The Weight of the World Read online

  -Aristotle

  v.

  The King of the Gods took his time relaxing

  and observing the flowers in the garden.

  In his mind, he put aside the woes of

  his troubled marriage.

  But as he walked along the garden pathway,

  a pressure built within his skull behind his eyes

  until the pain left him prostrate on the path,

  unable to scream.

  It was in his good fortune that Hephaestus,

  an unambitious and compassionate god,

  was the one to find him in this weakened state.

  Zeus pleaded with him.

  Knowing that mortal blows were nothing to Gods,

  Hephaestus raised his axe high over his head

  and brought it down to cleave apart Zeus' skull

  and relieve the pain.

  The silver mist that poured from the gaping wound

  quickly swelled to a hasty spinning tempest.

  The whirlwind of dense thought burgeoned and shifted

  as it left his head.

  In minutes the wound closed on the God-King's head.

  The cyclone slowed, tensed, and refined its figure.

  Left standing in the presence of the stunned gods

  was a young woman.

  “Everything is in a state of metamorphosis. Thou thyself art in everlasting change and in corruption to correspond; so is the whole universe.”

  -Marcus Aurelias

  V.

  Zach waited beneath the neon sign for the movie theater at the mall. The walls around him were painted bright orange and gold. Over the buzz of teenage voices and TVs playing pop videos, Zach could no longer hear the thunderstorm that raged outside.

  The boys had decided to make the food-court and film a weekly ritual that summer. It had rained every day this week and weather forecasters in Miami Dade County were now calling in guest meteorologists to try to figure out why the patterns were so unpredictable. Rain had driven the local teens indoors. The mall was once-more packed with bored kids and their parents, who needed an escape from being cooped up with them at home.

  Lewis met Zach at the entrance and they split up. Lewis went for tacos while Zach got a standard burger and fries. Zach was standing in the absurdly long line for his lunch when he heard Lewis.

  “Oh man,” Lewis whispered. “Zach needs to see this.” The whisper sounded like it was right in Zach’s ear. When he turned around to see why Lewis had changed his choice of meals, however, he found nobody behind him except a tired-looking mom with two toddlers.

  Zach’s eyes searched the food court. Lewis was still at the taco stand across the entire width of the court.

  Zach paid for his meal and met Lewis at their table.

  “You’re gonna think I’m crazy,” he said, when Lewis sat down. “I swear I heard you talking to me in line.”

  “Yeah?” Lewis smirked.

  “You said ‘Zach needs to see this.’”

  Lewis’ smirk fell away. “Did I?”

  “Yeah. I hang out with you too much, man. Your voice is in my head.”

  “Well... I did say that, but I was way over there.”

  Zach raised an eyebrow at him. Was Lewis just messing with him? He couldn’t tell. Lewis seemed serious. “So you’re telling me that you whispered and I somehow heard it?”

  “Yeah, I mean, unless you can read my mind.”

  “What did I need to see?”

  “Oh, just some redneck picking a fight with the clerk at the next stand over. Total cliché with the sleeveless plaid shirt and trucker hat. Thought it was gonna get physical. That’s not really important right now,” Lewis said. He hadn’t sat down and was practically bouncing. “What if this is another power, you know? I mean, did you get that mass email from Evan?”

  “Yeah, how he can melt metal now?”

  “What if this is my second power?”

  “Just because he has one, doesn’t mean you do. I mean, knowing machines wasn’t exactly a clear-cut supernatural ability, Lew. Maybe that was really his first actual power.”

  “But what if this is my second power?” Lewis set his bag of food down. In a blink, he was gone. Zach saw him stop his blurred run at the opposite end of the food court.

  “Can you hear me now?” he whispered. It was as clear as if he were right at Zach’s shoulder.

  “Yeah,” Zach said. “I can. Weird.”

  “I can’t hear whatever you’re saying, dude.”

  Zach waved for him to come back. Napkins flew off of tables as Lewis rushed back.

  “Dude, stop doing that in public. You moron.”

  “Nobody can see me.”

  “Someone is gonna notice. Some preteen girl is gonna be staring at us and see you vanish like Clark Kent and we’re gonna get busted.”

  Lewis shrugged. “It’s super easy now I know I can do it. I mean I just focus and tell you something, you directly, and it gets there. I wanna try someone else.”

  Lewis turned and stared at a man in cut-off jeans and a Nascar hat. “Hey, stupid,” he whispered. The man looked around wildly, but nobody was near him. Lewis laughed.

  “Eat your tacos,” Zach said.

  “Grumpy,” Lewis retorted before flopping down into a chair.

  “Look at her,” he said, pointing at a woman across the sea of tables. “What do you think, sorority girl?”

  Zach shrugged.

  “Come on, Lightning,” Lewis moaned. “Hot girl, straight ahead, and you don’t care?”

  Zach put his burger down and took a proper look at the girl Lewis was ogling. She had black hair that went down past her backside. It was a very nice backside. He nodded. “Probably.”

  “That’s more like it. Wonder if I could use my new gift to convince her that God was telling her to go out with me.”

  Zach shrugged again. He ran his hand through his summer haircut and scratched his stubbled chin. He could play along, but he wasn’t really feeling it.

  “What is wrong with you? Her body is easily a nine!”

  “It’s not really that exciting, Lewis.”

  “Six months ago you would have been there, right now, using a line on her.”

  “Six months ago that might have been worth it.” In truth, Zach had been with a string of girls just as gorgeous as the mysterious food court girl that Lewis was currently so fixated on. Since his breakup with June Herald in February, Zach had embraced his freedom and made moves on more girls than he could count in retrospect. He had been successful, too. Now the idea of flipping on the Zach Jacobs charisma and bringing home yet another gorgeous girl seemed exhausting.

  “This is what senior year of High School is supposed to be like. Man, you’re really a downer this week. You know that? Like, the last few weeks. Buzzkill!” Lewis threw a french fry and hit Zach square in the temple with it. Zach rolled his eyes and plucked the fallen fry off of his rain jacket.

  “It’s boring.”

  “Boring?” Lewis couldn’t believe his ears. He had spent most of his high school career living vicariously through the upperclassman and now Zach was telling him that being his hero was boring? “You’re just not trying hard enough.”

  “I don’t have to,” Zach said.

  “I know! That’s the problem.” Lewis clapped to punctuate his point, “You need more challenging girls. You’ve been picking up easy girls. You need to try someone who isn’t the type to sleep with any tall quarterback who comes along. I mean, look at you, man. You’re a god. Literally. You don’t need to aim so low. You can get girls with standards to bend over backwards for you.”

  Zach looked up from his food and back at Lewis. He was smiling, obviously lost in that last image he had created for himself. Zach shook his head. He knew that Lewis wanted him to simply up the ante and put some more difficult notches on his bedpost, but that wasn’t Zach’s style. Zach didn’t want to trick some good girl into wasting her purity on him. Maybe he was ready to actually date again--
just not with June.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  Lewis clapped him on the back.

  “Finish up your food,” Zach said. “Our movie starts in fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen whole minutes,” Lewis said. He had formed a recent habit of waiting until the last second on everything these past few months. Lewis leaned back on his elbows and looked up through the glass ceiling. “Hey, look,” he said, pointing up. “Sunshine. Hallelujah.”

  They ate. Zach stopped Lewis from using his new power to tease anyone else while they were there. When they had thrown their trash away and put their trays up, they headed across the mall to the theater for their weekly flick.

  Lewis went home to mow his parents’ lawn and Zach decided to hang around the mall a while longer. He got an ice cream from the food court and made stops at the standard teen hang outs. Zach bought a Florida Gators cap at a hat store and browsed through the dirty birthday cards at Spencer’s.

  Eventually he ended up at the book store, drawn in by the green Hulk statue in the window dressed up like Harry Potter. Zach wandered down the aisles, browsing the covers and killing time. The book store was on the second floor of the mall, and so the radio was muffled by the patter of rain on the roof above.

  “You need self help?” someone behind him asked. This time she was really behind him. Zach didn’t recognize Minnie at first. She had cut her hair short and changed her glasses to frames that suited her face since the last Pantheon meeting. The Pantheon hadn’t held an official meeting since school let out. She wasn’t in a t-shirt and jeans, either, but nice, tailored clothes. She looked professional. She was wearing a name badge.

  “You work here?”

  “Nope. Just wear a tag to confuse people.”

  “You look different,” Zach said, looking her up and down. Minnie had always been the teacher’s pet at school, but it was hard to imagine her as a goddess in gender-neutral t-shirts with her hair straight and hanging in her face. The new cut and glasses showed off her strong cheekbones and let Zach see her large, dark eyes. The new clothes revealed that Minnie had been hiding a killer figure. “Very different,” he said, staring.

  “Looking for anything in particular?” Minnie asked. “Could I interest you in a copy of The Friendly Guide to Mythology?”

  “Just trying to bust boredom. D’you guys have comic books?”

  Minnie nodded and crooked her finger in a signal for him to follow. She walked away from the Self Help section and guided him along the back wall, past the Manga, and stopped at a section of graphic novels.

  “I should have guessed you’d work at a book store.”

  “You have no idea,” Minnie said with a smile. “It’s not just the discount that I’m benefiting from.”

  Zach had absolutely no idea what she meant by that.

  “I’ve been working here a week and I’ve already read thirty-five books on the job.”

  “What?” Zach knew she was brainy, but he thought that even defied the best speed reader.

  “Pick any book. One without pictures, preferably,” she said.

  Zach turned around and plucked a teen romance novel off the shelf. Minnie opened it at the middle and, without even glancing at the page, ran her hand over the words. She promptly passed the book to Zach and started reciting it. He followed along as she recalled the page word-for-word.

  “Woah,” he said when she stopped talking. “I knew you had perfect memory, but how did you even read it?”

  “By touch,” she said. “I just have to touch the words and I’ve read them. And, well, you know I just have to read or hear or see the words and I’ve memorized them.”

  “When did this start?”

  “Before finals. Actually, a couple of weeks before that. May 3rd was when I first noticed it.”

  Zach picked up a graphic novel with a shattered picture frame on the cover. He flipped through the pages while deciding if he should tell Minnie. In the end he decided that Lewis was always ready to brag, so there could be no harm in sharing his new gift.

  “Lewis discovered a second power today,” Zach said. “He can whisper at you, like he’s right there, but from far away.”

  “Today?” Minnie asked. “Did you get Evan’s email?”

  “Yeah. The metal thing. I think we’re all getting an upgrade,” he said.

  Minnie leaned on the shelf next to him and pulled a comic off the rack. Graphic novels still held a challenge for her. She could absorb the written word, but images still had to be seen. “You heard Devon’s pregnant,” she said.

  “It’s all over Facebook.”

  “How could they be so stupid?” she asked. “As if we don’t get enough Miracle of Life warnings from biology class, and then, with our circumstances, they should be twice as careful.”

  “Well,” Zach laughed, “So long as the baby doesn’t get Frank’s strength and punch a whole in her uterus--”

  “That’s not funny,” Minnie said. “I mean, that’s a real possibility. I came out of your skull, after all.”

  Zach shuddered. “You think it’ll be a god?”

  Minnie peeked around the shelf to make sure that the other patrons and employees were at the other end of the store. “Don’t know. Dr. Davis has one kid and she’s one of us, so maybe. But mythologically speaking, not all of our offspring were gods.” She put the graphic novel away and picked up a discarded coffee cup that some woman had imprinted with her lipstick and left half-full on the shelf. “How are you doing, Zach?” she asked sincerely. “You seem sad.”

  “Do I?” he asked. Maybe Lewis was right. “I feel fine.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah, just bored.”

  Minnie nodded as if she had heard a different answer than the words coming from his mouth. “Okay,” she said.

  “I should be going,” Zach said. “I’m sure Mom’s cooking by now.”

  Zach took the comic book to the register. Minnie followed him and gave him her discount when she rang it up.

  “We should have a meeting, soon,” she said.

  “I’ll call for one.” Zach took the bag from her.

  She flashed a friendly smile and jokingly chimed in with her standard parting line, “Have a nice day, sir.”

  He chuckled. “Hey, Minnie. The new look, it works for you,” he said. Zach left the store and took the escalator down to the North entrance of the mall.

  Minnie, Lewis, and Evan had second powers. Those were just the ones they knew of. How many members of The Pantheon hadn’t he heard from? A meeting was definitely in order. Zach wondered, as he pushed open the glass doors, what his second power would be.

  The storm had broken while he had been talking to Minnie. Outside the sun shone brightly, drying up the puddles in the parking lot.

  Zach realized that what he had told Minnie was more true than he had known. He had been bored. Pursuing girls had gotten old and he had let himself foolishly think that things would settle into tedium after surviving Prometheus’ plot. Now the gods were awakening new powers. Zach realized that things would never be truly boring for him again.

  And then there was Minnie. For the first time, Zach had realized that she, the brainy Pantheon member, the girl he had gone to school with since they were kids, was a woman.

  “Bacchus opens the gate of the heart.”

  -Homer

  vi.

  Arms laden with grapes, Dionysus wandered.

  He stopped when he came to a tablet of stone.

  Picking up a rock, he began his carving.

  Patiently, he worked.

  When the basin was complete, he continued

  and carved out a trench to the edge of the stone.

  Then he laid the vines of grapes in the basin

  and danced on the fruit.

  The sweet juices of the grapes flooded the pan

  and traveled the trench to the edge of the slab.

  He collected the product in a barrel

  to make the first wine.


  “Wine is a peephole in a man.”

  -Alcaeus

  VI.

  Theodore Wexler had no reason to wake up before one in the afternoon any day that summer. He opened his eyes at quarter-of-two and decided that he couldn’t roll over and go back to sleep any more. Teddy got dressed and started down the stairs to make some toaster waffles when he heard the garage door open. His adoptive mother, who was actually his step mother, (who not-so-secretly despised him) was home from a shopping excursion.

  Teddy turned around on the stairs and ran back to his room. He shut and locked the door and cranked up a mix of french rap so high that there would be no way she could get him to carry her bags from the car for her.

  Teddy slipped into his large, white, leather computer chair and decided to kill time checking his mail. That shrew of a woman could carry her own Gucci handbags if she wanted to waste his father’s money.

  As soon as his computer booted up and signed on Instant Messenger, a message with a pale pink background popped up on the screen. It was Penelope Davis.

  Penny didn’t usually IM Teddy. He was pretty sure they had talked once when she had gotten her new screen name and usually he just saw her name on his buddy list and ignored it. She told him that she bought a webcam, and she wanted to try it out. Teddy checked his hair once more in the mirror over his dresser and then clicked the video chat button.

  “You got a new webcam?” he asked when her face appeared on screen. It was an interesting peek into the life of Penny Davis. She had pastel pink walls, likely painted that way when she was a little girl, but they were covered with posters of supernatural teen romances and some wild-looking girl with pink hair and a violin. His own room featured dark wood panelling, almost completely obscured by posters of high performance sports cars and Victoria’s Secret models. The single poster of Lupe Fiasco over his computer desk looked out of place among a sea of glossy lingerie pinups and chrome wheels.