Tobias Seamon
		Eurydice Reflects upon the Depths Hell is the absence of memory. Every reeking dawn, coughed up from the lung of the Pit has no clue what’s in store. Yesterday’s pig-iron tongs, Hades’ poker-faced rape, they are experienced anew every time the eyelid pall lifts. Then you’re never sure where you are or why you’re there in the first place just as a grimy devil leads you by the crotch towards the rack. And it’s always fresh, being stretched, broken, bastinadoed, sleeping it off on bent tacks. There are no familiar faces, no compatriots, no one to hang the blame on. You just assume it’s your fault to begin with. No one ever tells you anything anyway, and Hell becomes a suspension, a dread while you sprain your back on stiff chairs, wondering who’ll turn the hourglass. Then rumors abound, that someone is coming and even the jackals look nervous. But the charnel gossip never materializes, and you continue obeying orders, to hurry up and wait. Orpheus Ascending I knew full well she was following. The backward glances of asps along Hell’s mirrored corridor told me she’d kept pace. The infernal mirrors made a monster of my form: bulbous hourglass phantom, a squint-eyed swine, all in silence twisted by asps at my feet. Step after step, more mirrors. I elongated into a slack-faced worm squirming palely through the haze, and silent flies flew from my mouth. This is where Hell corrupted me, Eurydice following a phantom, a hog, serpents and maggots, and I realized she’d have followed anyone to escape Hell. So I turned the corner of my eye, enough to reveal that it was her lover that failed her not some anonymous beast. And after I looked back, I never looked back again. Instead I followed my own song of ascension upwards into the upper spheres of sound, where corrupt notes like black flies began buzzing from my tongue.