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crimson lumps. Having always been the more competent in times of crisis, I bent down, wincing at the pain in my sliced socket, and picked up my father’s left leg and my right leg, respectively. I ordered my father to walk west along the river. I linked my arm with his and we managed to pogo together, like the elementary school field-day game where you tie your right leg to somebody else’s left leg and become a three-legged creature, only we had no third leg to share. All the while, my father wouldn’t look at me, not even a sideways glance. I spent the time wondering what Hephaestus had meant by such a mean swipe; he of all the gods seemed most likely to be sympathetic. In silence, we continued to take generous hops by turn, our remaining legs strong as steel, as we advanced towards the closest hospital, where the doctors stitched us back up, saying we were lucky he didn’t slice through our hearts.
    I guess we weren’t supposed to have gone to the hospital, because it made things a lot worse in the long run. A few hours after arriving back home, where my mother stirred spaghetti in a strong steel pot, I felt a strange rumbling in my hip socket precisely where my leg had been stitched back on. My father expressed feeling a similar quake in the middle of his left pelvis. That was when I knew we were to bear immortal children from our wounds. I quickly unlaced my stitches and pulled off my leg, allowing a full-grown god named Meninges to spring out, panting heavily; he had almost suffocated in there. My fatherdid the same with his stitches, and from his pelvis leapt a beautiful goddess named Hysteria, with golden locks, coral lips, and the rest.
    Hysteria and Meninges immediately embraced, ignoring their injured parents. My father and I stitched ourselves back up; it’s not hard once there are holes to guide you. Looking at one another, we each saw our children’s mythologies in the other’s face. They would love each other, grow old together, despite/because of having an unusual sex life and an uncommonly high number of shared genes.
    It has been difficult knowing my son’s father is also my sister’s father: it’s like in the movie Chinatown , with the difference being obvious. For me, this has all been a small if unusually sharp bump in the proverbial road of life; for my father, it has been a wall. He walks now with an imagined limp; his head, shoulders, knees, and toes all drag, increasingly lifeless as the years proceed. But my father has always been a homophobe. The knowledge that his immortal child was born with the sword of another man, and the ugliest of gods to boot, is simply too humiliating. This is what we had been arguing about in the first place: why I was so unfeminine, and couldn’t I be normal. I had said I don’t like being penetrated. He had claimed to dislike it as well.
    We have never much talked about our experience with Hephaestus. It is the elephant in the room, as you can imagine. It’s discomfiting to have these scars, like matching tattoos, marking the history of what we most wish we had not been through together. Otherwise we’re not very close, which I’ve always thought a shame. We’re alike in so many ways.

ELIZABETH’S LAMENT
    Told partly through the lyrics of Tegan and Sara
    Jessica,
    I ask myself all the time how two people who look so precisely the same can be so utterly different and I’m sure that you do too. For instance how we’re mirror images with the same shoulder-length, sunstreaked blonde hair, sparkling aquamarine eyes, and perfect golden skin. And then how beneath our skin there is a world of difference. For instance how I’m selfless and caring while you are selfish and cruel. For instance how you live as if you’re one while I live as if I’m two, an us, a we. Well today my therapist gave me this book called The Emotionally Abusive Relationship and sis, it’s us to a tee. According