The Queen of the Underworld checks her apple watch. There's a selfie, a question about a choice of shirt. It's girl with a portal in her chest, who is always bothering the Queen. The girl has a date tonight. The Queen types half a reply, deletes it, tries again. "Have fun!" she sends.

The shirt in the selfie has a loose-woven crochet motif and is worn unbuttoned over a black singlet on skin that has drunk too much sunshine. Beneath that skin, a tropical forest blooms with ancient tree-ferns and hibiscus, within that forest is a heart and a portal to the Underworld. The girl paints strawberry balm on lips that taste of ash. She tugs the singlet so that it sits a little lower than her jade pendant, and wonders if her breasts would bleed sugar for the right girl or if that only happens when the Queen commands her senses. The girl checks her reflection, checks her phone, sends a love-heart emoji reply. Her skin buzzes like a tree full of cicadas as she leaves her apartment.

When the girl with a forest in her chest steps off the tram, she pulls out her phone, orients the screen-map to the streetscape: cars queueing across the intersection, icecream shops with their melting cafe umbrellas, crying seagulls, the glimmering ocean. "Wish me luck!" she texts.

The Queen of the Underworld is pouring wine when the watch on her wrist buzzes again. She takes the watch off, without looking, throws it onto her pillow. She has the whole house to herself and wants no interruptions. She lights a candle and pours wine.

The girl in the crochet shirt is perched awkwardly on her bar stool, tracing runes into the condensation on her glass of cider. To her date, the girl looks like a waterbird perched on a pylon, wings open, waiting for an uplift of warm air. "Are you shy? Am I not what you expected?" the woman teases.

"I'm ok." The girl buries her blush by taking a sip. Strawberry balm and flecks of grey smudge the rim of the glass. "Takes me a while to warm up..." Her date has green eyes, curly hair and a tattoo of a passionfruit vine climbing up her left wrist.

"Where did you grow up? Around here?"

The girl takes another drink. "In the Old Town," she begins, wondering if she also needs to explain the scent of mud brick, the cool of it, or the way wheat grows wild and unattended, the way the oldest fig trees have the sweetest fruit. "So I can speak the Old language and read you all the ancient texts. Most are boring, some are sexy." The cicadas in her skin hush.

The Queen of the Underworld prepares supper for one. Bitter chocolate and blackberries that bleed over a wedge of soft cheese. Cured meat, pungent with white mould and pepper. Two slices of rye bread baked with garlic and olives. She has drunk two glasses of wine, and she doesn't want to eat.

The girl with a jade pendant hanging under her black singlet scoops a mussel from its shell and asks her date about lost loves. She savours the hot and sour sauce, the way her lips tingle. She has started thinking about kissing the passionfruit tattoo. The jade pendant tumbles from her singlet and swings back and forth against her chest. "Beach walk?"

The Queen of the Underworld has danced her way from singing to sobbing. The Queen has turned her wineglass into a spiral staircase. She descends, running her fingers down the crystal walls. She knows at the bottom she will find Lethe. Tonight she will bathe, perhaps drown. That human girl with the portal in her heart will not find her then, will not bother her with tea and honeybread, will not bother her by placing cool hands on the Queen's grief-fevered temple.

The girl with hibiscus blooming in her forest has taken off her shoes. She holds hands with a woman whose passionfruit tattoo is growing tender new shoots. The ocean holds its breath for their first kiss. The woman with the passionfruit tattoo breathes the scent of forest—hibiscus flower, tree-fern spore. "Now," the woman asks, her voice rich as honey, dark as a beehive, "who are you, and whom have you loved?"

The Queen sits at the bottom of the glass stairs, casting tears like pebbles into the river. Lethe shimmers before her, blabbering, murmuring: "Who are you? Who have you loved? Who are you? How have you loved? Who are you, that has come here for love?"

The girl in the crochet shirt opens her mouth to answer. The forest in her chest inhales, pressing her ribs hard against her skin. The fire in her heart leaps and burns in her throat. Ash falls from her lips as she states her name.

The Queen leans forward, holding her hand over the river, relishing the burn of hot oil marking her skin. "You know who I am," she slurs, "I have come here for—" The rim of the wineglass cracks.

The woman with the passionfruit tattoo sees the sea turn to stone. The throb of distant music cuts. Even the seagull is frozen, fish still writhing in its beak.

"I am servant to the Queen of the Underworld, most days," the girl says, and shrugs.

The wineglass, the staircase, and the stone sea shatter.


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