Eurydice in the Twenty-First Century by Lev H Butler

I have heard the myth of Orpheus, who charmed Death himself to free his true love. Orpheus, with his lithe fingers dancing over the strings of a lyre and his mother’s skills tattooed on him for all to see. His love, Eurydice, taken by a snake meant for him, and released from Hades because of a mortal devotion.

Novels should be written about the admiration in Orpheus’s eyes when he looked at his Eurydice. I swear, I can feel his gaze even now, thousands of years after the lovers’ death. She eclipsed the moon in beauty, her hair taking the place of the night’s sky and the stars forming the silhouette of her fingers as they reached towards him. Only for her would Orpheus stop his playing, if only to skate his fingertips over the small dip of her pulse point and press a kiss to the vein.

A mortal’s love nearly cheated death, only fumbled because of the poor man’s excitement to see his love again. He had been convinced he had done it, he had saved her, saved their life, and yet again he’d watched her fingers disintegrate into stardust on his palm as her soul blew back to the cavern of the Underworld, and he could only wail.

His cries broke Hades’ heart, and all the gods above, and it’s said that the world was drowned by Aphrodite’s tears for years to come. All of that strife for a single failed love story thousands of years ago. As if love doesn’t fail every day. As if love itself is not the cause for failure.

For my tale, you will call me Eurydice, and my Orpheus is nothing like the one before. My Orpheus lazes. He is entitled. He claims to be an entrepreneur, and yet he conducts his business from the walk-in closet of my one-bedroom apartment and puts his share of rent on a growing tab that he made for himself.

My Orpheus has a ring of beer around his sweaty lips and hair that leaves pimples on the back of his neck. He hasn’t touched an instrument since his third-grade piano recital. When he looked at me last, his eyes were at my chest and missed the last ever smile I would orchestrate for him. No one would write a novel about our love story. No one would write anything about my Orpheus, except maybe an early obituary for a drunk driving accident.

When the cancer was found on my ovary, too late to solve with chemotherapy and too integrated to remove through surgery, my Orpheus didn’t dawn his guitar and charm the medical system into providing me with a cure. He didn’t send me to bed with a kiss on the forehead and a promise of safety.

Instead, he packed up my closet and wrote me a note that fit on one side of an index card. He left his tab open and disappeared. He must not have been very successful after he left me, though, because his name never appeared during my rage-fueled Google searches. Though he had never been very good at entrepreneurship, in my opinion, so I was less than surprised.

The disadvantage of a Eurydice without her Orpheus, however, was that no one charmed the Ferryman for me. Nobody's music accompanied me into the dark. No one's fingers interlocked with mine and held on until the very second my soul slipped below.

I greeted the Ferryman alone, my chin held high like my father taught me and my vertebrae perfectly aligned.

The Ferryman held his hand out expectantly. Silently. The gray shroud where his face should have been didn’t move with an inhale or exhale. I admit that I was scared. He knew it, too. His demanding hand turned welcoming. I imagined his eyes had softened.

"Come aboard, little one," he croaked. His voice was covered in cobwebs and dust. Minuscule spiders crawled through the canyons between the goosebumps on my arms.

“I don’t have any payment,” I responded, because it seemed the sensible thing to say. The Ferryman chuckled. He waved me onto his small canoe anyway.

I had to curl into the space between the seats on the boat because I was sure that if I dared to perch on one of the benches, I would send us tumbling into the Unknown. I say “Unknown” because whatever surface the Ferryman’s canoes traveled on was too thick to be water, and yet too vaporous to be oil. It settled like steam that was anchored to the floor. Ripples shot out from the hull of the canoe, skipping over the surface.

The Ferryman did not speak. He did not give me a name. He only stared ahead as he rowed the boat in an infuriatingly rhythmic habit, his single oar never once scratching along the rim of the canoe.

The boat ride was long and uncomfortable; my back ached, my joints protesting the cramped position. I hadn't known dead people still had the ability to feel discomfort. Which, retroactively speaking, was stupid of me. If dead people felt no pain, why was anyone scared of dying?

Long after my nose had gone numb from the frigid chill wafting off of the surface of The Unknown, The Ferryman slowed the canoe to a stop.

“This is your stop,” the shroud told me. I unfolded myself and stretched my limbs and—oh, I wasn’t sore? How strange. Maybe the ride hadn’t been as long as I had thought.

There was a convenient pathway, perfectly paved, that led me from the Ferryman’s dock and up the craggy obsidian bluff, along the coastal ridge and back behind the cliff side, to a canyon. My legs did not ache anymore, and I found that my chin seemed to hold itself on its own accord. I was light as a feather, (or maybe a soul?) and I was wandering throughout the realm of Hades.

As if thinking of his name summoned him, my path was blocked, rather inconsiderately, by a man in a cream linen suit. His cheeks had the healthy flush of a blood-bearing body. His dark hair was combed through and the longer curls were pulled back into a neat bun at the nap of the man’s neck.

The man’s nails were painted red, like the juice of a pomegranate, and chipped at the tips. His left canine was slightly crooked when he smiled. A delicate gold chain wrapped thrice around his neck, plastering to the divots of his collarbone.

This man was the closest thing I had seen to life since my death, which was ironic, because I was sure I was now standing before Hades, the god who had blurred the rules of life and death for two mortal lovers so many centuries ago. Hades, the god now staring at me with furrowed brows.

“You are a Eurydice,” he told me, as if I hadn’t known. I nodded, too afraid to speak and even more afraid to leave the god unanswered.

“And where is your Orpheus?”

That, I decided, most likely requires a verbal response.

“There is no Orpheus,” I told the god. “It’s only me.”

Hades shook his head. He clicked his tongue. He rubbed at the crease between his eyes and sighed.

“That cannot be right,” he protested. “There is always an Orpheus to save a Eurydice.”

I stared at him. How many times had this cycle run its course? Why did my Orpheus have to be the one to break it?

“What happens to me now?” I asked Hades. The god studied me, and I tried not to shrink. I was sure he heard the quivering cadence of my voice. I had no disillusions of this man’s power, and he surely must have known it.

Hades tapped his foot and, if he was wearing one, I bet he would have checked his watch. Whatever deadline he had must have been approaching, for his next statement came in a tired rush.

“I guess that’s up to you.”

I remember blinking.

“How is it up to me?”

“Well,” Hades reasoned. “You’re the only Eurydice like you, with no Orpheus to come and save you. And while Orpheus never succeeds in saving his love—doing so would be unnatural—your love never even tried.”

I’m not sure if his words were meant to depress me, but all they did was stoke the tentative ashes of my anger. How dare my Orpheus leave me down here, with no chance of escape? He’d stolen my odds, and even if my fate was set, and I would never again see the land Above, it would have been nice to have the illusion of hope to keep me going.

“You’re saying I have a choice?”

“I suppose I am,” Hades mused. He laughed a bit, to himself. “A strange concept; mortals having choices.” Then the god waved his hand, clearing the air.

“You can stay here,” he decided. “And take your place in my land, never having any chance of escape.”

I tried to hold my breath as I listened to the god, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to hold on to anything more than a shallow pant.

“Or,” Hades continued. I felt myself rise taller with anticipation. “I will release you from my domain until you find your true Orpheus, and return to me as the Fates dictate all Eurydice’s must.”

Seconds or minutes or decades later when I made my decision, Hades’ eyebrow crept towards his hairline in something that looked reminiscent of approval. There was no conceivable way that he had known what choice I would make, as I myself had hardly decided before the words were spewing from my lips, and yet I sensed that he’d known all along. Somehow he had predicted me, despite my aberration from my namesakes’ previous fates.

“I will see you again soon, Eurydice,” Hades told me. I bowed my head in gratitude, and then as quick as he’d come, the god was gone, and I was left to find my own way out of the Underworld. It turns out, I didn’t need an Orpheus after all. Not now, at least.

I flagged down the Ferryman alone, who chuckled when he saw me, and once again did not ask for my payment. The boat ride away from death was nearly pleasant; the Ferryman wasn’t one for conversation, and neither was I, so we sat in silence, sailing over the foggy surface.

When the keel of the canoe sloped onto the bank of the river, and a small circle of sunlight could be seen through the darkness of the Underworld, I thanked the Ferryman and leapt from his boat. I practically skipped back to life, careless of the loose rocks beneath my feet. I stumbled, scraped the skin of my knee and nearly wept with joy when blood beaded at the wound. If anything was undeniable proof of life, it was blood, I decided.

So, I pranced back into the land Above, and I burned the note my Orpheus left. I covered the smell of his body spray with pollen from drying flowers hung in bouquets around my home. I cut my hair above my ears and cried about it instantly, but it would grow back, I knew, and then I cried once again.

I reconquered my closet and bought too many clothes, more than I would wear in even my longest lifetime, and I decided that I would put off my search for a new Orpheus. My love, my death. Wherever he was, he could wait for me, and I knew that I could certainly wait for him.