Fuck, Eurydice thinks. Cresting the hill next to Hades' palace is her husband, clutching his lyre like an anxious, first-time busker. He looks put off, like he regrets his heroics, his crown of laurels drooping, his hair resembling hair for once, and not a lump of frozen lemon jelly. She feels a migraine begin to bloom.

He finds her inside one of Hades' impressive rooms, resting her hot forehead against a cool window. He chants her name and scoops her off the ground. Always, he has conflated the last two syllables of her name into one, not duh-see but dise. Hades raises an eyebrow, and finally Eurydice can cry too, burying her face into Orpheus' wet neck.

During her first week in the Underworld, she had missed Orpheus. His warrior body, which had sweetly melted over the years; the animals that swayed their heads to his strumming. She didn't care that he had bedded more than half of the Naiads living in the river by their house, or that his poems were bad. Most nights, he played his lyre while she sat on his lap. He called her "my ear." Now, he leans closely to whisper something, and she flinches. He searches her face as if he is looking for more lines.

Hades loves games, which is why he tells Orpheus not to look back at Eurydice as they leave the Underworld. Sometimes, she plays Scrabble with Hades in the Asphodel Meadows, where star-shaped flowers dust the board and their shoulders. He finds smart words that begin with q's and z's. These games are a betrayal of Persephone, who offers Eurydice pomegranates and wears high collars to hide bite marks. In Eurydice's stomach, the seeds squirm, like a colony of hatching fish eggs.

As they exchange goodbyes, Hades' eyes suction onto hers.

Orpheus leads Eurydice through the Underworld by the hand, but they say nothing. He loosely dangles his lyre. Sweat weeps through the fabric by his armpits. They take turns kicking pebbles into lava pits. She gets a cramp in her belly, but doesn't ask to stop. He stares ahead, and she watches the hairs at his nape undulate in the unpleasantly hot breeze.

Years later, Orpheus will tell romantics whom he'd like to woo that he looked back because he missed his wife's face. Other times, he'll attribute his lapse in judgment to the Sun, which appeared in their eyeline so suddenly and blindingly that they lost balance, tumbling into each other. If he is drunk enough, he will confess that he didn't believe Eurydice was following him. He'll repeat: "Her hand didn't feel like her hand."

Orpheus will be half-right. As the land of the living swings into sight, and they are once more cast against the lush green backdrop of their marriage, Eurydice thinks only of the asphodel trees, which shaded her and Hades as they fucked, still mostly dressed, he stretching her name to six, seven syllables until it snapped like an elastic waistband. Her hand is damp, limp, and she can't take another step. She calls after her husband, hoping that just once, he will be the one to listen.

.