Persephone’s Purple

“Cousin, you seem to be missing your husband!” Aphrodite giggled and gestured at the purple pansies popping up in my wake. “Perhaps a private meeting with Dionysus or a stroll through your garden with Pan would. . . help you focus.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I replied as a field of violets burst into bloom around me. “Circe will make a potion for me. And some of the nymphs can gather the violets and take them to the kitchen. Sugared violets will be divine on the pomegranate cakes.”

She dove into the cold spring, resurfacing in front of me at the edge and lowering her voice. “A cup cannot do what a staff can, and your energy is waning. Your body needs seed.”

“Ditey! Watch your mouth!” I felt my face turn several shades of pomegranate.

Circe joined us, auburn hair bound in a loose braid, ivory skin gleaming against the deep cerulean of her maillot. She looked at my face, then pointedly at the ground. “Cousin, I think Ditey is right. Your. . . situation appears to be a bit far gone for a potion.”

A passionflower vine snaked up the porch railings, bursting into bloom as it grew. Orchids, hydrangea, iris, and all varieties of purple flowers formed a wild bed of blooms around me.

“Oh, this definitely calls for Pan. I imagine he’ll be waiting by your bath by the time you get there—no doubt he can smell your . . . passion.” Aphrodite gave Circe a knowing look.

“Persephone, now!” Circe grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the new flower bed while a great vine of eggplant formed, enormous fruit bursting through gigantic blossoms veined with purple.

Pan was indeed waiting by my bath.

“Quickly, Queen Persephone, into the water before we’re in a purple jungle.” Pan practically bleated his instructions.

I dove in, and every amethyst in my bath glowed like it was alive. When I resurfaced, I was surrounded by lavender water lilies. Pan joined me in the water, and Circe slipped away to make a potion for me.

Pan instructed me to close my eyes and think of white flowers, explaining that they didn’t have a chance of materializing, but the thought should slow if not stop the violent eruptions of violet I was causing, and he suggested giving Aphrodite a private bath; otherwise he, Dionysus, the nymphs, Apollo, and Ares would be exhausted by nightfall, reminding me that none of us are immune to the other’s powers.

Circe returned and nodded at Pan, giving each of us a potion. Pan raised his glass to me and drained his, pomegranate seeds and all.

“Quickly, this is a dual potion.” Circe chided.

I drank mine perhaps more quickly than Pan. It was the most delicious concoction I’d ever tasted, pomegranate and jalapeño with lemon, lavender, blueberry, and honey. My limbs loosened, and I dove back under to approach Circe at the edge of my beautiful bath, now with all the stones glowing—quartz of all colors, tiger eye, jade, ruby, aquamarine and bloodstone, sapphires, diamonds, onyx all glowing beneath the water without any light dancing through the lilies.

“May I have more?” I asked when I resurfaced, noting the magnolia blossoms were the color of lilacs, and the gardenias glowed like thistle in the distance.

“Not just now. I believe you may want to tend to your other needs.” She raised a graceful arm in Pan’s direction, and as I turned my head, the air changed.

The pungent aroma of goat became sandalwood and cypress, and I gasped because it couldn’t be, but there was Hades, droplets of water clinging to his cashmere-soft beard and mustache as well as his velvet skin. I swam to him.

He left the steps and met me halfway across my bath, the lilies shying away from him because of what the mortals say. They’d be wiser to fear Apollo’s ego than my husband’s silken touch.

As he took me in his arms, my garden breathed with me, and daffodils opened among the irises while peonies loosened their buds beneath the wildly artificial-looking passionflowers. Daisies, tulips, and petunias opened their blossoms and sunned their radiant faces in the breeze. Roses, camellias, and azaleas filled in the spaces between the trees. Gladiolus, hyacinth, and delphinium fluttered open in cascades of bloom climbing pillared stalks while forsythia burst into fountains of buttery petals spilling down slender limbs, and callas, cannas, and stargazers peeled their petals back, stamen and pistils erect, bursting with pollen that filled the air in a field of color as far as the eye could see. The flowers climbed the distant hills, covering the curves in deep blue and purple blooms reaching all the way to Mount Olympus, the vines climbing Zeus’s tower, my love conquering the entire earth with velvet petals.

In the bath, the water and Hades’s skin were heavenly on mine, and I didn’t take my mouth off his to let him speak. Ferns and moss appeared, dewy and tenderly green, condensation from the steamy bath forming a thin veil of mist on the fronds, eventually flowing from the leaves and the trees like rain. I filled my lungs with their green fragrance as deeply as I could, all the way into myself. My hands were full of Hades’s submerged skin as I cloaked his body with mine. The cypress and cedar grew up in the bath and beside it. Their great, thick trunks rising into the air, needles bursting from the limbs, bursting and bursting in an endless explosion of green giving us the privacy, the intimacy I craved. I felt it inside myself, the sap rising like honey flowing up from the hive, pulled by a force greater than gravity. Intricately patterned orchids with deep violet centers fading into delicate white edges splayed their petals against the great trees of the densely conifered bath. The rough bark and soft petals blurred into a melting sepia wet with rain, and a pair of hawks wheeled on the rising thermals, gliding so high and wide they disappeared. Hades growled into my mouth and I lost myself in him.

We never left my bath, and by the time Circe returned with the potion I had begged for, my garden was breathing gently, bees gathering nectar in a buzzing drone while Hades fed me pomegranate seeds, one by one, just like the first time.

I filled my mouth with the potion as soon as my husband and I raised our glasses to each other. It was vile, bitter medicine with quinine and cumin, juniper and onion, fenugreek with cilantro, habanero, garlic, and horseradish. I dove under the water to fill my mouth with bathwater. When I surfaced at the other end, my husband was gone, Pan where he had been before I drank the potion, biting into a pomegranate like it was an apple.