Hades

They were very different learners, the two of them. For Eric, it was all about locking himself in the house in the forest, back bent and head down, frowning under the light, hours and hours spent in the same rigid chair. He needed to memorize, summarize, make lists, color code and organize things on calendars. The shack was always dark, silent, immaculately clean, the windows closed against the wind that threaded and wound through the trees.

Eden was his opposite. In the winter months she liked to sit in the sunshine that filtered through a bottlebrush tree at the bottom of the hill, her hair pulled up into a bun with a ribbon, her mouth and nose submerged in a grey wool scarf as she flipped through the pages of the monstrously large book on her lap. Hades would watch her through the front screen door, see her lift her head and stare off into the distance as she linked concepts and came to conclusions, her lips gently murmuring words.

They needed no encouragement, the two of them. They fell into a routine of studying, writing, planning, reading, from the light of morning to the shadows of dusk. When he tested them, Eric sat in the kitchen chair, upright, unblinking, like a hound waiting for dinner. Eden liked to do things while she recited her answers, stirring a pot on the stove, filling in a crossword puzzle, braiding pieces of her long hair. Now and then when he was wrong Eric would erupt into violence. Eden was never wrong. When he gave her the scores she would shrug and go back to her work.

In their second year Eden came to the shack and presented him with a paper he had not asked for, placing it on top of the novel he had been reading. She went to the fridge while he looked at it, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his uneven nose.

“And this is?”

“It’s a correction,” she said, sitting down across from him with a glass of milk. “For the textbook. They’re wrong. I thought they should know about it.”

Hades looked at the paper, lifted the first page and frowned.

“Protection of intestinal epithelial cells from clostridium difficile toxin-induced damage by ecto-5-nucleotidase and adenodine receptor signalling?” he asked, lifting his eyes.

“You betcha.”

“What do you want me to do with this? It can’t go anywhere under your name. You’re supposed to be seventeen.”

“I thought maybe you could hand it in anonymously.” She licked the milk from her lips. “You know? Like a letter to the editor?”

The old man nodded thoughtfully and watched her go into the sitting room, flopping onto the couch with her half-empty glass. He put the paper aside and didn’t think about it for days. When he posted it to the contact who had allowed him to enroll the children in the course, a gambling addict he had occasionally enslaved over the years, the man offered Hades twenty thousand dollars in order to publish it under his name.

After some consideration, he decided to tell Eden about the offer. Unlike Eric, he knew she would deal with the news humbly. She was always embarrassed when he praised her and he enjoyed it. He went to the front door and opened it, stopping on the first step when he saw Eden sitting at the bottom of the hill on her favorite tree stump, her back to him.