second class smoking room
Hephaestus was man-not-man, a snarl of old muscle and powerful shoulders above the heavy torso of forges and the rancid heat of the sulfuric snap of the molten, the lugubrious gliding of the glassy core upward, torn from center to surface, tempered and tampered and twisted into baubles or steel to kill a king. He was grounded in earth. He knew who he was and what he was, old things that refuse to die long after the stone cascades to nothing and the priests die blind-eyed and the blood no longer spills. He knew he was wrong and he knew he was out of place and the salt on his lips and in his nose had nothing of the earth to give him a god’s strength. There was stone, the polished marble of a staircase that sloped like an Appian Way, a processional toward the depths. There was stone but it was dead and he could feel it like the pump of arterial blood as it slows to sacrificial nothing poured out on parched ground and he knew he shouldn’t feel it at all.
Above was damp drizzle, a starless night and a dredge of tempered boards, dead wood carved up and slated out for men to walk on, to parse the seas with hubristic eye for horizons not yet their own. Above was nothing but to find the water spread out all around him and gods made of the molten, forged from cast-offs had nothing of interest in water. The boat slanted, the floor rocked and Hephaestus stumbled, withered leg and the palm of a burned-thickened hand grazed the nearest wall and the music trickled like poison, like the fickle promises of Greeks long dead to draw him along. His progress was halting, the ponderous pace of a man unused to injury and fitting movement around it. The leg dragged at first, like the dead limb of a tree cast low, and then the walk roiled forward, the unambiguity of adaptation and the lurch of the boat made large.
Smoke. He sought smoke, sweetly seeping from the deadened door and a room where warmth crept like a friend over his shoulders, welcomed him like a prodigal returned. Smoke that soaked his wrists, warmed copper-dark skin as he stood without certainty of whether if he sat he would rise again.