would think, these ones. They like it if you hum to them. Stargazer lilies that are a vibrant, leopard-spotted pink. Fuchsia dahlias as large as plates. Black bat flowers with enormous diaphanous leaves and two-foot-long whiskers. They’re ticklish, she tells you. In a grove that smells so strongly of rotting meat that you gag, there are half a dozen corpse flowers, so tall that you have to crane your head back to look at the strange yellow protrusions shooting upwards from their crimson bowls. The gardens are illuminated with balls of light so bright they hurt to look at, hung from trees and ornate cast-iron lampposts. A gift from Helios, she says.

She leads you into a dark grotto, where water runs over rocks into a deep pool. Best not to touch the water, it’s diverted from the Styx, she says, though Kerberos laps from it happily. Mushrooms grow in every crack and crevice. She names them for you. Witch’s butter like yellow coral, veiled ladies with delicate capes of fibrous netting. Domed mushrooms of cerulean blue, amethyst purple, others glowing a phosphorescent green in the darkness. You are dizzy with beauty, with the weight of responsibility. She looks at your face and laughs. It’s something, isn’t it?

You settle into your new life. You spend hours working in the gardens, taking pages upon pages of notes: The nightshade likes to be fertilized with bonemeal, the corpse flowers need the pH of their soil to sit in the mid to upper sixes, the stargazer lilies need at least an inch of water per week. You go on long walks with Persephone and Kerberos, and she tells you about her troubled relationship with her mother, about what it was like to come to the underworld. You wait for her to ask you about your life, about how you got here. You prepare the story for her, tell it to yourself while you fall asleep, but she never asks. Maybe she thinks it’s a sore subject. You get used to the shades who linger under the giant, ever-blooming wisteria tree. They are girls, young women, your age. Insubstantial until Persephone pricks her thumb with the sharpened back of one of her garnet earrings. There are only two things the denizens of the underworld desire, she tells you. Blood and stories. A drop of Persephone’s blood and the shades become solid for a time, long enough to sit at her feet, rest their heads on her knees while she talks. You are jealous, sometimes, watching them, but then you remember you are the one who lives here, the one she trusts with her beloved gardens.

Each day you wake feeling exhilarated. Your mother always said illness—mental or physical—was a sign that you were out of alignment with your divine destiny, which you told her was pseudo-spiritual bullshit. But now you wonder if all along she was right, more right than the doctors who diagnosed and medicated you. You are so grateful to be alive. You feel aligned with your divine destiny.

The fourth time she brings you back, she says, I told you never to touch the Gympie-Gympie tree. Your skin stings with the memory of an electric pain. I’m sorry, you say. You need to be careful while I’m gone, she says, I won’t be here to save you. You are warmed by her concern. You don’t want her to leave. You don’t want anything to change. Is this what it means to be happy?

The day she leaves, she puts her hands on your shoulders. Take good care of them for me, she says, and when you nod, she pulls you into an embrace. You think, I am being embraced by Persephone. You think, She trusts me. And then she lets you go, kneels to kiss Kerberos, picks up her bag. Call if you need me, she says. I’ll see you in six months.

After she leaves, you wander the house like one of the shades. You walk through the open arch that leads into her bedroom. It smells like her, gardenia and honeysuckle, laced with something darker, resinous. You imagine lying down on her bed, but you can’t shake the sensation of being watched. She is a goddess, who’s to say she can’t see you—through the mirrors, the windows, her face a shadow in every pool of water. You pace circles around the house, Kerberos following behind you until even he gets bored and goes to lie down by the fireplace. The months stretch out ahead of you, vast and echoing.

You aren’t the only one who misses her. The bleeding hearts droop until they look like teardrops, the dahlias are dropping petals. Even the corpse flowers seem unhappy. You are following her instructions; you are doing everything right. You double- and triple-check the pH level of the soil, add precise amounts of pine needle mulch. You water exactly on schedule. You adjust the balls of sunlight a dozen times until you have achieved perfectly dappled lighting. Nothing works.

Soon you are too panicked to feel sad or lonely. Should you call her? You dial her number over and over but never press send. She’d told you how hard it was, the transition between realms. How when she was in the underworld, the sunlight called to her, and when she was up above, it hurt her eyes. Some part of her perpetually thinking about the place she wasn’t. At least this time I won’t be worrying about the plants, she said. Usually I ask Hades to water them, but growing things isn’t his forte.

You are hardly sleeping, but one night you dream of your mother. Darling! she says. You’re home just in time for the Eleusinian mysteries. You tell her you need help, something you long ago stopped saying in your waking life. I don’t know what the plants want, you say. Isn’t it obvious? she says, except she isn’t your mother anymore, she’s Persephone, who is looking down at you with disdain. I told you this already, she says. She is sitting beneath the wisteria tree, light through the blossoms turning everything rosy, and her arms are covered in blood. The shades swarm her.

You wake up gasping, convinced it was really her, that she has been watching, that she is disappointed with you. You head for the gardens, stopping in the kitchen long enough to grab a knife. You go to the stargazer lilies, their petals pathetic, wilted. You hold the knife over your arm, hesitating. You always hesitate in these moments, the animal of your body fighting to remain whole. Blood and stories, you think. You slice, long and shallow, hissing. You speckle the flowers with your blood. Then you tell them the beginning of the story Persephone never asked for.

I was watching, you tell the lilies, when she gave that interview. I was fifteen, it was my mother who put it on TV. The twin goddesses were her latest cult. You can feel the flowers’ attention. I can still remember Persephone’s exact words: I am tired of having my story told for me. I am tired of being portrayed as the hapless pawn of Demeter or Hades, forever torn in two. I am the queen of the underworld, the goddess of spring. I am whole and I belong to no one but myself.

Instinct leads you to the deadly nightshade, next. You tell it: My life, too, felt like a series of rises and descents, but I couldn’t figure out how to feel whole. My family, my friends, they loved only fragments of me and eventually it felt easier not to be loved at all than to be loved conditionally.

You walk to the bleeding hearts, who you know won’t judge you for being melodramatic: People like to tell you you’ll feel better soon, but what they don’t understand is how little comfort that offers. How there are only so many descents you can make before it doesn’t feel worth the effort of reemerging. Before the feeling of lightness becomes only a prelude to a fall. I didn’t want to do it anymore. But I kept thinking about Persephone, about what she’d said.

You tell the dahlias: My mother always said hopelessness was the quickest path to hell. It was a chastisement, a way of telling me to stop being so negative. But what if it was true?

You walk over to the corpse grove, make a fresh cut on your arm. You feed each upturned mouth a drop of blood. You say: I went looking for the underworld. If there’s one thing my life has taught me, it’s that hopelessness is more than a feeling. It’s perceptible. People notice it, they back away. It has a smell, like a damp towel left in a corner. A taste like sour milk. An appearance that can be stark or run-down or sterile. A slight electric buzzing. And, of course, the heaviness.

To the bat flowers, who have a dark sense of humor: I kept thinking I’d found the entrance: in the parking lot that used to be a forest, outside the 24-hour Walmart, in line at the bank. But it never quite worked.

You tell the witch’s butter: I needed to cast a spell. I went to IKEA, told myself I was there for the curtains that would transform my life into something beautiful. By the time I reached the textiles, I was shaky with want and indecision. Should I get the rug with the abstract squares? I could picture it in my living room. But none of the curtains were exactly what I’d imagined. Nothing in my life had turned out exactly as I’d imagined. And there it was: a grey door with a sign that said DO NOT ENTER, and behind it, stairs leading down into the darkness.

You save the ferryman for the hemlock: I told him I needed to see Persephone, but he blocked my way. Told me the boat was for the dead, not the living. So I did what I had to do. It wasn’t suicide. I knew she would bring me back.

Each day, you dig up new stories, feed the flowers your blood. The gardens are thriving. You are exhausted, a little more diminished with each passing week, but you are proud, too. You imagine her pleasure, her praise. You imagine her embracing you again, telling you that you did better than she could have hoped.

When she returns, she’s tired. She doesn’t go into the gardens. She drops her bags on the floor, scratches Kerberos in his favorite spot behind his leftmost head. She says, The trip was hell. She says, I need sleep.

The next day, you wear a tank top so she will see the scars that crisscross your arms. You want her to look at you, to see how much you gave of yourself. You imagine her saying you shouldn’t have, that it was too much. You will tell her the truth: You wanted to. You love the plants and they love you, you can feel it, the way they reach for you when you walk through the gardens. But she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look at your arms, doesn’t go outside.

That night, you hear her crying in her bedroom across the hall. You are afraid to bother her, afraid to leave her to cry alone. You poke your head through the arch to her room. Anything I can do? you ask, your heart pounding. I could use some company, she says. You perch carefully on the edge of the bed, and she tells you about fighting with her mother, how Demeter refuses to acknowledge her role as queen of the underworld. I know exactly what you mean, you say. You take her side and it’s not just because you want to please her, it’s also that you believe she is right. No one appreciates her the way they should. Everyone—her mother, Hades, the dead girls—wants too much from her. You are ashamed for being a part of this everyone. You go back to wearing long sleeves.

Things aren’t the same as they were before she left. You can’t figure out why. You scour your behavior for changes. You spend hours talking to the plants. The bleeding hearts drape themselves around your neck, you rest your cheek against their soft skin. The corpse flowers lean their stamens against you like the heavy heads of dogs, the bioluminescent fungi brighten when you walk past. Gradually Persephone’s mood seems to lift. The gardens look luminous, she says to you one day, and your whole body tingles with joy.

The days blur into weeks, which slip into months, and soon you are dreading her departure again, counting the days you have left with her. Eight days, seven, six—

The fifth time she brings you back, you’re screaming. What was it? What was that? She soothes you, pets your hair, and at first this is all you notice, but then you look up and see the corpse grove: trampled, the flowers uprooted, lying on their sides like massive fallen beasts, chunks of their flesh missing. Your eyes fill with tears. I know, she says, I know. It wasn’t your fault. You hadn’t had time to consider fault; your stomach heaves as though it wants to leave your body. She tells you it was a monster, a chimera. Truly not your fault. You can’t stop shaking. You go and lie in bed with Kerberos, who rests his heads on your shoulder, stomach, and thigh. The weight is comforting.

The next morning the bleeding hearts are strewn across the ground, and you don’t feel sadness, you feel fury. You fed these plants your blood, your secrets. You love them. They are your responsibility. You tell her you are going to stay outside, keep watch, and she takes down the gleaming sword that hangs—decorative, or so you thought—above the fireplace, handing it to you ceremoniously. The sword is so heavy. You didn’t know it would be so heavy. You have never held a sword before.

For four nights, the chimera stays away. You feel as though it is the strength of your will fending it off; you don’t dare sleep. You are tired, so tired, the kind of tired where your thoughts are disconnecting and reconnecting in all the wrong ways. You want to go home, wherever that is. You want your mom and her eternal, infuriating conviction that the universe has some plan. You want someone to take the sword out of your hands and tell you to go to sleep.

On the morning of the fifth day, you walk inside and see her bags sitting by the door. I hate to leave you at a time like this, she says, and you understand that you are supposed to give her departure your blessing but the words elude you.

On the seventh night, you rest. You tell yourself that even god needed a break. You tell yourself the chimera is gone, though you don’t believe it. You sit in the grotto and talk to the mushrooms, promise them that if you can get just this one night of sleep you will resume your guard. The veiled ladies swish their lacey skirts. You walk through the gardens and tell each plant to be brave. Inside, you curl up with Kerberos and sleep the sleep of the dead. When you wake, your heart is fluttering in your chest like a trapped moth. You grab the sword from where it leans against your bed and stumble out to the gardens.

They are a scene of wreckage. The earth is churned up, there are scorch marks on the trees. Some of the balls of light are lying on the ground, others have been extinguished entirely. You wander in a daze. You pick up one of the veiled ladies and hold her in your cupped hands.

You call Persephone. You say, I’m so sorry. You say, Please. You say, I need you to come home. You don’t say, I can’t do this anymore, not by myself.

The sixth time she brings you back, you don’t know what happened. Was it a punishment for asking her to come home? As soon as you have the thought, you are appalled with yourself. You feel certain she’ll be able to see it in your eyes. You don’t ask her what happened. You keep your eyes low; you kiss Kerberos on top of each head. He leans into you and you lean into him.

She says, We’ll just have to summon Hades. A man for a man’s job. You want to protest, but it’s true that you failed. He shows up with his two-pronged pitchfork in hand. She introduces you as her gardener, he barely looks your way. They walk together through the gardens, shoulder to shoulder, talking quietly. You try to convince Kerberos to stay inside with you but he growls until you open the door and let him chase after them. He trots besides Hades, who rests a proprietary hand on one of his heads.

She cooks Hades an elaborate dinner while he relaxes on the porch with a wheat beer. You help her prepare, but you’re not sure if you’re supposed to eat with them so you slink away before it’s finished. You want to go talk to the bleeding hearts, but the bleeding hearts are dead, so instead you go to bed. You wish you had a door for your arch. You want to be in a small, closed-off space. You curl up in a tight ball, pull the blankets over your head, try to pretend you are sitting in your closet at home far away from chimeras, gods of the dead, resurrectionists.

You wake to Persephone saying your name. She’s standing in the archway. It’s done, she says, and you nod, you have no words. After she leaves, you finally let yourself cry, soundless, until you fall asleep again. When you wake a second time, you tiptoe out of your room and find the house empty except for Kerberos, sleeping by the foot of her bed. On the kitchen table, a note reads: Had to head back up, but Hades said to call if you have any issues.

You walk outside barefoot, search the gardens until you find the chimera’s body sprawled on the ground near the wisteria tree. It is both larger and smaller than you imagined; more grotesque and more human. You drape yourself across its goat torso, rest your head on its lion mane. The fur is coarser than you would have thought. You are almost envious of the chimera, of the fact that it no longer has to live in its body.

A familiar heaviness settles into your bones after this. You try to get the garden back in order, try to salvage what is left. But it is harder and harder to do the things you are supposed to do. Kerberos gets restless, but you don’t have the energy to take him on walks. One day he bites you, leaving dark red indentations on your hand. You cry so hard you burst a blood vessel in your eye. You are beginning to look like you belong to the underworld.

This time, when Persephone returns, she takes one look at you and folds you into her arms. She’s brought treats, junk food you haven’t had in ages—Nutella, Milky Ways, Mars Bars. The two of you stay up late and she tells you the latest family gossip, who’s sleeping with whom. She says, You’ll never guess who I’ve been corresponding with. She says, That whole thing with the chimera made me think that maybe I misjudged him.

Soon Hades is around more nights than not. He has a whole realm and you don’t understand why he’s here so much, but it’s not your house, you don’t get to decide. You help her cook, sprinkle pomegranate seeds across the top of a salad. She brings him another beer. At dinner, she asks him about his work, about his family, about his work again. You want to say, but what about me? This is the wrong question though: Even when he’s not around, the two of you never talk about you. You want to say, but what about her? What about her work, what about her family? You want to say, without her, girls wouldn’t even know it was possible for women to become resurrectionists, much less queens of the underworld. But you don’t say anything. After dinner, they go into her bedroom, leave you with the dishes. When you go upstairs, there’s a cloth draped across her archway like a door.

The seventh time she brings you back, you don’t remember what happened. It was just a little disagreement the two of you got into, she says. He can’t always control his temper, it’s hereditary. You want to know the details, but you can see she’s upset, so you put a hand on her shoulder, tell her it’s okay, you’re back now, everything is fine. She rests her head against your hand. What would I do without you? she says, and you can’t help it, you still glow at the words.

The eighth time she brings you back, she asks you why you keep picking fights. You apologize, don’t answer. The truth is that he reminds you of the men in your college philosophy classes, always so entirely certain of their own rightness, so eager to advocate for the devil. You can’t understand what she sees in him.

She starts going to Hades’s place, taking Kerberos with her. You know it’s your own fault, but still you resent him. Alone in the house, you try to sleep through as many hours of the day as you can.

Instead of tending the plants, you lie beneath the wisteria tree in the spot where the chimera’s body once lay. The shades linger nearby, but even when you offer them your blood, they have nothing to say to you. The plants that weren’t killed by the chimera are dying of neglect. The wolfsbane drops all its flowers, the nightshade berries shrivel. You dread what she’ll say when she notices, but she doesn’t say anything. The silence growing between you is the only thing that’s flourishing.

The ninth time she brings you back, you can’t stop thinking about the sword, once again hanging above the fireplace, the weight of it, the way it is like a door to another room but not one you are allowed to stay in.

The eleventh time she brings you back, you keep your eyes closed. You understand your mistake now. You had thought you were like Persephone, someone who spent time in two realms. But actually you are the chimera: a being created of conflicting parts, always at odds with itself. The reflection of a monster, not a god.

The fifteenth time she brings you back, you beg her to resurrect the chimera, to give it another chance. It would be a cruelty, she says. Something like that isn’t meant to exist.

The twenty-second time she brings you back, you open your eyes. You try to remember the way it felt the first time, how you were overflowing with happiness, or maybe it was gratitude. She is looking at you the way so many others have over the years, a look that means: What have you done with the version of yourself that I was promised?

I’m no use to you anymore, you say. Her eyes are pools of disappointment. So many lives later and you still want her to love you. I’m just afraid of letting you down, you say.

You would never do that, she says.

You lose count. You are here then gone here gone here gone here. It is like blinking your eyes. It is like peeling off your own skin and finding an identical copy of yourself underneath.

Here gone here gone here—

You walk outside into the wreck of the gardens and lie down on the ground where the chimera’s body once lay. The dirt is damp against your cheek. The flowers and the mushrooms are gone, all that’s left is churned soil and dead leaves. Except there, across from you, a splash of yellow. Almost the same color as the chimera’s mane. Later, you look them up in one of Persephone’s books of plants. They’re not named after the lion’s mane, but rather its teeth: dents-de-lion, for their jagged leaves. You water them with salt. You tell them only sad stories. This is all you have left to offer; the parts of yourself no one has ever had use for. Each day they are there, waiting for you. Ferociously alive.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from K.C. Mead-Brewer during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: K.T. Elms

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors