Page 6 of The Signature Dish of the Underworld

Down here, it was the thrill of getting one that had Irid agreeing to find it for Rae. That and the fact she also didn’t like Garth winning the festival every century.

“It is, and I did,” Irid said in that no-nonsense way of hers. “Well,” she continued, “Hercules did – and after that whole palava of giving them to King Eurytheus, only for Athena to return them to the garden again, it seemed fitting that one or two went missing …”

“Thank you, Irid. Really.” Rae gently scrunched up the brown paper bag again to hide the apple from view.

“What are you going to do with it?” Irid asked, leaning forward on the counter slightly. Usually, Rae would let her in on her recipes, but not this one. Not this time.

“I’m going to eat it.”

***

Back home, Rae let herself in through the only tree door painted red in the meadows.

She dropped the keys on the wooden side table and rubbed the vines that had begun to curl up and around the mirror.

“Hello, girl. Good to see you.”

The vine purred in agreement.

Rae sighed and padded down the hallway, turning right towards a small kitchen. There was only enough room for a dining table that doubled as a desk under the window, where Rae sat doing the sums of how many tokens it would take to buy the bistro off Geras night after night. The kitchen island she loved to cook at overlooked the dining table desk. With only a little cupboard space behind her to store ingredients and crockery, which had been chipped and repaired too many times to count, everything in this room had its place.

Rae took the golden apple out of thebrown paper bag and set it on the table. She took a seat at the table and stared at it.

She had practised the dish for the festival a dozen times in the last week alone. It worked. The only thing she needed to check was that the consistency of the filling and the colouring would be a perfect match to the original apple.

But, what if, when she ate this apple – it invoked some sort of state of mind? What if she forgot what she was supposed to be doing? It would help if she had someone else here, someone who could keep her on track if something was to happen.

Rae had no one. She hadn’t had anyone to help her for a long time.

She glanced up at the clock on the wall that hung above the concave arch to the hallway. It blinked at her with the eyes of old Chronus, keeper of time. Five o'clock in the late afternoon. She should spend the evening here, understanding the composition of the Hesperidian apple. The cook-off, after all, began tomorrow.

But the temptation to work in Garth’s kitchen …thatwas the stuff of legends. The fact that he considered her good enough to even offer work in his kitchens meant she might finally be getting somewhere. And, she might get a sneak peek at what his festival dish was, be able to get her head around what she needed to do to beat him this century.

If she was going to go, she had to get ready and changed now.It was likely Garth would expect her to work until well into the night – dining hours tended to run on a little longer down here. So she’d only get a few hours sleep between the end of the shift and getting this apple recipe exactly right. She could get it all done.

Couldn’t she?

Shaking her head clear of self-doubt, Rae got up and padded across the hallway and into the other rooms in the house. The first was a bedroom just large enough to fit a double bed shoved against the wall and a chest of drawers, both made of ash-tree oak. The latter was shoved against the end of the bed.

On the opposite end, by the headboard, was a door that led to the equally small bathroom. It had nothing more than the basic essentials that dealt with waste – toilet, shower, sink. Just because it was the Underworld didn’t mean they didn’t have plumbing.

Sewage was a real issue when you had Souls trying to drink from the rivers.

Turning the shower to scalding hot, Rae waited for the hornwort plants on the shower floor – all trimmed so as not to be prickly but exfoliating – to freshen up. Once they had turned from a dull to bright green, Rae knew it was the right temperature to step into.

She washed quickly. She was an Arae. That didn’t mean she had some weird form, another common misconception by the Souls. The humans forgot – they had been made in the gods image. She was, technically, one of the “originals.” She had what the mainstream called a mortal body.

Ok, so hers was slightly curvier than most of her kind. Most Arae were tall and lithe. Others would suspect that Rae would be too but – surprisingly – staying on your feet all day did not help you shift the weight. Instead, Rae found she under-ate when she was working in the bistro all day then gorged on her own creations as she tested recipes over and over again at night. Besides, she just didn’t generally have the disposition the others of her cursed kind seemed to have. Perhaps it was because she didn’t hound those who broke their oaths by literally chasing them across the Asphodel plains.

Instead, Rae soaped heavy breasts, a stomach that still carried the angry red marks where her chiton cinched at the waist, wide hips and thick thighs. So she was slightly on the thicker side – that didn’t make her slow. She was in and out of the shower within five minutes and redressed in a fresh white chef chiton.

She grabbed a jacket, the keys, and her purse carrying a few tokens (the rest she hid in a cookie jar in the kitchen for when she knew she needed them), assuming Garth was going to pay her for this favour tonight. Then Rae locked her red door, headed down her street, and turned right towards Geras’ Grub. At the crossing she took a left, turning her back on the only job she’d ever loved, and walking the five hundred metres totheplace to eat in town: Zeus’ Watering Hole.

The legend, no doubt started by Garth, was that the name had come from the fact that Zeus himself had been spotted dining here when he travelled down from Olympus, on one of his rare visits. It made sense. After all, the two deities that got drinks smashed on the floor in their honour were Zeus and Garth. Perhaps the two had made a pact of some kind.

Rae took a deep breath as she looked up at the mauve neon sign.

She could do this … she could do this … she could do this.

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