Chapter 38
844 Words
Chapter 38
“I don’t suppose I could get away with resigning.” Dana ignored her ringing cell phone and began cleaning up the planetarium from the failed evening with Sam.
“Did you ever read Greek mythology?” Michelle gave her a hand moving the chairs back into place.
Dana shook her head. Or was she Diana? She didn’t like the feeling of being two different people. Didn’t like it one bit. Another person had been living in her body. Or at least in her DNA. Very uncomfortable.
“Well, I guess that’s okay. Most of it’s a crock anyway. The only ones they actually got right were Zeus who really is a womanizing jerk and Aphrodite who truly is so beautiful and sexy that every conversation grinds to a halt whenever she walks into a room. Anyway, your mother is one of the most powerful Goddesses in all creation.”
“Mama is a Goddess?” She loved her mom, despite her weird meals and eccentric musical predilections. But Goddess?
“Okay, your spiritual mother.”
“Mama isn’t a Goddess?” Now she was sounding stupid.
“Artemis is the Goddess of the Hunt for the Ancient Greeks and much of Western Asia before them. She is immensely powerful. At the same time vicious and nurturing. Goddess of blood sacrifice, both hunter with a bow and a caring guardian of the animals of the field. Artemis was so powerful and feared that the Greeks made her into a virgin just to try and control her power. She was still too much for the Romans, who always were a bunch of woosies.”
Michelle rose to her feet and paced across the planetarium as if inspecting it carefully, but Dana could feel the Devil waiting for her to formulate a question.
“What did the Romans do to Artemis?”
Michelle ignored her.
“I told you I haven’t read mythology.” Dana reminded her.
She stopped her pacing. “Try remembering.”
Dana dug around in her brain pan. Searching for this person that the Devil and the Angel insisted she was. There was Dana-the-top-astronomy-student-in-the-department. Theresa had called her Dana-the-Destroyer after more than one video game. And then there was Dana-the-daughter-in-a-slightly-less-than-normal-household. That was all she could find.
That, and Diana-the-huntress.
She jerked to her feet. A brief flash, like a camera flash on the far side of closed eyelids. A woman, young, pretty…Herself. Clothed in flowing tanned leather the color of newborn leaves. Barefoot. Running through a forest. Her hair flowing behind. A bow over her shoulder with the string crossing down between her breasts. A quiver on her back and a stag, with at least a dozen points on his antlered head, prancing beside her.
A quick blink and the image was gone. Again she stood in jeans and a t-shirt. Bare feet racing across the forest floor were once more covered in white Nikes standing on linoleum. The four walls of the planetarium surrounded her rather the boundless green forest.
“How’d you do that?”
Michelle dropped into one of the front row planetarium chairs. The dark eyes could be a smoldering fire except for the amusement that pulled up their corners.
“What’s troubling you?”
“The…” Dana couldn’t say the vision. She didn’t believe in clairvoyance, or the afterlife. She believed in the here and now. Energy flow, even if most people didn’t let themselves see it, was still in the realm of the here and now. This was more. A shiver shook her like a rag doll.
“A particular memory bothering you?”
“No.” Dana knew she was being petty, but she couldn’t help it.
Michelle was kind enough to shrug her acceptance. “Artemis was too scary for the Romans, so they watered her down and made Diana. So they made—you.” Michelle pointed at the center of Dana’s chest.
Dana placed a hand over her heart as if a puncture had just been made that would let her inner essence leak out and be lost among the fake stars on the dome.
“Virgin Goddess of the hunt.”
“So now I’m a virgin.”
“You aren’t?”
“No. Yes. No I’m not.”
Michelle arched her eyebrows at her.
“I just feel like one because the only guys I’ve been with sure didn’t make me want to be with them again.”
Michelle continued, “But Diana the Huntress was still one tough babe. Though they’d made Artemis the mother of the animals into Diana the virgin teenager, she still scared the s**t out of them.”
She headed for the door and c****d her head beckoning Dana to follow. Henrietta fluttered up from where she’d stayed amazingly quiet perched on the edge of a chair in the front row, and landed on Michelle’s shoulder, holding onto her ear for balance.
“Then what? What did they do to me…her…Diana after that?” She didn’t want to leave the sanctuary of the planetarium, but Michelle was already moving out into the wide concrete corridor, her footsteps echoing down the hall from the closing door.
She caught it just before it snapped shut and trotted after the woman.
“Then what?”
“It took the Christians to figure out how to tame your image. They reformed you into a vessel for the birth of their male Messiah, the Virgin Mother.”
The Virgin Mother?
“Mary of Nazareth? Mother of Jesus?”
Michelle laughed as she walked past a long blackboard covered in equations explaining white dwarf collapse into neutron star, and headed down the wide, concrete stairs.
“Both of you descended from Diana, after a fashion. Makes you sisters, mostly. Jesus would be your nephew.”
Dana sat down on the top step. Hard.
- Writer
