The love who rode without him

The ground danced beneath Orpheus’ feet, delicate at first, then angered and violent and determined to unbuckle his boots. “You sure it won’t kill me?” he asked as Hades barreled toward him, its smokestacks emitting sadness, its narrow pilot deflecting hope, its grey headlight obscuring everything in its path.

“So what if it does?” Hermes patted him on the back. “You’ll be a passenger either way.”

A long, deep whistle slithered from the train, uttering a tone better suited to coddle one to sleep than to arouse alarm. Orpheus cradled his lyre, readied his voice, and prayed for the muse to guide him. And though the infernal locomotive emitted a sorrowful lullaby, Orpheus’ lamentation reached depths of gloom heard neither in this world nor the next.

For this was a song for his love. The love who rode without him.

So consumed was the bard by his own melody that Hades failed to seduce him into an eternal slumber, and Orpheus boarded the speeding train, alive, awake, and wholly unscathed. And when the cold autumn breeze was replaced by the colder, damper air of the first carriage, a restless voice suffocated his senses.

“Ticket,” it demanded from beneath an impossibly old, white beard.

“I can only pay in song, I’m afraid. But I’ve been told I’m quite good.” Orpheus taxed his mind for words that rhymed with Charon and found enough to fill three verses. The old conductor swayed his broad shoulders to the rhythm as his dead eyes fixated on nothing, or perhaps everything, except Orpheus, who went unnoticed into the next car.

“Down, boy,” he barked at the guard dog to no avail. Its three heads were each eyeing a limb as its draconic tail constricted his vocal cords.

Orpheus carefully tightened the lyre's leftmost string until the tension could no longer bear it, and he plucked a note in an octave so high, he himself could not hear it. But Cerberus crashed into walls and windows and burrowed into himself, trying to muffle the sound in all six ears. Whimpering, death’s best friend took refuge under a nearby seat, and Orpheus proceeded through the unending train.

Some cars were brimming with souls: painless, joyless, and listless. Others were reserved for single passengers: one relentlessly trying to squeeze an oversized suitcase into an overhead bin, another whose innards were being pecked out by a bird of prey, and a one-eyed man with a dirty monocle struggling to complete a puzzle while hanging upside down.

But sitting in a car made of gold and bone was Hades.

Orpheus pleaded with the god in the only way he knew how. Through meter and rhyme, through rhythm and treble, he begged for his beloved to be allowed to walk among the living once again.

Those who accompanied the god shed their immortal tears, and choirs of gentle sobs serenaded every carriage, but Hades simply offered an empty smile.

“This train only moves forward,” said the god, “I suggest you do too.”