Grass. Grass should’ve been easy and plentiful; her frustration made her thoughts blur and snap like thread breaking.

Persephone leaned her head against the willow and sobbed, her breath coming sharp and dry in her throat. Her failure in some ways was more painful than the whipping had been.

Still, with no other end in sight, she persevered. Her extremities had gone numb by the time she caught it—something—a whisper that might have been everything, or nothing at all.

She strained to hear it. Gradually, the whispers of the grasses filled her awareness—she listened to their manifold complaints, their sleepy chatter. The horses had been unexpected; none had grazed here for quite some time.

She smiled as she listened. She was not alone, then; could never be alone, not when she could touch the living ground. Was it living? Or were these the ghosts of grass?

The plants did not know the difference, in any case. She withdrew from them and reached out for the next largest thing.

Ox-eye daisies spread through the grass, their flower heads dried-out husks. It would soon be harvest time, on the surface, and perhaps here as well, if the underworld followed the same seasons.

She could not move her hands, but she imagined herself with palms outstretched, summoning the spirit of spring into the ground. She was not sure that anything had happened until a plant brushed the side of her foot with a white halo of petals.

Oh! She would’ve leaned down to pick the flower if she’d been able. Giddy with elation, she longed to touch more: all the living things that grow here, cypresses and ferns, poppies and figs.

All this time, she’d been trying to make the land bend to her will, and all she’d had to do was listen?

She leaned her forehead against the willow’s trunk. It had been a seedling before she’d been born, a young sapling when she’d been learning to walk. Its thoughts were slow to change, and it did not know her.

“Please,” Persephone said, her fingers spread against its branches. “Please help me.”

Its leaves rustled in the breeze. It did not understand her plight, only knowing she was in its shade, beneath its canopy.

For long years, it had stood above the black palace on the horizon. Through the earth, it had felt the footsteps of the dead marching by, two by two, the restless making the pilgrimage to Lethe, to drink of its waters.

She felt the network of its roots stretching into the void beneath her, its bone-white capillaries seeking moisture. Its hold upon the ground was absolute. It could not be moved.

There was something else growing there, near the base of the tree. Persephone went very still, opening her eyes in shock. “No. I cannot,” she said to herself.