Orpheus in the legs that fall asleep and the eyes you can’t keep open, and the endless cups off coffee that didn’t work, caffeine immunity creeping in. He’s the sand in your eyes the day after an allnighter, coaxing you to pause, letting you know the world can wait a few hours. In the vivid daydreams and dizzy thoughts that conjure themselves into vision even when you don’t close your eyes. He’s the sudden smells that take you back a decade and are gone as quickly as they come.
Hades stands not in graveyards but on every corner and every bridge. Dutiful accountant, he knows your name, and it waits on his tongue. He’s not there to rush you, nor help you. Perhaps his presence is enough. Ideation, Hades is in cold fingers and forgotten teas, crumbles leaves that tell you he’s taken her away again. He’s in the rinds of fruit and discarded husks, the plucked leaves, the end, always waiting at the core of everything.
Persephone is in the fresh fruit, ripe and ready to burst, eating them, destroying them feels like a sin, like delicious betrayal. Shes the first sharp bite and the way the juice rolls down your chin, in the decisions you hold steadfastly onto.
Aphrodite is in the sharp line of lipstick, and the boldness of a sharp cateye, but also the next day when it’s smeared and freckled with chipped mascara, the glance in the mirror when you see yourself like this and shrug, ‘not so bad’. She’s in the burst of warmth and weak you feel when you watch a child laugh with its grandmother. She’s there in that moment you fit into those jeans, she’s there when you slip into sweatpants and have a second slice of cake. When you shit talk your ex she’s there, nodding and making sure you know he was no hood for you.
Dionysus walks in when your friends do, carrying his revelry on their shoulders. With a bottle of champange, -a treat-, he’s not so much in drinking it as he is shaking it up and popping the cork, the laughter and the mess that ensues, the sticky fingers that last the night. He’s there in the morning next as well, surveying the damage and grinning like a king when you scrape chips off the couch.
Hestia is in a recipe that came out perfect the first try and in the twenty failed attempts in another. She is the warm crackle of a bonfire that friends and family gathers around on a crisp evening with cups of warm cider in your hands. She guides your hand when feeding a baby for the first time and smiles indulgently as you stuff your face with gooey cookies still hot off the rack. She’s a faint brush of cinnamon and wood smoke across your nose and the sound of footsteps big and small crunching leaves.
(@rosewitchwoods)
Ooooh yes perfect @deitiesanddevotionals
Tag: mythology
greek gods as @dril quotes
zeus: how come a baby born with a foot in its brain is considered a “Miracle Baby” but when I get my dick stuck in a drawer im just some asshole
poseidon: my body is 70% water mother fucker. guns cannot harm me
hades: I will tell you this right now: I’m from hell. Im highly fucked up. Ive been known to say rude things and watch the carnage unfold brutally
hera: “horny” has killed more people than all the volcanos on earth combined
athena: and to the guy who said i have shit for brains: youre right. i do have… four brains……….
artemis: Blocked. Blocked. Blocked. You are all blocked. None of you are free of sin
apollo: i just looked up the stats and the number of meaningful relationships ive formed is less than the number of public restrooms ive Screamed in
hephaestus: back in the dog house after the wife caught me photo shopping her into vintage car ads
persephone: “i wish they got, WiFi down here” – guy who died in the paris catacombs
dionysus: “sir, can i ask why you’re smoking TWO huge blunts?”
“officer, I’m…”
*turns to camera*
“double jointed”
*cop starts breakdancing*
ares: the conflicted supersoldier stares over the horizon as he smokes a cigarette. “war is the most fucked up thing ever.” he takes a sip of beer
hermes: the doctor reveals my blood pressure is 420 over 69. i hoot & holler outta the building while a bunch of losers try to tell me that im dying
aphrodite: looks like im forced to address false rumors that i own 3 dildos on a shelf labelled “breakfast” “lunch” & “dinner”. this is an absurdity .
Millennial Sisyphus keeps entering all the information from his resume into the web form, only for it to delete everything when he tries to move to the next page. He just goes back and types it all up again, over and over again, forever, and he never gets a job.
Millennial Tantalus has been promised that his unpaid internship will become a paid position as soon as the company has space for him. Every week he sees their new job posting. Every week he asks his boss if he can have a real job. The boss shrugs apologetically and says he’ll just have to make do with being paid in experience a little longer. He goes back and keeps working, over and over again, forever, and he never reaches the fruits of his labors.
Millennial Persephone can’t get a job without a degree, but because she had to take out loans to pay for college, she must spend 1/3 of her life working just to pay them off.
Millennial Cassandra’s title is Social Media Coordinator, she was hired to be the expert, but every time she tries to explain the problems in her company’s social media decisionmaking, the managers don’t listen…and end up hiring expensive PR flacks to repair the damage to their reputation when things blow up exactly as she predicted.
Millennial Medusa uses multiple shades of primer and opaque foundation to cover the scars snaking across her face, hiding the bruises, aligning the asymmetry in her broken nose and jaw. Red matte on the lips, green shimmer on the lids. Flawless liner on the first try. She’s had lots and lots of practice. She films her transformation in secret for all to see and learn, and again, men are turned to anonymous stone faces screaming in horror. “Liar!” “Witch!” “Take her swimming on the first date!” These words do not discourage her. These words are a challenge. GlamGorgonXx posts another video.
regional differences
“oh hey,” she said, “it’s a really touristy area, but since you’re gonna be passing through anyway, you might as well stop by pier 29, see the dragons. also, there’s a—”
“hold on,” i said. “i knew your city had mountains, but. dragons? uh, actual living dragons?”
“dude, it’s not a big deal. they’re there all the time. of course they’re majestic and everything, but they’re loud and cranky and mostly they lie around eating garbage. now and then the city council will talk about trying to make them roost somewhere else, but—”
“dragons,” i repeated. i knew it was making me sound like a rube, but it was a lot to take in. “you live in a city that has dragons.”
“no, it’s cool, we used to go see them when i was a little kid. it’s worth doing. but that whole area is mostly dragon-themed gift shops, and the commercialization is kind of a bummer. also, sometimes a dragon will melt somebody’s car and it’s a whole problem.”
“fairytale-style, giant scaly fire-breathing dragons.”
“honestly, i forget other cities don’t have them?” she said. “there’s a few other sites on the west coast where they gather. portland calls them wyverns, but that’s a portland thing.”
“chicago’s got, like, bunnies and songbirds,” i told her, “but otherwise it’s just your typical vermin. pigeons, rats, sphinxes—”
“sphinxes? what the hell.”
“oh, yeah, they nest in the el tunnels. sometimes a fucking sphinx will flap down out of nowhere, bring the whole train to a halt until the front car answers a riddle.”
“that sounds exciting,” she said.
“it’s the worst. your train winds up being twenty minutes late, and you just have to hang out hoping somebody up there read their mythology. there’s supposed to be a program where the conductors get trained in riddling, but i don’t know. rahm emmanuel keeps saying it’s not a budget priority.”
“huh,” she said. “guess the grass is always greener and all that. but on some level, it’s nice to remember that even with all these big box stores, the country still has some variety left in it.”
“yeah, did you know that in rhode island they call water fountains ‘bubblers’?” i said.
“whoa, seriously?”
“i read it somewhere. crazy, right?”
“crazy.”
i am here for urbanized mythological creatures
Switzerland has a lot of dragons, but dragons have long since moved on from collecting gold. There’s a purply-scaley one that roosts behind the Mad Mex that refuses to stop hoarding signposts. The city uses banners for the main roads and sells a lot of maps.
Golems love cities–with their stone buildings and sidewalks. There are strict laws about what one is allowed to say to them, because golems tend to be rather literal and very obedient. There’s always one kid who thinks he knows better. He doesn’t.
OH MY GOD THE CHICAGO SPHINXES, DON’T GET ME STARTED. Here’s the thing. When you buy your Ventra card at the machine – which is another one of Rahm’s scams, leasing that out to a private company, wtf was he thinking – it’s supposed to have the answer to the riddle on it, right? The sphinx is supposed to scan the bar code and let the train through.
that never fucking happens. Especially on the Blue Line which is down for maintenance all the time and constantly switching tracks and running shuttles, which means half the time you’ve got a sphinx that came over from the fucking Orange Line or some shit and is full of riddles that only the Irish mooks from Bridgeport understand. Or it’s in Polish only. Or it’s got a glitch that makes it stutter and if you interrupt it, it’ll get snippy and bite your head off. LITERALLY. They hush it up but it happens. Businesses lose millions from sphinx-related tardiness every year.
And then there’s a case back in ‘96 when it was proven after the fact that the “wrong” answer the Red Line Sphinx got was actually A PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE REGIONAL VARIATION but by then, the Sphinx had already eaten half a car full of drunken Cubs fans. I know, not much of value was lost there, BUT STILL.
You think SPHINXES are bad? Detroit has imps, thousands of them, and you know what they love? Buses. You know the major form of public transit in Detroit is? BUSES. So the drivers have to literally shoo away imps at every fucking stop, making them 30 minutes late, an HOUR late, and it’s not like there’s anything you can DO, because they’re all leftover from when the car companies were big, and ALL OF THOSE FUCKERS CLOSED.
So of course there were hundreds of orphaned imps, and they kept SAYING they were going to reopen the factories, or at least get some good junkyards, but nooooooooo, they never did, so the imps just bred and bred, and now they’re all over every bus and it’s not like you can ever count on getting anywhere on time and long story short, I’d take a sphinx over imps ANY day.
yeah as someone who did high school and college in michigan and now lives in chicago, i have to say that as far as the age-old sphinxes vs imps debate goes, they’re both terrible in different ways. the imps are way more common and they probably have a wider total reach, and oh my god nothing like trying to board a bus already covered in those little suckers when said bus is already forty minutes late—
(sidenote: ugh people from bloomfield hills saying stuff like “well if i lived in detroit, i’d have the sense to carry around a nice heavy club or walking stick—” yeah dude good luck with your walking stick against two dozen imps)
but the sphinxes. let’s not, uh, sugar coat this: the sphinxes don’t just slow commuters, they kill people. and yes, if you know the riddle, you’re fine. but what if someone else offers their answer first? what if you get some overly cocky freshman philosophy major who takes it upon himself to answer for the whole car?
i think in the back of our minds, all chicagoans know that rahm emmanuel’s administration isn’t gonna lift a finger until one of the sphinxes goes after a wealthy tourist and it makes national news. and even then, we’ll get, like, flashy riddle-solving software installed in all the red line trains, and maybe the brown line, but no way is it gonna cover the whole infrastructure.
basically if you ever need to take the green line or the pink line, you wanna start studying your classical mythology and folklore fucking yesterday.
@copperbadge do puns work on Sphinxes as well as riddles?
You bet your sphinxter they do.
(Sphinxes hate that one but they’re obliged to honor it.)
Everyone complains about Boston’s insanely confusing street layout and nightmarish traffic. No one dares speak the name of the Good Folk responsible.
Bostonians have been trying to get you idiots to take the hint for the longest time. Seriously, what did you think the purpose of the Big Dig was? There was no purpose. The Gentry don’t need purpose, you fools. All is for Their amusement.
The old legend about how Boston’s streets were just tracing the paths of where cows wandered? You should pay closer attention to legend. Cows know the Fair Folk better than you; they know instinctively where the ley lines are. Never stray from their path. You really don’t want Them to take a shine to you.
And the song of Charlie on the MBTA, forced to ride a never-ending train for all of eternity because he had no extra coin to pay his fare? That was a warning, in code, for those of you who carry no iron in your pockets. Charlie is far, far away, and yet so close, seven years out of time. Never go down into the T tunnels without iron on you. The tracks are not iron enough; they will not save you.
The Fair Folk have been here for a long, long time. Fear of them is in our bones, in our blood, in the way we speak. We are so used to calling the wicked good that we call the good “wicked”.
And is it any wonder we’re really, really shitty drivers?
Jesus, this sounds awful. In Seattle we only have to worry about the Kraken, but if you live further inland you’re pretty much fine. It’s not even here year-round, it migrates up to Alaska during the summer and that’s when people really hit the beach.
Every once in a while it’ll come up-river and that’s always a huge production with the Coast Guard, but again, mostly a non-issue unless you’re really into fishing.
I guess there’s the mermaids too but they mostly hang out down at the pier and steal people’s Starbucks rewards cards.
what if medusa was a real woman. i mean: what if the woman with snakes in her hair was once a tiny girl with beautiful braids in her black hair.
what if the stories came from her smooth hands. when she was six she could make pottery that looked like flowers blooming in your palms. could carefully create replicas of any plant she saw.
and medusa was smart. ran from home, tucked up her hair so it looked short, made herself into a little boy. besides, they liked pretty boys. medusa at school with top grades, sending her unknowable stares at the other men. because the whole time she’s learning the planes of their faces, the way they look while they’re thinking, the slight twist of their hand that meant they were lying.
medusa going home to sketch every little figure. comes to school in the morning with her hands caked in pottery clay. medusa learns. scrubs dirt on her face to mimic their planes. tilts her head the right way when she’s thinking. doesn’t twist her hand when she’s lying.
in her back yard, a little garden grows. statues of ceramic boys only three feet tall. at first, she can’t quite get the faces right. men are not the same as plants. there is something weird about the proportions she uses. medusa frowns.
she starts making animals instead for a bit, annoyed and disheartened. she’d always just been naturally good at it, and the fact she couldn’t just make something felt as if she’d lost her gift.
she makes cats and dogs and her neighbor’s birds and keeps going.
the snake wasn’t her favorite. he just wouldn’t leave her alone, so she gave up and let him sleep on her in the cold nights. besides, he was a small garden snake, couldn’t even bite her hard, just wanted a place of warmth. she let him rest on the angles of her shoulders, right near her neck, even if he sometimes forgot and held her too hard. that was okay. when she was little, she forgot too, sometimes, and shattered the slim walls of her pottery. the snake had a lot of growing up to do.
she loved no one. not because she was cold-hearted. just because it wasn’t something she wanted. she was busy with her artwork.
she chose an apprenticeship under a master craftsman. his sculptures made her breath stop. she was careful in the workshop, kept her things simple, kept her mouth shut. he called her stupid often. she would duck her head. sometimes she would make mistakes on purpose. all the while he only made sculptures of men. said there was no beauty in women. often made savage remarks about those they saw in the market.
and all the while, she watched him. she watched him and she went home and sketched. this is how his hands were when he made a vine. this is how they were when shaping a nose.
and her back yard garden would grow. little boys became her master, over and over and over, until she could get his jaw right. ceramic became sculpture.
he was who took her to athena’s temple. who shouted at her about how beautiful the statues were against her own. every week he’d come back and shame her. asked how the women there were smarter than the man she was supposed to be. medusa ducked her head and grit her teeth.
in her back yard, she made them. she made every god and goddess she’d seen in the city. her favorite was athena. she ached over her features. had spent so long in the world of men, was blinded by the beauty of women.
it was a black night. and medusa thought her master had left the temple before her. she loosened all the bindings that kept her from breathing. took her hair out. worshiped in peace. placed on athena’s alter a small and beautiful thing. the goddess, head tilted, thinking.
when he found medusa, what made him angry was not her small frame. it was the statute. a delicate thing. much better than the ones he had ever made.
he took it and snapped it in half. threw it deep in the temple’s well to rot. pulled her by her hair. demanded to know where it had come from.
medusa, angry, tired of hiding, tired of late nights and being a boy and pretending: medusa, athena-mad, spat on him. “I did it,” her voice is strong and full of hatred, “A woman made something better than a man could.”
He meant to kill her. To bash her head into the temple steps, claim it was an accident – or better yet, the spite of a god made flesh.
when he grabs her hair, the goddess bites back. athena, patron of creators, patron of the arts, patron of girls and those who are smart – she turns medusa’s hair into snakes.
it is a quick little thing, darts out and draws blood, almost falls from her hair as a result. she catches the creature and runs, runs until she feels numb.
and what if – while her master is explaining her back yard full of frozen men as being evidence of her evilness – what if medusa finds friends in blind women. and they teach her how to feel what she is seeing. how to use her hands with her eyes closed to make maps of whatever she holds. she starts with plants again. her snake is big now, and has babies. she moves on to their little wiggling forms, amused when they make tiny rings around her fingers. she does not live in a cave. she dresses as a man again, goes to market, sells her roses and vines and beautiful (simple) things. buys herself and the women a nice house out beyond all the noise of it. fills their garden with frozen men.
when the men come to kill her – because now her name is known, it is whispered, sticks in the throat – they don’t find her. they find a tall man who tells them: look in the mountains. when they don’t come back, it’s no fault of medusa’s. frankly, she thinks they should have brought more supplies than their swords into the deep woods. she’s not cruel. when they leave, she makes a statue of them, as her version of a memorial.
but one man is not like the others. he finds her with her hair down, humming, dancing around a marble stone. her snakes are warming in the sun.
medusa? he asks her. it’s a name she hasn’t heard in a long while.
she is tired of being hunted. she just wants to make art. she waits for the sword point. but he hesitates. looks at her full in her face.
strikes a bargain. if she makes him a head for his shield, he will tell the others that she is good and dead. and he will sell her art to better patrons when he could – although he suggests at least hiding the signature she has with maybe a little less snake-like scrawl – he would make her name known.
but medusa knows men. knows they will chomp down on a horror story faster than that of the artist. she is already permanent. she says: no, here’s what happens.
after many months, he has his shield. she wouldn’t let him leave with the first nine hundred versions, always found something wrong with them. he grows fond of her in this time, agrees to her terms. even he can’t really look at the shield head-on. she has captured a scream, a rage, too much. it is so utterly human and at once not that it makes his skin crawl.
where medusa’s blood drops, serpents sprawl. or at least, that’s the code she uses. when he finds little girls who can make art, he sends them to her.
medusa does not expect to be known for the school that she starts. she is a women artist in a time of men, and her name is already dead to them. but i know medusa. i know her. she is known for her work.
after all, who can speak about medusa without mentioning how she froze the world?
Love love love this.
queerhomestuck 