in contact, like me. Maybe it doesn’t matter once you’re dead. Maybe people come to your funeral anyway, even if you were royally pissed at them. I don’t know what’s worse—imagining him there, trying not to command all the attention in the room or not there at all.
I get my answer at the bottom of the list.
Anonymous donation by proxy—courier note to parents re: stated wishes for service and burial
This is included above the name of a bland-sounding shell company.
I close the journal and collect myself.
Before this. Whatever I’m looking for, it has to have come long before any of this. Before Reya came to Olympus. Before Zeus lived here. I’m looking for his childhood, and that could take a long time.
Time I might not have. I skip down to the next shelf, where the journals become smaller and less uniform. At some point he started buying the same one over and over again—or, more likely, having them made personally for him. This shelf is a mountain range of book covers, rising and falling. The one I pull out is medium-sized with a beat-up red cover. The only red cover.
Demeter is killing birds again. She thinks it will get his attention. Nothing I say will convince her that he won’t care.
I read the entries on the page again. Zeus almost never mentions his sister in the present day, other than to plan for her next attack. I thought they’d always been sworn enemies. But here he is on the page, trying to convince her of something. Would an enemy do that?
I flip forward a few months, to the summer.
She’s a terror with blueberries now, in addition to whatever she’s been doing in the greenhouse. I found her with a basket of them in the barn conducting a science experiment on Hades. How many blueberries will kill a person with an allergy? She hissed like a cat and scratched at me when I took the basket. He was still unconscious when I sat him up and scraped the blueberries out of his mouth. Lucky us.
There’s something here, something close. She’s a terror now. That means she wasn’t always, doesn’t it? I can’t tell how long I’ve been reading, but the clock is ticking. Any minute now he’s going to wake up and come looking for me, and I need to be upstairs when that happens.
Another journal.
Hid Demeter in a closet today when Cronos found the missing food. He was so pissed I think he believed me.
Hid her.
How old was he?
Not that old.
My heart is beating too fast by the time I go for the very last journal in the row. The oldest, most battered one. It has a dingy cream cover and yellowed pages and it cracks when I open it. On the inside, the ink has started to fade, but it’s still unmistakably Zeus’s writing. This one isn’t so much a journal but a collection of lists.
1/2 box of shells, 1/2 cup cheddar
Peanut butter, 2 pieces of bread
1 oatmeal cookie
The food is grouped like this with neat lines dividing the lists. What is this? Tracking what he ate?
Cronos noticed the shells today, switch to rice
It’s such an off-handed note at the bottom of the page, but afterward, he notes down the rice he uses.
D doesn’t want oatmeal this week, find shells
Oh my god.
In one of the margins he’s left an even smaller note.
D up 1:30, set alarm so she doesn’t cry
The last page is torn in half but the top half reads:
Get her out ?
He would have been eleven, maybe twelve, when he was writing these lists. I think they’re lists of the things he would cook for her, at least sometimes in the middle of the night.
A small, folded paper slips out from the spine of the book. It’s older than the journal. The paper is thin and worn and I get the sense it will crumble into dust if I touch it. But I hold my breath and do it anyway. It’s been folded and unfolded so many times that the folds have worn little cracks in the page.
It’s a child’s drawing of two people and a house. One of them is slightly smaller, the other one bigger. One in a long dress with long hair. One with pants. The figure in the dress holds something in one hand—a bowl? Both of them are smiling. A wavy line suggests a hill and on top of the hill is a house drawn with the rough, uneven lines of someone