Call me Titan

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“How did you get loose?” The woman who was Aphrodite asked me.

“It happened. Here I am.”

“Yes,” she said. “You. Of all of them, you. In this lovely place.” She waved at the shining sun-bright sea, the glittering white stripe of the beach, the whitewashed houses, the bare brown hills. A lovely place, yes, this isle of Mykonos. “And what are you going to do now?”

“What I was created to do,” I told her. “You know.”

She considered that. We were drinking ouzo on the rocks, on the hotel patio, beneath a hanging array of fisherman’s nets. After a moment she laughed, that irresistible tinkling laugh of hers, and clinked her glass against mine.

“Lots of luck,” she said.

That was Greece. Before that was Sicily, and the mountain, and the eruption…

The mountain had trembled and shaken and belched, and the red streams of molten fire began to flow downward from the ashen top, and in the first ten minutes of the eruption six little towns around the slopes were wiped out. It happened just that fast. They shouldn’t have been there, but they were, and then they weren’t. Too bad for them. But it’s always a mistake to buy real estate on Mount Etna.

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