Among the Lesser Gods by Margo Catts

Author:Margo Catts
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

18

Mindy had insisted on paying me back for my minimal babysitting by taking both children the next afternoon. She said she had some yard work to do and Kevin could help with the baby while the girls played. She told the kids to bring swimsuits to play in the sprinkler.

It was a hot day, by local standards, though far from what southern California had taught me to label that way. But I felt perfectly comfortable on a lawn chair in the Koffords’ backyard, shaded by the house, a glass of iced tea nested in the long grass beside me, the mythology book open on my lap.

The illustrations were strangely compelling—Prometheus chained to a rock, head thrown back in a cry for relief as an eagle tore at his liver; Demeter bowing into herself in grief, with all the plants of the earth wilting around her as her daughter returned to Hades. The stories were at once simple and profound—the jealousy, the grief, the anger, the longings and disappointments, the little victories and unintended consequences. I could see that mythology was not so different from physics: both trying to explain that all the disproportion and imbalance in the world only appeared that way and were the products of forces we could not see.

When I heard Paul’s pickup pull up in front of the house, I was looking at a picture of Zeus in a columned hall, surveying tiny fields and towns below Olympus. He held a white urn against his hip, tilted, and reached into it with one hand to cast blessings, the story told me, on those he chose to favor below. A black urn of sorrows stood at his feet. Actual people were minuscule from that perspective, so insignificant in their joys or troubles that the gods could rub them between their fingers like sand. I’d been looking at the picture for some time.

I heard the pickup come to a stop but couldn’t stir myself. Paul was early, by a few hours. He went into the house through the front door, and I heard him calling for someone to answer but I waited until he came closer.

“Out here,” I said when I believed he’d hear me.

He pushed open the screen door and stood in the opening, four fingers in his jeans pocket, birthmark wrapped around his neck.

“Hey,” he said. “Where are the kids?”

“At Mindy’s. She invited them to play in the sprinkler. She said she’d bring them back before dinner.”

“What’s for dinner?”

The question shouldn’t have bothered me. He hadn’t been expected until early evening, so of course I would’ve planned dinner, and of course he had a right to show up early and eat his own food with his own family. But I felt as if he was checking on me in my momentary idleness. Suddenly he was Paul the dictator again. A fissure opened, releasing the fear and anger I’d sealed away since his call at the beginning of the week.

“I don’t know. Did you have a good trip?” I made no move to get up.

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