text: [Themes: Mythological, romance, Mythology, magic, ancient Greece]
  
  > Look around
  The back garden is really little more than a lawn-gone-wild and a weedy patio. The sky is a cool grey curtain backlit by the weak sun. The chill air bites at your skin.
  
  You can get back into the house to the south.
  
  A snake, still as stone, has partially emerged from the long grass.
  It seems to be watching you.
  
  > go south
  The kitchen is surprisingly spacious for a rented house. It has faux-granite counter tops and matching tiling, and fitted cupboards in shades of coffee and cream. It would be a pleasure to cook in such a kitchen.
  
  Scattered across the  worksurface nearest the hob is an array of cooking utensils, onion skins and pepper cores, including the wooden knifeblock you bought for a tenner in Boswells during a sale.
  
  Vera and Tilda (plants, not people, and therefore bearable) are on the little round kitchen table.
  
  Natalie is by the hob, stirring a pan of pasta.
  
  The back door leads into the back garden to the north, and, if you're feeling particularly brave (or masochistic), the living room is to the west.
  
  > talk to Natalie
  "How are you doing, hon?" she asks, all warmth and sympathy. You suspect "doing" is a polite way of saying "coping". "I'm fine," you lie. And, then, because it's so obvious a lie: "It's hard, of course." "Yeah." Natalie gazes you at with an expression that is starting to become familiar - why do people always look at the bereaved that way?
  
  > talk to Natalie
  "I'm nearly done with the pasta," says Natalie, "so at least this way I'll know you're eating." You mumble your thanks, inevitably sounding ungracious. You feel monstrous, caged behind your glass, snapping at proffered kindness, howling at a heedless sky.
  
  > talk to Natalie
  Seeing you lingering in this awkward, Natalie stops stirring and smiles at you encouragingly. "I'm here for you," she says. "Do you want to talk?" You have to bite back sarastic things you don't mean. So you keep smiling and shake your head.
  
  > jump
  You jump on the spot, fruitlessly.
  
  > go west
  You had better not wander around the house carrying a cleaver. For a start, you could fall over and accidentally stab yourself, which would be embarrassing. But also it could make the people in the living room - who are technically your guests -  feel uncomfortable
  
  > go to the west
  The extensive living / dining area was one of the features that drew you all to this house when you were looking for places to rent. That and - despite the fact none of you have been able to bring yourself to do anything as prosaic as cleaning for days - the fact it's not an abject shit hole like most of places on offer when you were doing the rounds.
  
  Currently, it's all cluttered with people. Your housemate John is sitting cross-legged on the floor at the end of the coffee table, frowning over a game of a Go. His opponent, Twitch, sits opposite and appears much more laid-back about the whole business. Rick is slumped on the sofa, a bottle of port at his elbow; Elsie is sitting next to him, apparently watching the game. Jess is huddled in a cloak on the other sofa, Adrian beside her, looking almost as uncomfortable as you feel. As for Laurie (fucking Laurie), she's leaning against the fireplace, and wearing an expression of infinite suffering like she's living her own little Victorian melodrama
  
  The coat stand is still in its corner, looming like an unexpected guest.
  
  Your escape routes are east into the kitchen, or south into the hall.
  
  > talk to John
  "How are you doing?" you ask, since it is the officially sanctioned question at a time like this. "Still losing," he says. You didn't mean the game, and you're pretty sure John didn't either but it's probably better this way.
  
  > talk to Elsie
  "How are you doing?" you both say, at exactly the same time and with exactly the same intonation. You smile awkwardly at each other. "I'm okay," you say into the pause that follows. "I don't think I am," says Elsie, shyly. Her honesty ripples through the room like a stone dropped into a fetid pond.
  
  > talk to Elsie
  You feel obliged to click into comforting mode. It is not that you don't want to comfort Elsie, it's just you're afraid that all your words are lies. "I have to believe that it's a choice she made," you say. "She was so unhappy, you can understand why she did it." But you don't. You don't.
  
  > talk to Elsie
  Elsie nods. You wonder if her faith makes this even harder for her. You want to ask about it, but what can you say? "So do you think Celine has gone to Hell for what she did?" Maybe not.
  
  > talk to Elsie
  Neither of you really dare say anything else. It's too delicate a balance to maintain, between honesty and lies, compassion and cruelty.
  
  > talk to Twitch
  "Is that a lyre" asks Twitch, unexpectedly. You look at the lyre, surprised to find yourself carrying it even though you already knew you were. "Yes," is the only reply you are capable of forming at the moment. There is a pause. Twitch nods with the sort of profound understanding only displayed by the stoned. "Cool," he says.
  
  > talk to John
  "Why on earth are you playing Go?" you ask. John shrugs.
  "Distraction is good," he says, finally. "Surely you can do better than Go?" you say, striving for a levity that goes down about as well as cyanide. John just shrugs again, Swedish and withdrawn. "Why not?" offers Twitch, who presumably brought the board with him and you cannot really think, or be bothered to think, of an answer.
  
  > talk to John
  You decide to leave him to the game.
  
  > talk to Laurie
  God no. You don't want to support her delusion that she has any place here. If you tried to talk to her, you might have to kill her.
  
  > talk to Jess
  You know that Jess is grieving much as you are grieving but she has tangled it up in a need to support others, and - you think - to be seen to be supporting others. She wants people to at look her and say to themselves "she's so brave" and then she can believe it for herself. But you don't want to be supported, you don't want to be the mechanism by which others distract themselves. Grief is not enobling in you. It seems to make you hard, ungracious, cold and churlish.
  
  > talk to Adrian
  Under different circumstances you would actually quite like to talk to Adrian. Maybe you are deluding yourself with suspicions of kinship but you can more readily imagine yourself saying something that feels true to him than anyone else. But how can you speak of anything in this company, at this time. Better not to talk to him at all.
  
  > talk to Rick
  Rick produces a silver hip flask with a flourish. "Absinthe?" he suggests, raising his brows, entirely conscious of the effect. Amusement temporarily alleviates the atmosphere in the room.
  
  > talk to Rick
  Rick reaches a hand into a shopping bag languishing by the side of the sofa. "Iberian ham?" he says. "Brie? Some pate?" You are starting to feel churlish but you keep shaking your head.
  
  > talk to Rick
  Rick has probably run out of random indulgent  foodstuffs to offer you by now, and you do not want to press in case the temporary semblance of normality founders. You remember that some of the people in this room are your friends and that you will not always feel this way.
  
  > talk to Jess
  Anyway, you think, hard, ungracious, cold and churlish as you are, Jess is here specifically and explicitly for John. When somebody dies, there is a grief hierarchy, topped by those denoted closest to the deceased, usually based upon length of acquaintence. Blood, is of course, thicker than water, more meaningful than love.
  
  > talk to Jess
  For the moment, it is probably best you don't talk to Jess. It has so little to do with her, in any real sense, but she seems to inspire particularly miserable thoughts in you at the moment.
  
  > play lyre
  The few discordant notes you manage to strike garner you a collection of odd looks, both sympathetic and less sympathetic, and it occurs to you that you're behaving rather strangely.
  
  Laurie paces back and forth in front of the fireplace, her fuck-me boot heels clomping on the wooden floor - clearly she is not garnering enough attention to feel comfortable.