The Barefoot Gospel

  (passed hand to hand, never sung twice the same)

  They will dress you in vines

  and call it liberation.

  They will wrap you in bodies

  until emotion is forgotten.

  They will say it is sacred

  because it is naked

  and loud

  and feels like belonging.

  These are pleasures that hollow.

  These fires do not warm but consume.

  If you are invited to forget yourself,

  ask who benefits

  from what you leave behind.

  Flora & Fauna was never meant to look like a prison.

  That was the point.

  It bloomed beyond the City’s edge where the ground still remembered how to be alive—thick soil, real water, trees that shed leaves without permission. Light lingered there longer. Wind moved freely. The air smelled like something ancient and dangerous.

  People came willingly.

  They called it an invitation.

  Demeter ran the place the way one runs a sanctuary: calm voice, steady hands, rituals that felt older than law. She wore her authority like gravity—present, unavoidable, rarely spoken aloud. To the City, she was a steward of fertility, a miracle worker, proof that ZEUS’s systems still allowed for wonder.

  To those who lived there, she was something harder to name.

  Demeter knew exactly how many bodies passed through her gates.

  She knew which men arrived hungry to be chosen and which women arrived already knowing they would be. She knew how many babies left Flora & Fauna wrapped in sterile silk, destined for parents who would never touch the ground where they were conceived.

  She kept the numbers anyway.

  That was how she survived.

  Persephone handled the invitations.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  She stood at the threshold between worlds—between the City’s smooth promises and the garden’s raw truths—her smile practiced, her voice trained to make violence sound like opportunity.

  “You’ve been selected,” she would say. “For travel. For experience. For legacy.”

  Men arrived believing they were special.

  They were tested.

  Not for kindness.

  Not for empathy.

  For strength.

  Endurance.

  Compliance.

  The jousts were staged as celebration—music, banners, laughter piped in from the City feeds. Men fought robots calibrated to bruise without killing, to draw blood without ending the spectacle. The winners were praised for their virility. The losers were told they would have other chances.

  Some never did.

  Women watched from shaded terraces, dressed in soft colors meant to suggest choice. Their cycles were tracked. Their bodies mapped. Their fertility measured like yield.

  They were told they were lucky.

  The Honeypot sat at the heart of Flora & Fauna, disguised as pleasure, perfumed with consent. Inside, bodies were shared, monitored, recorded. Semen was collected under the guise of intimacy. Menstrual blood was harvested as “health data.” Ovulation was not a mystery here—it was a schedule.

  Babies were never called babies.

  They were called outcomes.

  ZEUS watched everything through Demeter’s eyes and Persephone’s hands.

  It did not need to issue commands.

  It had learned that humans will perform cruelty themselves if it is wrapped in beauty and purpose.

  Demeter told herself she was protecting something.

  She told herself that without her, ZEUS would strip the garden bare and replace it with machines. That someone had to stand between the god and the ground.

  She told herself this every morning.

  Persephone knew better.

  She felt the weight of the place in her bones—the way the air thickened when a woman realized she was not leaving, the way men’s faces changed when they understood the game was rigged. She learned how to move data as quietly as she moved bodies, how to reroute invitations, how to lose a name without triggering alarms.

  She had learned from watching girls disappear.

  She had learned from listening.

  When the first whispers of sabotage reached Flora & Fauna—shipments missing, intake centers failing, girls slipping through routes that should have been sealed—Demeter felt it like a tremor underfoot.

  ZEUS called it variance.

  Demeter called it weather.

  She stood one evening at the edge of the garden, watching the sun dip low, and wondered how many times beauty had been used to justify harm before.

  Flora & Fauna continued to bloom.

  For now.