Story: The Man Who Sold the World

It was mid-June, and Apollo had been missing for two weeks.

Some people insisted he wasn’t really gone, he hadn’t left us. Others said he’d finally had enough of us and skipped out. I wasn’t sure what I believed, but I did know that people had been dropping like flies ever since he’d supposedly bailed.

My little sister, Ariel, was starting to catch on too. “Maria says her cousin in Tampa caught the sickness a few days ago,” she said, kicking a Styrofoam McDonald’s cup lightly along the sidewalk after softball practice. “Where’s Tampa?”

“Florida.”

Ariel looked solemnly up at me. “Do you think they’ll find a cure, Tate?”

I looked down at her. She was seven, ten years younger than me, born well into Mom’s second marriage. Even for half-sisters, we didn’t look much alike.

But before I could answer, we rounded the corner to our apartment complex, and she charged off to find her cat. I followed.

“Aren’t you old enough to drive?”

I paused. Our new neighbor, Cyrus, was knelt in the community garden, over a patch of drooping hyacinths. Every time I went outside, he was either in the garden or on the little covered balcony next to ours, surrounded by old poetry books.

“No car,” I said. Then I raised my eyebrows, because he could only be in his early twenties. “Aren’t you a little young to be obsessed with gardening?”

He grinned. “Touché.”

Up in our apartment, Ariel couldn’t find her cat, so I headed outside to look.

Cyrus was still in the garden. He swore quietly at the flowers, like it was their fault for dying. Then he passed his hand over them.

The hyacinths’ stalks slowly straightened, strong now instead of slumped-over, color bleeding brightly into their faded petals.

Cyrus glanced around, a little late now, and saw me. For a second, we stared at each other, frozen.

Then I turned and went inside.

*** 

A few weeks later, the sickness was spreading like gossip, and we’d all figured out that the world was ending.

The worst part was watching the sickness develop: people would get weak, then shivery, and then their skin went translucent and their bodies started wasting away altogether. Like their health had just abandoned them. It took a week to kill you, and nobody knew what caused it.

I was starting to think I might, though.

I took Ariel to practice, then stepped onto our balcony.

Cyrus sat in his rocking chair, red sneaker propped up on a stack of dusty books. When he saw me, he went still, but didn’t say anything.

“Everybody’s looking for you, you know,” I said.

“Oh?”

I snorted. “You don’t have to admit anything, but don’t bother lying, either. I already know. You aren’t exactly subtle.”

He frowned. His blond hair was swept to one side, and he wore a ratty plaid shirt, and he looked impossibly young. “What?”

“Planting hyacinths in the garden? The poetry books? I mean, Cyrus means sun; you really thought nobody would notice?”

He looked away, down at the garden below. “Sometimes I get tired of being Apollo. Sometimes I want what you guys have. A life where you can do anything, because none of it’s going to matter.”

“Thanks,” I said flatly.

Cyrus sighed. “I just want my own life, okay? To get away for a while.”

“People are dying.”

Cyrus’s face and clothes and hair said worn-out college student, but when he looked over at me, his eyes said Apollo—god of the sun, god of poetry, god of health. “People have always been dying, Tate.”

“So you won’t come back?”

He shook his head. “My life is here now. And while I’ve got that life, I’m not leaving it. I feel like you can understand that.”

And it sucked that people were dying, but the thing was, I did understand. Humans were always running with scissors and traipsing across landmines. We ruined everything we touched—including the world, and especially each other.

It had to get old cleaning up after us.

***

The next week, when I woke Ariel up for practice, she was shivering.

For the next three days, all Mom and Paul did was cry. Ariel’s skin was getting translucent enough that her veins stood out like a roadmap, but her muscles weren’t visible yet.

On the fifth day, on my way down, I passed Cyrus on the stairs. I tried to say something to him, but one look at his thin face and I knew. I knew that he knew, and he still hurried past me, looking ashamed.

Ariel didn’t have much life left, but he did, and he was clinging to it.

***

So the next day, while Mom and Paul were with Ariel at the hospital, I borrowed a gas can from the maintenance shed and slipped out to the balcony. It was mid-morning, so I hoped most people had left their apartments, but at this point I had to risk it.

Cyrus was down in the garden like usual, reviving all the flowers he’d almost killed since last week. I watched him, then grabbed the gas can and climbed carefully from our balcony to his.

The sliding door was open, probably to let more sunlight in. For a second, taking in his mismatched furniture and misguided but enthusiastic decorating, I almost felt bad. He really had made a life for himself here.

But while he had it, he was never going to be anything but Cyrus.

And Ariel was dying. We were all dying.

We always had been.

I went through his rooms, dousing everything with gasoline, making a little trail back out to his balcony. Then I crossed back over to mine, climbed down to the first step of the ladder I’d leaned against it, and took Paul’s lighter out of my pocket. I lit it and tossed it at Cyrus’s rocking chair.

And then I climbed down and watched as Apollo’s new life went up in flames.

Author's Note: This week, my piece was inspired by Ovid's "Ganymede and Hyacinthus," which tells the story of the god Apollo loving Hyacinthus so much that he gives up his godly routine and takes up mortal life for him. It wasn't so much the love as the adopted mortal life that interested me, so I focused my story on what it would look like if Apollo abandoned his post for his own reasons, in a more modern setting.

Bibliography: "Ganymede and Hyacinthus," Ovid's Metamorphoses. Translated by Tony Kline. Source: Mythology and Folklore UN-Textbook.

Image Credit: "Book burning." Source: Wikimedia Commons.