What Ho, Magic! by Tanya Huff

Author:Tanya Huff
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2013-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

FEBRUARY THAW

The challenge with this story was to accept all the mythic information as fact and then present it updated for the nineties. They really were a highly dysfunctional family…

Scuffing across the rec room floor in a pair of well-worn fuzzy slippers, Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest, pulled open the door to her small wine cellar, took a bottle of wine from the rack and held it up to the light. ATignanello, 1990; lovely vintage. Most of the family didn't think much of Dionysus but she rather liked him. Not only did he do very nice things with the grapes she provided but, in his other guise as God of Theatrical Arts, he saw to it that she got complimentary tickets to all the big shows.

She'd seen Cats half a dozen times before the novelty wore off.

Tucking the bottle under her arm, she scuffed back to her chair and settled into the overstuffed cushions with a satisfied sigh. One thumb popped the cork – there were perks to being an immortal goddess after all – and she settled back with a glass of wine in one hand and the television remote in the other.

Demeter loved winter. Not so much because she had nothing to do after the rush of planting, tending and harvesting, but because her house was her own again. She could eat what she wanted, she could drink what she wanted, she could wear what she wanted, and, most importantly she could watch what she wanted. During the winter, she wore stretchy fabrics and watched absolutely nothing with socially redeeming value.

"I admit it," she announced to the fat, disinterested tabby sprawled in the middle of a braided rug. "I was an overprotec-tive mother. Well, what do you expect? I was a single, working mom. He was never around. Still…" She took a long, contented swallow of the wine and turned on the first of the afternoon's talk shows. "…if I had it to do over, I'd give them a nice set of salad bowls and my blessing."

"Mom?"

Having just taken another drink, Demeter choked.

"Mom? Where are you?" Fashionably high heels brushing against the worn carpeting on the stairs, Persephone descended into the rec room to find her mother dabbing at the stains on her turquoise track suit with one hand and trying to fish a tissue out of the box with the other. "Mother! Honestly!" She shoved a tissue into Demeter's searching fingers. "It's the middle of the afternoon!"

Wiping at the wine dribbling out her nose, the goddess glared up at her only daughter. "What," she demanded, "are you doing here? There's two more months until spring."

"Two more months?" Persephone repeated, volume rising with every word. "Two more months? I couldn't stay with that man two more minutes!"

While she had every intention of being supportive, Demeter couldn't help looking a little wistfully toward the muted TV as she asked, "What did he do?"

"What didn't he do?" Throwing herself down on the sofa, Persephone ran a slender hand through corn-silk blonde hair.

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