The Sixth Seed

No one remembers who counted the seeds.

They remember the number, of course. They always remember the number. Six. Sometimes four, sometimes seven, depending on who is telling it and how much time has passed since hunger became allegory. But the counting itself—the moment when a mouth closed, when sweetness broke, when something irrevocable happened—that part is never given a witness.

I was there.

I was the one whose task it was to keep the bowls full and the floors clean and the doors closed. I was not invited to the bargaining, nor to the weeping. I belonged to the class of beings whose presence proves nothing except that someone must hold the world together while the gods rearrange it.

The girl had been in the Underworld longer than the myth admits.

That is the first smoothing. Stories prefer immediacy: a theft, a cry, a quick descent. They do not like duration. But time here does not move the way it does above. It settles. It accumulates. It teaches the body new habits before the mind knows it has learned anything at all.

She learned where the light thins first. She learned which corridors echo and which swallow sound. She learned that the dead are not quiet—they are simply finished asking questions.

She also learned hunger.

Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind that bends the spine and earns sympathy. This hunger was orderly. It arrived at the same intervals. It made no demands. It waited.

I watched her notice the pomegranate long before she touched it.

It sat in a shallow bowl, split but not broken, its seeds exposed like a map. We do not grow much here. What exists exists because it must. That fruit was not temptation. It was infrastructure. It was there because someone had once decided that something must mark the boundary between before and after.

When she reached for it, there was no announcement. No voice warned her. No thunder. She did not look at the throne. She did not look at me.

She simply ate.

The first seed changed nothing.

That is the second smoothing. The myth suggests immediacy again: one bite, fate sealed. But bodies are more patient than stories. The first seed was sweetness only. The second, a texture she did not expect. The third, something like relief. By the fourth, she had stopped thinking of it as eating.

By the fifth, she had started counting.

I know this because I was counting too.

We count here. We count steps, names, years without marking them. Someone has to. Otherwise the place fills up unevenly. Otherwise things stay when they should go, or go when they should stay.

When she reached the sixth seed, she hesitated.

Not because she knew what it meant. Because it was the last one within easy reach.

That detail is always omitted. The bowl was wide. The seeds were scattered. Six were close. The rest required commitment: a shift of weight, a lean forward, a decision that could not be mistaken for accident.

She stopped at the edge of the sixth and held it between her fingers.

This is where the myth usually rushes in—where a god interrupts, where realization strikes, where destiny asserts itself. None of that happened.

She ate the seed because it was there.

When she finished, she licked her fingers, surprised by the stain. Red is different here. It does not signify. It simply is.

Later—much later, after the arguments and the compromises and the arrangement that everyone pretends was inevitable—someone asked how many seeds.

I answered because it was my task.

Six.

They nodded, relieved. Numbers make excellent borders. They are easier to respect than moments.

No one asked why not five. Or why not seven. No one asked whether she could have stopped earlier, or whether stopping would have meant the same thing. No one asked what the seeds tasted like, or whether hunger counts as consent.

Above, they tell it as balance: half the year above, half below. They tell it as symmetry. They tell it as justice.

Here, we tell it as logistics.

Six months is enough time to forget how the light feels on the inside of your eyes. Six months is enough time for roots to harden. Six months is enough time for someone to learn the sound their footsteps make in a place that does not echo their name.

When she leaves, she walks carefully, like someone who knows where the ground drops away. When she returns, she does not hesitate at the doors.

This is the third smoothing: they say she was taken, and they say she returned. They do not say she learned the difference.

As for the seeds, we replaced them.

Not because we needed them, but because bowls look wrong when they are empty. Someone above might notice. Someone might ask questions that have no use here.

I still count them when I pass.

Not because I need to.

Because if I don’t, the number might change, and then the story would have to be told differently.