New to the story or need a refresher? Begin with the prologue:
Jaden’s world solidified from the nebulous edges of…a dream? His eyes, heavy with the remnants of sleep, caught sight of his suitcase leaning against the nightstand. Vacation. He remembered that much. Free from the shackles of needing to be somewhere. He could sink back into the soft sheets, burrowing in a comfortable bed.
Then he saw the urn.
It rested beside his luggage, small and stubbornly real, and the heaviness of the world cocooned around him again. Those were his mother’s ashes.
To fulfill her wish to see Greece, Jaden had her cremated and put together an itinerary to travel around Europe for six weeks. The first stop was Amsterdam. The last stop was the island of Crete, one of Greece’s largest islands, where he would spread her remains.
Right after they had moved to Davis Court, Jaden remembered his mother buying cigarettes at a rundown convenience store four blocks away from their new apartment. At the register, a yellowed travel magazine featured the white (turned sepia) sand shores and beautiful crystal waters of Balos Beach. She ran her chipped fingernails across the cover while waiting for her change. Her eyes lit up, and she left that shop almost imperceptibly. Beaches always had that effect on her.
“We should go there,” Jaden said.
“Who are you to say such things?” she asked, hateful. “Just look at you. You black, you poor, you ugly, and you not a man. Just a little boy. What you got going for you?”
Before Jaden could answer, his mother gave him one. “Exactly. You just nothing at all.”
Standing in the line behind him, he recognized some of his new classmates. The horde of them, laughing and grinning. Everyone except one, the biggest guy in the group.
Most of them would later go on to taunt Jaden in school about how his mom could be like that, mouth full of talons instead of teeth. And how the only thing he could do in the face of her anger was to agree with her and pacify her with the likes of, “Yes, Mommy Lady.” That part killed them, with all the smugness of nasty nine-year-olds.
When he got older, he learned to protect himself by avoiding his mom altogether. No Christmases or Thanksgivings. No phone calls or texts. Yet now she was here with him anyway.
Only smaller.
Her ashes would never tell him that she was proud of him, that he had succeeded despite her unpredictable anger. But he was determined to show her that he was, in fact, something.
Getting run over by a cyclist hadn’t been part of that plan, however. He lay in bed and replayed the previous day like sifting through photographs in a dark room.
He couldn’t have met three Greek gods. He couldn’t have been turned into a cat by one and nearly killed by another. Twice. It had to be dream residue. Like some kind of underexposure. If you didn’t leave the photographic paper in the developing solution long enough, the image came out looking faint. He couldn’t have had those experiences because he had gotten off the plane in Amsterdam, taken a picture in the center, and then went...
...where?
The answer clicked into place like a well-timed shutter.
Here.
His hotel room. Where his 35mm camera stared back at him from atop the nightstand, and a comforting wave washed over him.
Jaden held on to his reasonable, rational version of events. Until he saw Apollo on the far end of the room, trails of light following Apollo’s fingers as he wrote something. Not on paper but into the air itself. The incandescence was a gentle nudge that if this were all a dream, Jaden’s entire life must be one, and regardless, he was still living it.
Why shouldn’t gods be real, was the better question. Why shouldn’t the room burn with the golden sparks from one of them tinkering at something?
Jaden watched him.
You could learn a lot from someone if you studied them, especially when they thought nobody was looking. There was something very competent about Apollo—possibly even arrogant—that pulled at Jaden. He was completely in the throes of his craft, and Jaden found that level of concentration attractive. The living script shimmered:
On the first day that I saw you
Your quiet soul shined bright
Then I pulled you into my world
I don’t know how you will survive
Gods and goddesses have wicked schemes
We pursue them to new extremes
But you’ll rise above the challenge
Even though—
“Even though…even though,” Apollo repeated out loud, filling in words that didn’t fit quite right, only to dissolve entire lines with a jab of his finger.
Jaden reached for his camera. The black enamel body fit into his hands, and the chromed parts that his fingers pressed and twisted were smoothed and welcome fixtures that had been a part of his life for years. His Minolta SRT 101 had proved its loyalty time and again.
Jaden peered through the viewfinder, framing Apollo, studying the fuzzy wisps of light surrounding the ethereal being. Slowly, Jaden turned the manual focus ring. The god sharpened into clarity—the curve of his shoulder, skin almost alight, and the long blond hair that swished as he hummed out the lyrics. Only through the mechanical eye did the world settle.
The camera had always revealed the truth of things to him. And Apollo hadn’t been some strange conjuring from Jaden’s imagination.
Jaden’s fingers longed to crank the film forward, to press the shutter button. To capture a god who embodied the quote from Chuck Close, who described the creative process in two perfect sentences: Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
But the frame ignited. Flames licked the edges of the room. The wall of instruments blackened. And light bent inward.
It mesmerized Jaden, called to him. He swore he could almost hear the fire whisper to him, songlike, and something inside Jaden opened in answer, as if mental windows were thrown open, after years of neglect, to welcome the heat from the hot sun.
Jaden’s voice interwove with Apollo’s: “Even though you’ll lose your mind.”
“Beautiful.” Apollo finished the verse, his back still turned. “You’re awake. How do you feel?”
The fire vanished the moment Jaden lowered the lens.
“I’m alright. All things considered,” Jaden said. “I still don’t even know where I am.”
“My sanctuary,” Apollo said. “In Amsterdam.”
“And will I?” Jaden twitched his cheek. The vague feeling of still having whiskers prickled across his face.
“Will you what?”
“Lose my mind.”
Apollo crossed the room and sat beside Jaden. “Probably. Your kind always does in the end.”
That wasn’t comforting. But the nearness of Apollo aroused a simmering pressure throughout Jaden’s body. His eyes betrayed him as he snuck in glances of the god’s physique: the cut of his chest, the strength coiled in his arms. And when Apollo looked back at him with his enigmatic eyes, Jaden wondered if Apollo knew how feverish the god’s effect was on him while Apollo appeared at ease in his room.
Room was the wrong word for this place. Gallery maybe. Or hall? As Jaden allowed his eyes a brief break from soaking in the god, he settled on one large hall full of natural light, musical instruments, and canopies of plush cushions. Books towered in deliberate stacks everywhere else, bursting from every corner, crammed in every available nook.
Everything radiated outward from a central wooden slab.
“That’s no ordinary camera you have, is it?” Apollo asked, his voice a mesmerizing hum in the quiet room.
“How did you know?”
“Just a feeling.” Apollo’s finger traced the outline of the 35mm camera, and for a fleeting second, Jaden felt a curious connection between them—the human, the god, and the conduit that bound them together. “Then again, you’re no ordinary person.”
Jaden almost laughed at that.
He had built an entire life on invisibility. Not an extraordinary person. But he was a great photographer. He always figured what made him so great was that he could come off as a prop in the background, not noticeable, important, or all that valuable compared to his subject.
“You’re the god,” Jaden said as he broke away from Apollo’s gaze to regain some measure of control. “You tell me.”
Apollo reclined onto the cushions, considering. “I will share with you a truth. Despite our divinity, there are things even we gods do not understand, particularly when a force far greater intends for it to remain a mystery. Even after thousands of years, I can find myself caught off guard. Intrigued. In this, I still feel the thrill of being alive. And you, Jaden,” his eyes sparkled with anticipation, “you are full of surprises.”
His instincts cautioned him to be careful. And yet, Jaden did not sense deceit when he allowed his gaze to wander back to Apollo. He did, however, observe something strange in Apollo’s eyes. They were made of something golden and elusive. Like flecks of soft gold, melting.
“I’d imagine you’ve had plenty of things happen to you that you couldn’t explain?”
“You could say that.”
Apollo’s lips curled into a smile. “Tell me about them.”
The conversation felt surreal as Jaden ranked some of the more bizarre occurrences of his twenty-five years on the planet. Being turned into a cat might rank third. The old number three was that time his mother chased off a corpse-eater from their neighborhood once. Then there was that time his father was shot, and light danced out of his eyes. But the strangest occurrence was when Jaden and his best friend, Tank, found this camera. Because it seemed to attract the impossible ever since.
Never before had Jaden told someone all of this, but something about Apollo compelled him to share.
With each passing story, Apollo edged closer to Jaden. “Fascinating. By your accounts, I can’t be your first encounter with the divine then.”
“So, it’s all real, huh?” Jaden said. “Gods?”
“Of course.”
“What’s it like? Being a god?”
Apollo paused. “Do you dream?”
“I don’t always remember them, but yeah.”
“It’s like living inside a dream. A dream where you’re able to dream the exact adventure you’ve always wanted to dream.”
“But what about after that? What happens after you’ve had all your fun?” Jaden asked. “Don’t you get bored?”
“Something tells me things won’t be boring with you around.”
Jaden felt an unmistakable pull as Apollo leaned forward. For a moment, Jaden waited for the kiss. He wanted the kiss.
“Your wounds are fully healed,” Apollo said as he brushed his fingers along Jaden’s neck. “I thought I almost lost you when I shot you with that arrow. There’s more strength in you than my sister realizes.”
Jaden pulled Apollo closer to seize the kiss he wanted for himself. Who was this version of himself? So bold and hungry. He was convinced that nobody else wanted Apollo as physically as he did, and no one ever would.
Jaden opened his eyes as their lips met, and he blushed.
Not because he felt he was violating some unwritten rule to making out by opening his eyes. What made him feel the heat of embarrassment was the thrilling realization that Apollo wanted to kiss him too. Like light meeting mirror.
This cannot—had better not—be a dream, Jaden thought as he pressed his eyes shut again.
That feeling ended a few weeks later.