EROS

A woman drives down a highway late in the day deep in the summer. Not another car on the road. Not that surprising; with bigger interstates this old road was only preferred by those that wished to take the scenic route. Problem was that unless the scenery included hookers and garish amounts of neon, most people just didn't give a shit--not anymore, at least.

The sky is blue and cloudless and the air is warm with a cool breeze. Her hair is honey-blonde and her eyes are soft brown like two freshly-brewed cups of cafe au lait. She smiles silently as she drives along, whether it was in spite of herself in the quiet workings of her mind or the very atmosphere of the natural beauty of the open road about her, I couldn't tell. But her mind is obviously someplace else altogether. Not quite a half a mile away in an old black '65 Plymouth Fury Convertible, a hand draped lazily over the steering wheel and the other leaning on the sill of the door; his curly jet black hair, short and messy by intent, billowing in the wind and the facial stubble peppering his formidable jaw a sharp contrast to the bright blue eyes set perfectly in his head, was a man. A singularly black t-shirt clings to a well-sculpted chest as if its existence depended on it, bulging a prominent rectangular shape over his right shoulder, and considering the price of cigarettes, I suppose it did.

The man, if you haven't figured it out by now, is me, and I leaned back a bit as I saw her blue beater of a Ford in the distance. Now that I could physically see her, I could tell that there was sadness in it--her smile, I mean. She was a stoic person; probably been that way all her life. About a quarter of a mile before we flew by each other, I aim my hand like a gun towards the sky before leveling it at her vehicle, thumbing back the imaginary hammer and pulling the trigger with a vocalized Bang.

The woman's front left tire also made quite an audible bang and promptly deflated, giving the woman no choice but to pull over to the side of the road and attempt to replace the, in her words, "goddamn, piece of shit." I can only assume she meant her flat tire. Given some time, she could've most likely put on a donut to last her to the next town--about thirty miles back, given she could get it running again--but it was not to be. In about two minutes a good Samaritan would stop behind her car and replace her tire for her and upon finding it not starting up and the day catching up with them, he'll offer her a ride to which catching up with them, he'll offer her a ride to which she gladly accepts. They have coffee at a diner and order the same kind of pie: Boston creme. They spend the night together. Eventually they'll be married and have three children, one of which the woman will not-so jokingly suggest to name as "Prometheus" in that he was like a beacon of light to their lives. They call him "Jim."

But this is the future for them. Right now she's just happy that someone was nice enough to stop and help. Maybe this young man with tousled brown hair, gray eyes and a crooked smile with a good spirit to boot would've met her in the future, but he wouldn't have the guts to actually approach her and stir up conversation. That is why the gods intervene, and I've always been quite pleased with my work.

But Jim. I mean... Jesus Christ, what the hell's up with that?!

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The Romans knew me as Cupid. The Greeks knew me as Eros. I always preferred the Grecian naming scheme, to be honest, even though a fair number of our names were more interchangeable than others, such as my own as well as my uncle Heracles--or Hercules by the token of the more popular Roman name for the god of Strength. I still smile at calling him that, even now: uncle Heracles. I would've been the one to change his damnedable diapers had he been raised on Mount Olympus. I knew that for sure. Mom reminded me enough.

Now might be an apropos time to address a question likely building in your mind right now: weren't you a blonde, chubby little mama's boy? With wings? Well. Yes. Yes I was.

But the blame for that can be placed solely on my mother's obsessive-compulsive shoulders. Perhaps you have heard the stories of how Aphrodite didn't want her son to grow up so she used magic to keep her cherubim babe of a boy young and nubile--of course, I had no say in the matter. If you've ever thought of her as being an overly zealous mother then let me tell you here and now: you don't even know the half of it. She freaked.

I guess she expected my hair to stay bright white-hot blonde for the rest of my natural life--well, as natural as immortality is. Then one morning she looked into my crib to see dark black hair replacing my barely-visible blonde waves. No, no. Now that I think about it, "freaked" isn't the right word. More like "went ballistic," or even better yet, "went fucking batshit crazy on my infant ass." She thought that someone kidnapped me. Me. The son of Aphrodite and Ares. Granted, Ares had ten times more enemies than he did friends it seemed, but he wasn't what you would call the "Ideal father." If someone slit my throat he wouldn't have given two shits about my little corpse. It'd just give him a slightly justifiable better reason for his near-constant lust for bloodletting. Hephaestus was more of a father than he'd ever think about being. Hell, my father wasn't even half the man Hephaestus was, and he's a cripple! But anyway, back to my crazy ass mother.

She was sure that I'd been replaced by some mortal babe and heavily considered tossing me bodily off the side of Mt. Olympus and would've surely succeeded if Nike and Artemis hadn't restrained her and Hestia hadn't knocked the flailing Goddess of Love unconscious with a very large rock. This, too, I surmised, likely had some correlation to her stepping down from her place on Olympia. But as my great-aunt Hestia herself put it: "Fuck this. I'd rather live with those idiotic mortals than listen to you people squabble for eternity. You're all so high-strung and I really don't need this kind of tension at this point in my immortality. Jackasses." Such an eloquent speaker, my aunt.

Of course she wasn't talking of the whole, just some. But in the end, the sum pretty much was the whole so I guess that's why she left with her middle finger in the air. But I digress.

Eventually my mother gave up on trying to murder me--about when my wings grew in--and decided, instead, to exploit me. Each and every morning she woke me up earlier, casting a minor spell to turn my hair as blonde as the day I popped from her loins, then taken with my aunt Artemis to perfect my archery skills. Every day at the very peak of Helios' run--which is very, very early morning, even for a god. And yet... she babied me. Oh did she ever baby me. Didn't help that that temporarily stunted my growth. Thanks mom.

Needless to say, even her parlor tricks didn't last forever as I grew older--even though she kept me at around the general height of an adolescent midget for a better part of millenia, times changed, and well, as you can plainly see... so did I.