F³ Extra Gifts

            “So, do you want your present?” I asked.

            “You already gave me a fresh sprig of mistletoe, days ago.”

            “Doesn’t mean that was your only gift.”

M³ You Won't Like Herc when He's Mad

            We fast forward a bit past Herc’s childhood. Sure, there was the thing with the snakes Hera sent against him, his feeding incident which created the Milky Way, and he grew up learning from the best and the brightest, but we want to see a serious struggle, right? Right. So we come to the most devastating act of revenge that Hera ever implemented.

            She drove Hercules mad.

F³ The Next Day

            Nikki, good as her word, showed up at my place Christmas morning. She didn’t look her usual stunning self. She looked tired and run-down, and lacked the usual sparkle in her eyes. Given all that, though, she had attempted to be in the spirit of the day, dressing in a red and white dress straight out of White Christmas, the part at the end. The dress flattered and hugged her without revealing. As usual, she was elegant.

M³ The Last Affair

Side note: All right, I promised my friend and stalwart reader Jay that I’d would do some Arthurian legend. I will. I’m working towards it. It’s just that, in deciding to do this, I realized how many mythologies I need to give some kind of background on because they tie directly to Arthur in some way. So, bear with me. We’ve still got some mileage to put on our coconut shells.

            Zeus, as everyone knows, sleeps around. Shamelessly. Incest is no barrier to this. He would have been perfect to appear on Jerry Springer or some other daytime talk-show. Moreover, he was completely unrepentant in how he had these affairs, often assaulting women to get what he wanted. That’s just who he was.

F³ Transencdence

            Ann was sweating as Lita helped her out of her suit. Her hands shook with the endorphins and adrenaline coursing through her. But more than all of that, she felt completely overwhelmed by the surfing. She wanted to think about it, but at the same time, didn’t.

M³ The Triumph of Monotheism

            By the time the Arabian Nights are being penned, Rome has already converted to Christianity (and fallen). Christianity spread throughout the rest of Europe and Russia. Only a little behind, Islam had spread throughout northern Africa and western Asia. Aside from India and China, most of what we refer to as the civilized Ancient world had abandoned polytheism in favor of monotheism.

F³ Lost Record

            Alex took a moment to survey the lecture hall, which buzzed with conversation, as always happened before a class began. The seating had shifted dramatically, though, with a large number of students crowding the front rows. Alex recognized many of those faces as ones that had asked questions and followed her to the coffee shop in the student union.

Good. Those are my most engaged students. The rest look interested, too.

Of course, she had the usual rows of slackers in the very back, most of whom had eyes focused on phones, tablets, or laptops.

“Well,” she began pleasantly, “hopefully now that we’ve got the Civil War out of our way, we can dive into a lecture I had actually planned out.”

M³ Our Hero Is Better than Your Hero

            We know that Odysseus is a strong leader, a great warrior, and very clever, which are all very admirable traits, especially in Greek culture. However, he’s also arrogant, destructive, intolerant, and did I mention arrogant?

            These traits make it difficult for him to be a hero to Muslim Arabs at the time when Sinbad’s story started circulating. These traits are simply incompatible with the values of the culture. Couple this with the fact that Odysseus is Greek (aka a foreigner) and it’s clear that he’s got to go and make way for Sinbad.

F³ Unbeing

            Ann went loose, letting her body twist in the wind. All she did was keep her hands tight on the rail. What was once a tempest, throwing her about became something else, something wild, but with a guiding force to it. She knew—but didn’t know how she knew—where the wind would go, and moved her body and the sail before the wind did. The sail's telltale sensors still screamed at her as they only went blue for an instant.

Islands in a Sea of Fog

            Anyone who has driven in West Texas knows that the landscape is nothing to write home about (and yet I’m doing it, anyway). It’s bleak desert occasionally broken up by flat-topped mesas, many of which have become the home of windmills.

            Most of the time, that is. Dawn, just east of Fort Stockton, Texas. The sun is a golden hemisphere struggling to break free of the horizon, promising a summer heat responsible for hammering the desert into anvil-topped mesas. But the air is not dry on this morning. Recent monsoons soaked the air, and a low fog clings to the ground. This is not the fog of San Francisco or of “pea soup” fame. It’s a veil that barely conceals, and as one gets closer, much like Salome’s enticing dance, the veils are stripped away.

            Yet the beauty in this fog is not in piercing through the veil, but in looking out across the valley, where those flat-topped mesas rise out of the fog like island oases, and fog laps at their sides, trying to swallow them. But they are too tall.

            I’m taking in all I can; the camera on my phone doing poor justice to the view as my car surges down the interstate. In a few minutes, I’ll be swallowed inside the nebula and see the fog as just a slight haze barely worth noticing. And after that, the sun will climb high enough to boil the sea away as if it never was. But the mesas remember, and the windmills remember, and I remember.