Longlist – 2026 Gooseberry Pie Annual Writing Competition
by Ed Higgins
She’s dancing naked in a summer field giddy with love of Orpheus when a goddamn viper bites her bare ankle and she’s instantly dead, oh such is the frailty of a pirouetting nymph! Not two days married making passionate love earlier in the meadow while after he’d been singing love songs to her as she was twirling away still lovely naked in the blooming clover, though now Orpheus holds her limp dead body as even the meadow’s crushed grass is weeping uncontrollably at his cruel loss.
Eurydice wakes in the Underworld puzzled and pissed as all hell that mere seconds ago love-sated and dancing in their favorite summer meadow she’s now dead; in an eyeblink snatched away from her lover-husband as forlornly she still hears the lingering Sappho lyric Orpheus had been singing to her while strumming his golden lyre, Love irresistible, You set me on fire, I desire and crave you. Though now she’s freaking dead with nary a summer field to dance naked in or love song to accompany her besotted love twirl as now droll Hades himself approaches to greet her naked loveliness while fearfully she quickly turns away noticing nearby other love-linked couples: Francesca and Paolo, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, noting they at least still have each other although they weep in camaraderie out of pity hearing her lost-love death story, nonetheless Eurydice is sadly aware they at least still have each other while she’s alone and feeling trapped in this shit-forever place.
As she turns back toward Hades’ approach, his hand extended, her rising anger rebuffs him as if he were that damn snake itself that bit her, yelling sardonically at him “Go to Hell! you soulless bastard!” (little realizing her pun) as Hell’s dissipating winds whip her long blond hair whispering against her sadness. Eurydice decides the only way she’s to be reunited with Orpheus is he must come to rescue her as she has seen and felt the charm of his playing and singing that’s said to charm even stones with his music, coax trees into dance, his lyre playing even saved the Argonauts from the fatal bewitching Sirens, so surely her husband’s beguiling music could charm the pall off Hades into releasing her back into the upper world and once joyfully on their way out of this dark fucking place neither of us ever looking back!
Ed’s poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals. Ed’s Asst. Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction and has a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals—including a rooster named StarTrek.
Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash
