Hercules
01
He was a god. In the twenty-first century America, the most godless place in the world—he was fiction made real. Stuff of legends and artwork and ballads. Tan, sweat soaked, and it didn’t matter that there was no way out of my house on Saturday at midnight but window in my bedroom, my second-story bedroom and the fifteen foot drop to the ground.
I looked down and almost felt my anklebones shatter but there was a piece of immortality waiting for me and life was short, so short.
Not for him, of course. But time was waging war against me and I jumped and the ground swam up to meet me, faster than I could fathom and I concrete kissed my hands, elbows, knees and feet. It stung but I was up in a second, amazed and charmed by the human machine and how smoothly it ran. Mortality was just a word, and so was forever and on a Saturday at midnight they hold the same weight. The stars laughed at everything, burning cold and indifferent.
My sister called my name. Softly, first. “Meg?” But I was running across our back yard, jumping up on the tool shed and over the brick wall, her voice tailing me like a dog, whimpering about my ankles. “Meg? Meg?”
Then a snarl, teeth bared. And a bark. “MEGAN!” But I was a shadow, a shadow in a night pregnant with shadows, no different from the other bulky, squirming things in the night.
My parents called him a delinquent but they didn’t understand. They heard the stories, carried by children to their parents, from them to other parents, each time a little more diluted from the truth.
But they didn’t see it happen, they didn’t watch him take the desk and throw it across the classroom, watch it put a crack in the wall, watch the dust burst forth like blood from a wound.
His body moved like a dancer’s, his body moved like paint across a canvas. His eyes were a thousand years old.
He was a hero, like the ones born of myth. But there were no mythical beasts to test his strength against; there were no cyclopes’s, no gorgons or sirens.
There were teachers and students, however, and there were parents; and there was every figure with authority, real or imagined, and the means to belittle us, to dominate us.
And when he climbed up the wall of the gymnasium (Impossible. How can you climb up a wall, a flat, smooth wall? You say you saw it? It’s… totally impossible!) and punched through the clock face, he was battling the Cerynian Hind, slaying the Hydra.
My parents called him delinquent when they heard about him trapping another student under a lunch table.
Never mind this kid was an ass and a bully, the real kind that makes teachers afraid of him, the kind that got away with whatever he wanted.
Never mind he did it for me.
I looked down and almost felt my anklebones shatter but there was a piece of immortality waiting for me and life was short, so short.
Not for him, of course. But time was waging war against me and I jumped and the ground swam up to meet me, faster than I could fathom and I concrete kissed my hands, elbows, knees and feet. It stung but I was up in a second, amazed and charmed by the human machine and how smoothly it ran. Mortality was just a word, and so was forever and on a Saturday at midnight they hold the same weight. The stars laughed at everything, burning cold and indifferent.
My sister called my name. Softly, first. “Meg?” But I was running across our back yard, jumping up on the tool shed and over the brick wall, her voice tailing me like a dog, whimpering about my ankles. “Meg? Meg?”
Then a snarl, teeth bared. And a bark. “MEGAN!” But I was a shadow, a shadow in a night pregnant with shadows, no different from the other bulky, squirming things in the night.
My parents called him a delinquent but they didn’t understand. They heard the stories, carried by children to their parents, from them to other parents, each time a little more diluted from the truth.
But they didn’t see it happen, they didn’t watch him take the desk and throw it across the classroom, watch it put a crack in the wall, watch the dust burst forth like blood from a wound.
His body moved like a dancer’s, his body moved like paint across a canvas. His eyes were a thousand years old.
He was a hero, like the ones born of myth. But there were no mythical beasts to test his strength against; there were no cyclopes’s, no gorgons or sirens.
There were teachers and students, however, and there were parents; and there was every figure with authority, real or imagined, and the means to belittle us, to dominate us.
And when he climbed up the wall of the gymnasium (Impossible. How can you climb up a wall, a flat, smooth wall? You say you saw it? It’s… totally impossible!) and punched through the clock face, he was battling the Cerynian Hind, slaying the Hydra.
My parents called him delinquent when they heard about him trapping another student under a lunch table.
Never mind this kid was an ass and a bully, the real kind that makes teachers afraid of him, the kind that got away with whatever he wanted.
Never mind he did it for me.