"Hades and Persephone," said Poppy. "I suppose you know the story? The god of the underworld snatched away the goddess of spring in what the poet Homer called an 'unwilling marriage'. So many painters have blushed away from the meaning of this, but I was happy to work with an artist brave enough to embrace it."
The artwork that Poppy was demonstrating was a lush oil painting that extended almost from floor to ceiling, layered with heavy shadows over an ivory-focused color scheme that resembled a bone-decorated crypt to evoke the underworld. The focus of the painting was indeed brave, although others might use the word 'obscene': an unambiguous rape, with Persephone's arms held down by grinning specters while Hades impaled her his on his fully detailed phallus. If Persephone herself did not look like a blushing maiden but a woman with full breasts and generous hips and the faint creases of laugh lines by her eyes, that was because Poppy Bristow had posed for it at the age of thirty-one. The mad painter Virgil Christoff had been beguiled by her golden hair and flushed skin, but moreover by her willingness- nay, eagerness- to pose for sketches while in the midst of intercourse with the brutish, silver-haired gamekeeper modeling for Hades. The rest of Christof's artist club The Brotherhood of Eros had proclaimed it a masterpiece, and it was immediately banned every time it was publicly exhibited.
The young man from the university (Khan, had he said that was his name?) was looking at the painting with wide eyes, magnified by his glasses. When he looked back to Poppy, his cheeks were rather pinker than before. She decided to intensify his adorable discomfort by taking his hand and physically pulling him over to the next painting.
"Persephone and Adonis," she said. "This one really must be viewed together with the last. As I'm sure a well-read gentleman like yourself would know, Persephone and Aphrodite both lusted for a beautiful mortal man, and though it was Aphrodite whom he loved, Persephone claimed him for an equal part of the year." In this painting, an auburn-haired rent boy had been recruited to play Adonis, bound and gagged in shadows as Persephone straddled him, aroused enough to penetrate her despite his clear terror. Poppy as Persephone was once again naked, but this time she wore a crown of skeletal ivory. "You see," she said, "the innocent captive has become the libertine captor. It was the only way she could survive."
