Сканк Уоркс

ALT He Had a Terrible Childhood BY JULIEN STRONG my mother tells me, and proceeds to elaborate at gruesome length. But don't all gods and heroes get off to a rocky start? Young Theseus thrashed in his fish shack, Zeus sent abroad to avoid being lunch for his dad. I am twelve and obsessed with Greek myths. I won't repeat the gory details of my mother's story here, but the gist is, faced with the madness of monsters who were his parents, the god in our basement made his mind a labyrinth and retreated inside it, where he invented everything but the way out. I felt it the first time I met him, shying away from him as a horse does a broken bridge. Though in time I learned to cross it—home was on the other side: my mother, shelter, bed. Do you think I shouldn't have married him? she asked me once. It must have been my senior year of high school. I kept silent. Like Cassandra I had a knack for sight yet there was nothing I could have said.

ALT Yes, the Fish Music A trout-colored wind blows through my eyes, through my fingers, and I remember how the trout used to hide from the dinosaurs when they came to drink at the river. The trout hid in subways, castles and automobiles. They waited patiently for the dinosaurs to go away.