FOUR STORIES

by Marcus Attwater

collection, paperback or epub

Apollo thumped the steering wheel in frustration. They were such a sorry excuse for a family. Playing at being human. Like Hermes, when they’d said goodbye: ‘Come and see me’. They always said things like that. ‘Come and visit’, ‘Let’s have lunch’, ‘We’ll keep in touch’. They never did. He had never seen Hermes’ Manhattan apartment, and Hermes had never been to San Francisco. They would see each other only at funerals, if gods had funerals.

After several millennia, Apollo feels rather tired of featuring in the same myths over and over. So when Hera calls a family conference because his sister Helen has been kidnapped (or has run off with a man – interpretations differ on that) he is more interested in catching up with his favorite brother. Maybe this time around the story will be different?

These four stories transpose classical myth to an early twenty-first-century setting, dealing with different kinds of brothers and different kinds of love: Apollo and Hermes, Castor and Pollux, Orestes and Pylades, Alexander and Hephaistion all encounter difficulties their old archetypes never had to worry about…