Open to Source
by Micah Schatz
The Rape of Persephone
By Melody Mansfield
Regret. That most powerful poison. Persephone shivered among the skeletonized carcasses that littered the floor of their kingdom. Her memories flew back to the warm, fennel-filled days of her youth, to the harmonious life she had shared with other tumbling flower beetles like herself, to the happy chatter of her sisters as they tumbled together from flower to flower, to that one good soul who had pursued her, loved her, left her.
Oh Dan. How foolish she’d been. So full of misguided righteousness, so smug in her beliefs. To think herself too good for a common dung beetle. And then, there’d been his smell. At the time, she couldn’t see herself permanently coupled with anyone who smelled like that, who lived like that. Though now, she thought, nudging aside the wrinkled shell of a caterpillar, she’d welcome the smell of good clean dung over this sickly-sweet odor of death. And not natural death either. Murder. Most foul.
She’d been attracted to Hale mainly because he was so very different from Dan and because Dan had, she saw now, wounded her vanity and hurt her heart a bit too. Hale was nothing like Dan. Nothing solid or reliable about Hale. He was a whirlwind of emotions and he’d swept her off her tarses. Hale was glamorous, in that bad-boy way that had quickly lost its charm. He was dark and swarthy and the first time she saw him she tumbled down, down, into an abyss of love. And that was just what it was, as it turned out. A great gaping chasm of desperate attraction. He let her fall, too, and then he did all he could to keep her down with him. He made her quiver, at first, with his very nearness. She’d mistaken that for love.
And that whole rape/kidnapping story – just a myth she’d invented to keep from disappointing her parents. She knew there’d be words if they’d known the truth. So she cast herself as the victim in their eyes, when it was actually she who’d sought him out, been drawn to the danger in his scent, to the intoxicating novelty of his very genus. An Assassin Bug. She’d never known anyone like him.
How long ago that seemed. She missed her mother.
But her breeding ran deep and she’d been raised with the understanding that one finished what one started, and she was the one who’d started this whole romance and it wasn’t his fault that she’d led him to believe she could be happy like this. It had been different in the beginning. Back then, she hadn’t understood that the sloughs of insects that decorated his chambers had once been living, fully metamorphosed individuals. She hadn’t fully understood Hale’s role in all that, or that his powerfully curved rostrum – the very one she’d once caressed appreciatively – was the instrument he used to poison and suck the life-juice out of these beings.
But once she got it, she got it. And then everything changed.
Hale couldn’t understand her repugnance. “I thought you liked my tools,” he said. “I thought that made you hot.” And when she shook her pronotum no, and backed away, his aspect became menacing. Hurt pride, she told herself, and strove to be a better partner, but always, after that, if she did the smallest thing wrong – stacked the corpses inexpertly or worse, got nervous and started tumbling around – he would thrust his rostrum in her face and say “I’d hate like hell to have to use this on you, baby.” And then as a type of apology, follow it up with, “you know that, now, don’t you?”
So Persephone became more and more nervous, needless to say. All day when he was gone, she would strive to control her tumbling habit. She trained herself to freeze, when she most wanted to tumble. When she succeeded in sublimating her most primal instincts, she’d reward herself with small memory trips to springtime and family and Dan’s amorous attentions. But when she failed, she made herself tumble over and over the stinking carcasses and she’d admonish herself sternly. “See! That’s what you get for being stupid and undisciplined. That’s what you deserve for not appreciating your life when you had it.” She was starting to dislike herself a great deal. She sometimes hoped that Hale would just go ahead and pierce her shapely femur with his beak and suck out her life-juice too. He’d already sucked out the best part of her.
In front of others, however, Persephone always strove to appear every inch the queen of Hale’s kingdom. There were things that happened between a male and a female that were simply not to be shared. And besides, she’d once confided her sorrows to an Ambush Bug named Steven, having mistaken his bright yellow coat for evidence of kindness. But far from saving her, he’d turned around and spilled it all to Hale. Which resulted, unfortunately for him, in Hale’s ire and in Steven’s subsequent skewering, but even more unfortunately for Persephone, because that evening Hale cornered her and hissed at her that he’d never let her go. Never.
So Persephone quickly learned to avoid rousing the chivalry of any visiting male. There was simply no place for heroes in that cold kingdom and nothing mattered anymore anyway. Only Hale. And he was doing the best he could. Not his fault she kept on making him angry. She would change. She’d do better. Before her, behind her, above her. Only Hale. For all of eternity. Her life, her soul, her entire existence would thereafter be in Hale.
Then, on one bright, cold morning, an unlikely visitor appeared at her chamber. He was a particularly handsome Ladybug. “Name’s Leslie,” he told her. “I know, I know. That’s a female’s name. But that’s part of the reason I’m traveling,” he said.
Persephone momentarily forgot herself and nearly tumbled over the threshold. “I beg your pardon,” she said, ashamed of her lapse. She knew she shouldn’t invite him in but was so flustered by her tumble back into tumbling, that she felt she had no choice. “Please,” she said, stepping back so he could enter. “I can see that you are a gentleman.”
“Am I?” he said, entering. “That may be part of the problem too.”
Persephone was perplexed. Not only at his words, but at his manner. “Yes, a fine Southern gentleman, I do believe,” she stammered. Unlike every other visitor they’d ever entertained, Leslie did not even seem to notice the corpses stacked high against the wall.
“Lovely abode,” said Leslie.
Persephone wondered what he was seeing. “Thank you,” she said, then added, “You must know my husband? Hale?”
“Must I?” said Leslie. He moved in closer and whispered words that sounded like a song. “I fell because of wisdom, but was not destroyed: through her I dived into the great sea, and in those depths I seized a wealth-bestowing pearl.”
Persephone felt something relax and realign itself within her structure. She almost laughed. She saw something like springtime reflected in the shiny red of Leslie’s elytra. Perhaps she could talk to him. Perhaps he would listen.
“The Queen of Sheba wrote that,” Leslie explained. “Thousands of years ago.”
Persephone didn’t understand, and feared she might tumble again, but just then Hale burst into the chamber, dragging a half-drained cockroach corpse behind him.
“Help me with this,” he snapped at Persephone, before he saw their visitor. “And who the hell are you,” he said to Leslie. He shot an angry glare at Persephone.
Leslie stepped in immediately to help Hale drag his burden into the living chamber. “Wow,” said Leslie. “That’s a beauty.”
Hale eyed him warily. “What the hell do you know about cockroaches?”
“Nothing,” said Leslie, cheerfully. “I don’t know much about anything, as a matter of fact. I have so much to learn.” He looked from Hale, to Persephone, and back again to Hale. Then he spoke in his song voice again. “I climbed the rope to the boat of understanding.”
Hale laughed. Persephone felt a terrible urge to tumble. She willed herself to freeze. She never knew how Hale would react to outsiders. And it would have pained her, deeply, to have had to stack Leslie’s corpse up on top of the cockroach’s tomorrow morning.
But Hale surprised her. “Stay with us,” Hale said. His eyes were bright and glinty. “There’s a lot I can teach you.”
So Leslie stayed. And Persephone was surprised again to see Leslie’s still-living bugness follow Hale out the front entry the next morning. She was a little disappointed too – not that he was living, but just that he was leaving with Hale. She was hoping he might stay and shower her with more of his song-words.
Hale and Leslie came back that evening with a plump, still-twitching termite. Leslie held it still while Hale siphoned off its juices. The night after that, they returned with just a tiny tick. And the night after that, nothing at all. But they entered in high spirits, nonetheless.
“Where’d you go today?” Persephone asked, hoping to elicit a little evening conversation.
“What the hell do you care,” Hale shot back. But Leslie mollified him with a glance.
“It was something,” Leslie began. “Really something.” And he proceeded to tell Persephone about a lake they had visited. And a field of goldenrod. “I marveled at that light, and grasped it, and brought it up to the sun,” he sang.
“I want to come with you!” Persephone said, before she thought.
“You’ll go where I tell you to go,” growled Hale.
“Lighten up,” Leslie said to Hale. Persephone waited for the explosion, but it didn’t come. If anything, Hale seemed pacified by Leslie’s laid-back attitude. Persephone started to tumble in confusion, but stopped herself. A clod of dirt fell suddenly from their ceiling, nearly hitting her. “You okay?” asked Leslie quickly. He scuttled to her side. A sliver of moonlight slid in through the crack.
She was fine. Just a little dazed by the changes in Hale since Leslie appeared. What was going on?
The next morning, she asked again if she could go with them to see the sky and the lake and the field of goldenrod. She braced herself for the worst from Hale, but he didn’t even answer. Instead, he nodded to Leslie who took it upon himself to explain, gently, why that wouldn’t be a good idea.
So she stayed alone, again, in the dark chamber. From time to time, she glanced up at the sliver of sunlight that shone in through the crack in the ceiling. I marveled at that light, sang in her thoughts. She fell to the task of tidying corpses with more energy than usual; she was thinking, inexplicably, about springtime and fennel flowers and what real love must be like and whether or not she’d ever find out. She realized, suddenly, that while daydreaming she had been stacking the corpses in a pyramid formation. She climbed up and looked around. Half a dozen more and she would reach the sunlight. Almost. She caught a faint whiff of fennel and scurried down to carry up more cadavers, then stretched to scratch at the crack with the hard elytra of a dead carrion beetle. The opening sun warmed her senses and reactivated her survival instincts. She dragged up three more cadavers – miraculous strength! – then three more. Kept scratching at the crack until she could see more clearly. The blueness of the sky startled her to clarity. There was life out there. She smelled it in the air. Mother? And then she remembered – she could fly! She could do that, and Hale couldn’t. He wouldn’t be able to catch her. He wouldn’t be able to find her. Probably wouldn’t even miss her, if her instincts were correct about his relationship with Leslie. Yes. That was it. She saw it quite clearly then. Leslie and Hale. She had climbed that rope to the boat of understanding. Leslie learning and Hale teaching – or so they would happily delude themselves for a while. At least until Leslie got smart or Hale got hungry.
Thoughts, ideas, feelings flew in to Persephone from the crack in the mud. She scraped at the edges until the opening was the size of a small tumbling flower beetle. That’s what I am, Persephone reminded herself. It had been a long time since she’d felt that. She wasn’t an assassin bug. She didn’t belong here. She could fit through this hole. She could fly away. In her excitement, Persephone started to tumble back down the pyramid of corpses, down, down, back into her life in Hale. But she righted herself, kept her sights on the sky. She kept climbing, fighting down her instinct to tumble. She fell because of wisdom, but was not destroyed. She was glad she had trained herself. She would not tumble again. She took off quickly, without regrets. Her wings trembled at the outset, but a fresh gust of possibility carried her upward. No turning back now. No ends in sight. She could sail on that sweet air all the way to heaven.
Read an interview with Melody Mansfield at http://www.bibliobuffet.com/bb/content/view/387/198/
Read other stories from the “Bug Collection,” of which “The Rape of Persephone” is a part:
“Ephemeroptera” http://www.wildviolet.net/spring3/contributors.html
“Mantis Prayers” http://www.nthposition.com/mantisprayers.php-25K
“Victoria’s Secret” http://www.ascentaspirations.ca/contributors2.html
“The Education of Old Dan” and “Fireflies of the Vanities” http://www.geocities.com/thoughtmagazine/current_issue
“A Day in September” http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/Secure/content/cb.asp?cbid=3917
Two other stories:
“The Bulk of Men’s Brains” http://www.spillwayreview.com/archivedstories.html
“Black Out” http://www.magaera.org/Magaera/fall04/index.html-6K