by Keeley Young

There was something different about Bellarmine. How he sculpted the world, changed by tapestry. Instead of ordering only for himself, he bought a flat white for his mother, and changed up his order too. Nervously, he stood off to the side of the local, ordinary coffee shop, waiting for the barista to call his name. He gave out Arnie when someone asked him what his name would be for the order. Bellarmine drew questions, strange glances, and so did his existence, too. Unknown father. Radiant skin—the first question he would be asked on a date was never what he did for work, but what his skin regime was, because to the women he took on first dates, he seemed to glow brighter than they did. Arnie was a suitable name because only a handful of baristas had ever gotten it incorrect, trading ie for y, thinking he said “Armie”, which made him hysterical, or otherwise they heard a string of incorrect lies: Arby, Annie, Ali—pronounced strong, not soft, the high ahhh sound of taking a sip of a refreshing cocktail. Now when was the last time he was drinking cocktails, sitting poolside, wondering the worst of thoughts: does the sun truly have to descend on the horizon, ruin the glistening tan coming with the ring of the end of the timer?

            Bellarmine heard the name, Arnie this time, spoken perfectly. Sometimes the heavens bless. His mother was complicated on change. Sometimes she preferred a flat white to a cappuccino, but he hardly remembered if that was something of this year or the last. Fluctuating with the wind, although her current was less visible still, an undertow constructed out of concepts and ideas. The time might have passed on liking a flat white, or this one in particular, the way it has been brewed in contrast to how a chain coffee-bean house whirrs the imperfect cup. Another weight on his shoulders, and with the two-split carry-case Bellarmine, or Arnie, brushed past the locals, purple-eyed morning monsters, and left the building.

            There was something different about him because the weight of the coffee cups proved them heavier than their contents. He knew the weight of disappointment, how it compared to espresso, beautifully ground beans, and steamed milk, and the weight of future-garbage. This particular place, five or so minutes from his mother’s apartment, provided little respite to his building agitation. One wrong nudge and he knew his footing was uncertain enough to send him colliding with the pavement, licking unintentionally at the feet of, well, ordinary, simple people. The human race. Those who never cleaned their shoes frequently enough.

            The lobby of his mother’s apartment building was inconspicuous—hardly a reconstructed Olympus, but that was the joke between the only members of the family older than he was. His mother, and the grumble-under-his-breath uncle the two floors beneath, in an apartment you would describe as “dark” or “moody” in a magazine. His uncle liked windows, until these curtains seemed to have miraculously walked into his life as if by divine intervention. These curtains, they were thick, blackout curtains, a musty red or maroon, and were only drawn open when Bell’s mother was present. Those early mornings when he had once swung round to walk with his cousin, Marcella, to the private school they had both attended were briefly spent in moody darkness. Marcella at the kitchen counter would say, ‘My cereal is like a blind taste testing…you think a bug could crawl in?’ This, only a little joke between them.

            Bellarmine would be sans the moral support of his cousin, who he called before the coffee shop. ‘Bell, I’m not home,’ she hesitantly retorted, stifling a yawn. ‘I spent the night with a guy, a thing my dad will kill me over, but brutal carnage is his thing. Your mum loves you.’ When the call ended, Bell lingered on the curb thinking about that love. Hard to pin down, the very definition of what weighed more now. The flat white, disappointment, or love. Familial love. With her genetics, a knowledge of love and romance coursed through his very blood. It too would have made anyone stagger.

            There was no inane button to push, or secret keycard to swipe. Bellarmine and his mother shared an apartment on the ninth floor, one his mother had outright bought in the 90s. For at least three decades, she had lived nomadically, sometimes spending months at a time in Milan, Florence, New York, Amsterdam, Positano, Paris. A life of very little stability. She had not liked to keep a job, although she was hardly scraping by, provided a wealth by her father she now only split with that brother of hers, who in the 80s had been homesick after the beginning, middle, and end of the Vietnam War. He spent a decade arguing with tourists and wasting himself away on a boat. By the end of the 90s, the sister-brother duet had reconvened in the most populated city in Australia, exiling themselves. Preparing, incidentally, for parenthood. Bellarmine’s mother’s stomach in those few photographs she had taken of herself while she awaited giving birth to him in an ordinary, sterile hospital was clam-like. She scribbled under a picture in the only scrapbook she cared to make, there you are, my darling boy, just a pearl. The scrapbook has only his name on the cover.

          No evidence of a father.

​

On the ninth floor, Bell took a sip from the still-piping-hot coffee. He, in an effort to be courageous, bold, daring, energetic, whatever, had ordered a long macchiato and sorely started to long for a mocha instead. Comfort, for now, seemed a virtue. Keep yourself calm but motivated, he told himself, stunned he was almost about to knock at the door of his own apartment. Although, miserably, he paid no rent and worried his mother thought of him what time had labelled “lazy” and “a bum”. Finding a new job, after he quit the small-time employment working at a collapsing cinema, was proving more challenging than the, uh, mistake he was about to confess to.

His mother could be heard from the door. Her voice was melodic, of course, but when she sung, or more so performed in the house, she favoured Broadway numbers she likely picked up from having entertained, or been entertained, by the greats of that time before she mothered a beautiful boy. She would conjure up a lovely, note-perfect rendition of “Send in the Clowns” and prattle a story about lounging around with Glynis Johns before she went onstage to perform. Bell didn’t quite know who Glynis Johns was, but when he had searched online about her he leapt up with a look of surprise, or shock, who could tell the difference, and said, ‘The mother from the Julie Andrews nanny movie!’

Of course, his mother knew Julie Andrews, too. Beauty recognises beauty.

​

‘I have coffee,’ Bell shouted into the apartment, hoping to cut through the melody. Dita poked her head out from where she had been innocently hiding. Bellarmine would never have considered his mother’s beauty, beyond her own admissions, but it was an understatement whenever anyone complimented her. Dita, for what it was worth, radiated a glow unseen. She was the epitome of every fabulous word, and despite her hair being at that moment tied into a loose bun on her head, and her house clothes antiques from her time in the ‘60s, Dita was gorgeous.

‘And I am trying to avoid the yellowing of our teeth,’ she responded, seeming to be half-tempted to lift the carry-case out of Bell’s hands and swiftly deposit it into the trash can. But she held herself back. The concept of her teeth becoming too yellow did frighten her, one would imagine, but her son was convincing. They retreated into what constituted their dining room—a nook in the apartment with a table only for the four of them, their fledgling, remnant family. ‘Should I get biscuits?’ Dita motioned towards the arch into the kitchen, but her son shook his head.

They sat down for a conversation that indeed weighed more than a flat white and more than curtains, but perhaps collided into disappointment and love. Two of the potential outcomes.

Bellarmine took a sip of the coffee, imitation alcohol for the time being, and felt the muscles in his body attempt to right themselves straighter before he started talking. Not typically an anxious person, he felt nervous now—not so much scared, or panicked, but from learning of The Thing until this moment he had had plenty of time to predict what his mother would have to say about it.

Dita held the coffee cup in her right hand. ‘Bell, what is on your mind?’

            Come right out with it, he thought, worried, then, that pussyfooting around the topic of conversation would make him appear weak-willed, frightened, and he was talking to the wrong goddess for that. He hardly wanted to court his mother. ‘Caitlin is pregnant.’ He assumed his voice sounded ordinary, that it sounded assured, respectful. That he portrayed the understanding in what he was saying, an unwed twenty-year-old in a semi-serious relationship with a girl he hardly wanted to get married to right away. Or at all. He didn’t know. Now she was pregnant.

            ‘She is such a wonderful girl,’ Dita began, softening her expression. Bell was struggling already to piece together what the creases of her lips meant, what the nose twist was. The stare, or gaze, her eyes cast. ‘Is this a child she intends to keep?’ The words were on the verge of cold, but Dita’s voice had not changed from the reassurance it held mere moments ago.

            Bellarmine paused. He thought. The two of them, himself and his girlfriend of a couple of months, had spent the entirety of the night before talking over what they intended to do with the child. ‘She wants to have an abortion.’ Dita smiled over at her son. With how little he knew of his father, Bell had wondered to himself, occasionally, once he became aware of abortion, whether Dita would have aborted him had the timing been awful. Awful like this. Neither of them, Bell or Caitlin, were adequately prepared for raising a kid, but then, had a centuries-old goddess been when she gave birth a few years into the turn of the century? The early 2000s. To be the epitome of beauty, Aphrodite, with a newborn child whose father could have been anywhere in the world. Although more likely he was somewhere in Sydney.

            Dita smirked. ‘You understand this child will do everything that it is capable of to be born, yes?’ With that grin, and somewhat of a wink, Dita spoke lifetimes. Her own birth came from foam of the sea, her form rising out of the water from the castration of a man. Her father, truthfully, although if Bell asked about any of his grandparents it was like requiring an archaeological dig towards the centre of the earth. Fossils buried deep, or otherwise having turned into mountains or stardust or the like. As far as anyone was concerned, Dita and Ares—he is self-confident—were the last of the gods. ‘Two gods, three demigods, a potential fourth. Dangerous ideas.’

            The third demigod was hardly spoken of. Ares had a three-year-old daughter he didn’t have custody of. ‘Neither of us is prepared to have a kid.’ He thought speaking it out loud would make the sentiment feel complete and certain. They were just becoming adults. Twenty-years-old. ‘It isn’t going to try to burst out of her stomach, is it?’ Caitlin and Bell both liked to watch Alien movies this time of year, when supermarkets were selling astronomical packets of candy and cheap wigs that look more like spider’s webs than hair.

            ‘The baby will likely reject a typical procedure.’ Dita set down the coffee cup at last. There was something taking over her expression. ‘When I first moved here, I was outrunning an uncomfortable affair I had been involved in when I lived in Nice. He made me feel an agony I had not felt since I had been married to Hephaestus. In this city, I wished quick, sharp love affairs would heal me, but not long after sleeping with a man I found myself pregnant. A pregnancy before you, Bellarmine, before you begin to think I raised you out of regret. This pregnancy I knew immediately would have to end. I knew exactly who the father was. It would not have been a proper child to have. So, I sought an abortion, but the child rejected the procedure.’ Dita froze, her gaze seeming to vacate the room. ‘It is the only time I have called upon an ancient magic I only knew about because of your long-gone aunt, Artemis.’

            Bell thought to ask his mother to skip through to this secret, ancient magic, but her glossy stare was enough proof it was something to be trifled with if no other options worked. In the twenty or so years since, perhaps…and he struggled to even think the final sentence. Plenty of people debated whether you should be allowed to have an abortion. Caitlin and Bell comfortably were not hesitating on it. Neither of them needed their lives to be ruined by a child.

            Not that having a kid ruined every life…

            Getting sentimental seemed worrisome, but his mother was not getting mad or possessed with rage. You took the strides you could. ‘But you decided to keep me?’

            ‘I was prepared to have a child,’ Dita said, smiling at her son. ‘As I said, I knew the father of the first, I knew the father of this one, too.’ It was perhaps the first admission, between the two of them, that Bellarmine’s father was not a faceless being who donated some sperm to welcome a demigod into the world. Bell had to pause to seriously consider that while he never questioned his mother’s decision to keep him safely fatherless, there was still a man out there somewhere. Surprisingly, he refused to possess a single negative thought about it. Whatever her reasoning had been, Bell had grown up comfortably without a father.

            He hesitated still to ask who his father was. Marcella, his cousin, knew her mother from a distance—there were pictures in a digital photo album on her father’s old phone, because he had stayed in contact with her until Marcella was fifteen. That was the story. A woman lurking in the background, promising to keep herself buried in shadow. The way Dita spoke of Bell’s father made the shadows appear midnight black, dulled, a void.

            Bell felt drained of the right thing to say. His mother, on the other hand, seemed on the verge of another wisdom-scooped monologue. Someone needed to provide them without Athena to call upon. ‘Knowing when you are not prepared for a child is important,’ she began, reaching out her manicured hand to her son’s. ‘In the decade between not having one, and then falling pregnant with you, I somehow found time to mature again. The difficulty with living forever is growing in and out of yourself. You are only twenty years old. It is the twenty-first century. Based upon how humans organise time. How we do. It has been so long since I recognised myself as something different.’

            A single tear fell down Dita’s cheek.

            The conversation weaved from there. Bellarmine wanted to disclose certain parts of what he had talked about with Caitlin, with her permission, and his mother was supportive and reassuring, although there remained a tinge of anxiety that the demigod blood would rear its head. Bell hardly thought of himself as true demigod. He had none of the strength of Heracles, none of the fight of Achilles. He led no ambitious quests like Perseus or Theseus. When he graduated high school, he did so like any ordinary human had: by putting in the effort to study for his exams.

            School had been a burden, though. He frequently exhausted himself by staying up late to work tirelessly on assignment pages, the human in him coming out in blemishes. Red like the tongue. In the mornings, half-scolded by his mother for the baggy circles under his eyes, Bell raced out of the apartment towards his cousin, who at least could mask her own sleepiness under a thin layer of makeup. School had been a burden and in reflection he wished there had been a Caitlin there, toeing the distraction, reminding him to do the work on schedule. Difficult, to listen and not question your mother, certainly if your mother is fabled, written on the page, talked about amongst the kids who grew up with vested interests in mythology. Look who had been underneath their noses.

​

¦¦¦

​

Bellarmine met Marcella downstairs, round the corner, and in front of a fountain depicting a centuries-old white man with an unrecognisable name. He seemed once-relevant, noticeably British, and as if he had been dumped there in the green by an oversized crane. Marcella, wearing last night’s clothes, reminded him again of seventeen. That youthfulness of being carefree, yet somewhat careful. She hadn’t done anything with her hair. The world could mould it as it saw fit.

            ‘Did she freak?’ This, after a quick greeting between the two. Marcella tried for sympathetic.

            The story was splayed out as they sat on the edge of the fountain, occasionally spritzed with a sprinkle of water. How Dita had been supportive, reassuring. No word on her secret huntress witch magic. Bell had promised himself, walking on concrete with the honk of civilisation in his ear, that he wouldn’t spoil his mother’s confession. It was not mere gossip to spread. Marcella hardly needed to know you could turn to the ancient art of reclaiming your virginity to rid yourself of an unwanted pregnancy in the early 90s. She didn’t need to know.

            ‘When is the appointment?’ Marcella seemed to be all questions.

            Bell knew it was soon, as quick as Caitlin had felt comfortable. She said she was talking to her own parents as soon as she said goodbye to him, that maybe they would hesitate, want her to consider what she could do with the child if she carried it to term, but with a supportive glance Bell reassured her. You can stand your ground. Remind them the nine months are still your life. This was the necessary spark to make the twenty-year-old feel more confident, and she later texted that her parents supported her completely, although they seemed somewhat begrudged Caitlin and Bell had had sex without a condom, the one time they did.

            Bell had wanted to say: demigod sperm fought in the Trojan war. But she doesn’t know his heritage.

            ‘Tuesday,’ he said, half-expecting his cousin to suddenly offer to be present, because sometimes they could be overbearing with one another, the burden of growing up as the only two people your age in a family with secrets guarded to their chests. What did Ares say when people asked him why his parents named him after the legendary—his word—god of war? It’s a symbol of respect. A talisman to live to the honour of such a figure in literature. He liked to wink-wink this way, remind his captive audience he thought those stories to be crafted fables passed down through generations of Greeks and Romans making their way into the lexicon. Lexicon was a Marcella word. Of course they both knew the rich truth. But no one else could until something like marriage. Trouble could brew if an incorrect person knew the correct lineage. Dita’s beauty secret.

            Marcella merely reaffirmed her support. ‘You’re both smart, it’s not the right age to be having a kid.’ Bell couldn’t help but picture his life as a father, already. ‘The youth sucked right out of you two, because you have to take care of this kid you didn’t even ask for. My dad, you know, was sort of an accidental father because him and my mother weren’t even really together when it happened, like an inverse of a good romcom. Always breaking apart, always saying things they couldn’t take back. Of course I came along and things were good for a while, but she never accepted being my Mum.’ Marcella said these things without batting an eyelid. At twenty, she already had a therapist she trusted and the emotional maturity of someone who had been raised by a different man.

            Although the Ares of Ancient Greece was a thing of the past.

            But still…

            Marcella dangled a hand into the water of the fountain and hoped to bring it back up with a fish nibbling on her nail, but nothing. Beside her, her cousin was checking a message on his phone. The moment could have been more emotional, had anything new come apart from it. Every third week Marcella divulged something about her childhood, but because the two of them had been forever-friends since their births a few months apart from one another, nothing was really new.

            ‘Is Caitlin okay with it all?’

            Bell knew this wasn’t about being pregnant, or the abortion. It was the layered question, seeping down beneath. A question for the girl, not the boyfriend. Bell sighed. ‘She’s not changed how she’s acting around me, she’s not pissed at me, I think neither of us blame each other, or we blame ourselves, I don’t know.’

            ‘You’ll be there for the appointment?’

            ‘Of course I will.’

            They sat in silence for a time, thinking on what must have been coming to both of their minds. Bell, caught thinking of the potential, this carved idea of the procedure being unsuccessful, and Caitlin in tears on a pillowed couch wondering what about her body would reject drugs and kind, helpful doctors. Cait, he would go, unable to speak the volumes of the truth, or make it believable enough. Dita would have advice, but it would come with cautions, warnings, and a refusal. Old world magic tied into the fabric of the world now, foolishly used, foolishly spoken of again these thirty-odd years later. Marcella, caught thinking about something. Her mind blocked off from him, and that was frightening, too. Unknown ideas. Unknown imaginings.

            The cousins soon began wandering back towards the apartment building, with Bell offering to stop off at the lower-floor apartment in case Ares was temperamental…for some reason, whatever he saw fit. It could be her staying out overnight, or coming home later in the morning, or having not had the forethought to pack a change of clothes and a toothbrush into the tiny purse.

            In the elevator, Marcella paused to say, ‘The guy. Why do I have anything with men?’ At her age, having ideations around the male of the species was advanced, rushed, almost. At twenty, she was supposed to be thrilled by the potential of love, of wanting intimacy with a man, or woman, whoever she saw fit, really. But Marcella seemed, from one question, or from a rather handful over the course of the last few weeks, she seemed to be possessed by a woman older than she was.

            Bell gave her a sideways glance. ‘What happened with this one?’

            It was the sort of thing Dita would have said in her dating days in the early 90s.

            ‘He was dismissive,’ she began. ‘Sort of, when I brought up something he didn’t know anything about, he would try to change the subject. I was three seconds away from walking off from his ass but it became less obnoxious when I talked about only the things I knew he liked, and then he was normal, really. Not stuck up about those things, he just had an actual reason to care.’ Marcella sighed and glanced at the flashing arrow as they rose in the building. ‘I went home with him because I wasn’t interested in anyone else, and I just wanted to have sex.’

            At the mention of it, the elevator doors pinged open and they were on the seventh floor. The only other members of his family were in an apartment the furthest you could possibly be from the ride down to the ground floor. Their front door was always locked. Ares was somewhat hot-headed, but he was not aloof and foolish. His emotions would never cloud him from leaving himself and his daughter vulnerable to a world that might not appreciate learning they are living amongst immortals.

Having let himself go since his various “heydays”, Ares now seemed like an ordinary man in his late forties, sporting somewhat of a beer belly, stringy hair slightly visible in the gap between his shirt and trousers. In no sense did he look like a bogan, but gone was the man who once commanded armies. As a modern father, he loosened the elastic of his pants and was more at peace with how he projected out into the universe. There was no telling how old he truly was, but now that Ares did not have to attend parent-teacher conferences or be present at school events, he got comfortable.

            ‘My daughter,’ he beamed as Marcella slid the tiny purse on the kitchen counter and narrowly avoided a hug. The Zeus in him came strongly across, like pulsated lightning bolts. Ever the menial, overly-touchy fatherly figure. ‘And my nephew!’ He sounded somewhat intoxicated, in the sense that one of the more common traits of becoming tipsy was an overexcitement to greet everyone you know, or do not know, and wrap your arms around them in a bear hug. Ares stood mere inches from Bell with an arm across his shoulders. From this position, Bell thought if there was alcohol on Ares’ breath he would be able to smell it, but thankfully at that time in the morning he could only smell what he assumed his uncle had been recently eating—spaghetti bolognese. An early lunch.

            So far there had been no anger. ‘Sorry for staying out all night,’ Marcella spoke, switching between sustained eye-contact, for sincerity, and brief glances at her cousin, afraid each word would indite her in the crime of having sex with a man she was only half-interested in. ‘My bed went cold for the night, I hope the sheets and things forgive me.’ Ares chuckled. He seemed pleasant that morning.

            ‘Do you want me to scold you for it?’ He glanced back and forth between the younger generation, seemingly trying to get their instinctual reactions before they said anything. Bell, trying hard not to fall for the bait, remained placid and almost frozen.

            Marcella smiled. ‘I thought you might.’

            ‘You’re grown now,’ he said. ‘If I told you off for every night out, for wanting to flee the nest, I would find myself in the position of every other parent on this planet. Trying desperately to keep you here, with me, forever.’ He paused, only for a moment, as if to take a breath. ‘The life I have lived bears weight on how I raise a child. I could rage against you, because that is so expected of the god of war, but when your aunt fell into her grave, she left behind the title of wisdom. God of wisdom for the other god of war, I snatched it up, how I could.’ He did a quick, sharp gesture of memorial for Athena. ‘Must I be cruel all the time? No. That was someone else’s rank, that would be someone else’s rank.’

            Ares passed into the living room and fiddled with one of the dark curtains, blocking light from entering the room. The briefest of cones of light passed in a wave, and Bell thought of darting into it, until it was once more gone. The apartment was bathed in candlelight and shadow. Somewhat of a safety hazard, but Ares was never responsible for fires, or at least not disastrous ones.

            ‘Bellarmine, your mother is coming down.’

            Ares had not looked up when he spoke this. He continued to tidy the space he was in, dusting with his hand, straightening one of the cushions of the couch. Marcella was moving towards her bedroom down the hall, walking backwards to keep in the know.

            ‘She texted me, which always, I think, gets me started on when I was waiting in line for the first iPhone and this dickwad behind me kept stepping on the backs of my feet, and I thought, one more time and I’d go Hades on his ass and really knock him backwards, then downwards, and then I start thinking, there’s no way for me to check, to telephone, ha, about who is in charge of the Underworld now that Hades is smoking bullets. The Christians like to think it is some boy named Satan, but he’s just a refigure of Hades. Now that was an uncle you didn’t want to tell about your night outs, why you were coming in late. Wouldn’t have cared if you were sorry, wouldn’t have appreciated someone coming for moral support. Disrespect me when I am babysitter? I do not think so.’ Ares took a truncated breath. All the while he had been tidying the place, while Bell stood, unsure what to do with his body. ‘Your mother, I always feel I have to make this place more respectable for her. She blinks,’ and he paused, studying Bellarmine, who on many accounts was Aphrodite replicated in the masculine form, and sighed. ‘She blinks and a living room is translated into art, living or suspended, but me, once I would have had the hide of a bear on the floor with blood still dripping from the teeth.’ He lifted his head, his arm, and pointed dramatically to a “spot” on the floor. ‘There, right there, is leftovers of the carnage.’ He smirked at his nephew. ‘Careful.’

            There was a curt knock at the door and Ares received Dita, who now wore an entirely different ensemble and was immediately bathed in the light coming through the open curtains. Marcella had rejoined the two in the living room, changed out of what she had been wearing since, say, five o’clock the previous evening. The three of them, Ares, Bellarmine, and Marcella, were arrayed in a respectful line formation as if they were welcoming the queen. Out of habit they had nervously collected together so Marcella and Bell could squeeze each other’s hands from behind their backs.

            ‘What, are we hiding another secret?’ Dita winked at her son.

            Looseness overcame the apartment and they stopped playing coy with one another. Marcella sighed and said, ‘I was worried you’d notice how bad my skin was, I slept in a face of makeup.’ Her aunt merely laughed and enveloped her in the warmest of hugs. She was, after all, the goddess of love, and it was rather difficult to think yourself unappreciated when Dita kissed your cheek and left what was essentially a blessing to look rejuvenated. ‘Everyone in this family is incredibly fertile, so be careful, darling.’ Dita kissed her niece’s cheek once more for good measure.

            The four made themselves more comfortable in the now-inviting apartment. With the curtains drawn open, Bell could once more take in the furnishings—Ares was not a poor decorator, or more likely, he took advice over the years from the more fashionable of the older gods and made the slight adjustments everyone else was less likely to notice. Flourishes. Coasters with flame-like detailing, silver statuettes of loosely-dressed men, pictures of Marcella in Halloween costumes in brown frames. These touches were noticeable when you sat on the sofa and wanted something to fiddle with.

            There seemed to be nothing Dita needed to say, for once. She was alluring enough that had anyone in the room not been related to her it would have been captivating on pure appearance. The unspoken presence, or technically lack thereof, of a new generation seemed to leave everyone at a stand-still. Bell assumed his mother had told Ares, hence the overdrawn monologue about how he watched texting come into existence from the first telephone, from the ableist Alexander Graham Bell—another story entirely—to now, with the sagging weight of a mobile phone in Bell’s pocket, brushing up against his side.

            ‘This has been like calling together a council, or a, perhaps a forum,’ Dita said, making a cursory glance at her son. ‘Family meeting, really. No one is to be shamed, or ashamed, when no one is peeved or disrupted.’ She sighed, her face taking on a rather human expression, mouth somewhat twisted and curled. ‘If this baby is stubborn, if this child is to be born, our existence becomes yet again more complicated.’

            Dita began to reiterate her own story of welcoming Bellarmine into the world, reverting to that of a young mother, hopeful and reminded, too, of how he was not her first child, and perhaps would not be her last. Hearing this again sent a new pang through Bell. He didn’t know a sibling—most were certainly deceased, or otherwise in some other part of the world, certainly not there. She was not in contact with them anymore. It would have seemed strange if the child she had in 1962 had a mother who looked younger than they were. Dita’s inability to really take on visions of age, considering she had been born irregularly, and on a plane not so much human, ordinary, complicated matters. Her children, although blessed with immortal genetics, still physically aged. That child would now be in their sixties. Physically, spiritually, mentally. The universe tended to cruelly find the means of swiping her offspring out of the picture. The child she had bore in 1790 had drowned in a lake.

            That was a morbid morning.

​

After her amble, Dita sighed and moved to the kitchen to fill a glass with water. Everyone in the room was distracted by her, still. A woman like that captivated. ‘There is something else I should confess, while we are gathered.’ Dita seemed slightly shaken, but not stirred. She took a sip of the water, then scrunched her face up, albeit only noticeable if you stood close to her. Only her son seemed to notice. ‘Ares, your water is bland.’ She laughed.

            For a moment, the others believed she had the fortunate foresight to make a remark. This water she had consumed a number of times, it was poured out from the insert in the refrigerator, but it was hardly holy. Bell, too, laughed but expected something more, something dire, or at least important. Dita sighed again. The theatrics, this must have been how it once was, when she wore elaborate draperies and stood in the heavens. Dancing on clouds.

            ‘I have been attempting to find Apollo again.’

            Nobody spoke.

            Dita laughed at herself. Bell inched towards her.

            ‘I know, darling, he might be dead. Having partied too much in the seventies.’ She moved from the kitchen towards the sofa once more, almost floating across the room. ‘Officially, Ares and I lost contact with him in the eighties. I don’t remember the year, do you?’ She gave a pointed, but asking-for-reassurance sort of look at Ares. Dita bit back her tongue at his silence.

            ‘It has been far too long since I heard a word from him, I know.’ Dita collapsed down onto the fabric beside her son, but no part of her seemed deflated, or defeated. They were no doubt worried she would begin another elaborate concoction of a tale about the last time she had laid her pretty eyes on the god of the sun, the god of music, who would have lit every room with a shine that could blind. ‘In twenty years, you raise a child. You mother, wrapping your son in diapers, and you begin to understand how to enrol him in kindergarten, how to avoid every allergen, or the children who have them. When I was raising my last, I had no need to understand how to raise them with the state of technology now, how adept he has become at using his mobile phone for everything, writing his essays on his computer…when I last saw Apollo, my brother, never would we have spoken of the rotting worry of artificial intelligence corroding the planet we stand upon.’ She paused, bowing her head. ‘That would have been for the movies. Apollo, he loved the movies.’

            Again, for a spell, no one spoke.

            Then: ‘Can you sense him, Aphrodite?’ It was the first time in quite a while someone had addressed her by the name she had abandoned to become Bellarmine’s mother.

            Dita shed a few tears. ‘Why do I carry a light of him, but not the others? Zeus, Hera, long since dead. Demeter, deceased and yet the crop still flourishes. Athena. Hephaestus, how our marriage had been wrought, but he is gone. So many are embers within.’ She wiped her cheeks. ‘But Apollo, there was never the breath to mourn.’

            She snapped her gaze to Ares. ‘The breath, Ares. There was the time. We spent our quiet evenings without knowing where he was. How alone and lonely it felt to be the last two remaining of the gods, in a world that saw us only as silly stories that which could not possibly have been true.’ Dita let her son comfort her, his arm snaking around her shoulders.

            ‘I want to believe Apollo is alive.’ She sniffled. Another tear fell down her cheek. It was to be all Dita would say, quietening herself down, leaning into the embrace of her child. Bellarmine whispered words of comfort, and periodically the goddess of beauty would seem calmer, softer. Of course, the entire time she sobbed softly to herself, she never once looked anything but beautiful. That was one of her secrets.

            When it was apparent there would be no more talking, Bellarmine shuffled his mother out of the apartment, making quick remarks to his uncle and cousin as they left. Thank yous, goodbyes, see you laters. In the hallway, having pulled back into a façade, Dita straightened herself and walked down the hallway to the elevator unassisted. She muttered a soft thank you to her son, but it was apparent, too, that Dita was not a blubbering mess. She was not one to express egregious emotion.

            With the elevator doors closing on them, Dita glanced at her son. ‘It was the escape I needed, before one or more of you began to criticise me for hoping.’ After the short trip up two floors, once more greeted with a hallway, the goddess stepped out with fairer skin and a wider smile.

            ‘He is somewhere,’ she mused, unlocking their apartment. ‘I know it.’

            She fled into her bedroom, at an ordinary sort of rate, without more tears, but Bell did not hear from her the rest of the day. One could imagine Dita, eternal Aphrodite, was alone in there, conjuring her thoughts in potential, possible actions. But without the sight, the glimpse inside, there was to be nothing substantial that night on what she had been plotting, concocting, even thinking of. For all Bell was aware, she had been sleeping off he exhaustion of tears. Of time.​