44, Apollo/Hermes
The stories
Emma Brewer Don’t Forget to Be Afraid
Dana Diehl My Ulcer
Lavanya Vasudevan So Pretty When She Smiled
Jayne S. Wilson Girl with All the Hands
Ben Niespodziany The Parish
Rebecca van Laer Marlowe
Stephanie Austin Stray
Andrea Jarrell On the Road to Zion, My Father Behind the Wheel
Sydney S. Kim Shedding Velvet
Courtney Young Two
Michelle Ross Manhandle
Lesley Finn Hurricane in the Mountains
Olivia Dunn Understanding Picasso & “It Is an Experience”
Chloe N. Clark They Are Coming for You, So You Better Run, You Better Run, So You Can Hide
The Pro-Choice stories
Chauna Craig The Open Door
Meghan Louise Wagner None of It Was Easy
Robin Anna Smith Reap
Kathryn Kulpa The Day the Women Walked Away from Alabama
Andrea Rinard The Morning After
Holly Pelesky Now That I’m Being Honest
Jonathan Cardew A fetus walks into a bar
Raksha Vasudevan New World Economics
Editor’s Note
The Ancient Greeks thought Mercury was not one planet but two, and they called it Apollo when it was visible to the eye in the morning sky, and Hermes after the sun went down.
You may not know the myth of Hermes and Apollo – I didn’t until I started writing this note. Long ago, in a cave, lived the baby Hermes, the son of Zeus. When he was four days old, he began to walk and talk. He left the cave and talked to all the flora and fauna, and they talked to him, and Hermes was glad. When he saw the tortoise he stopped the tortoise and asked it where it would go. The tortoise (and I feel great affinity with this tortoise) didn’t want to talk, but Hermes said “if you won’t talk, I will make you sing.” And he killed the tortoise and made his shell into a lyre.
Far away, he saw Apollo’s oxen, and thought he could kill a few and turn them into strings for his new lyre. Apollo had many oxen, and would hardly miss a few. He took the oxen to a distant cave and slaughtered them and strung his instrument, then returned to his own cave and pretended to sleep like the baby he still was. Very sneaky, this Hermes!
Apollo found the oxen were gone and got angry and it didn’t take him great detective work to find out who’d pilfered them. Long story short, Zeus ordered Hermes to make amends. Which Hermes did. In apology, Hermes gave Apollo the tortoise lyre he’d made. And Apollo gave Hermes a wand that could turn friends into enemies. Apollo also let Hermes take care of his flocks, and (a fun aside) Hermes is the wind and Apollo’s flocks are the clouds.
Zeus was so happy this possible disagreement ended so nicely that he made Hermes the official messenger of the gods, and the moral of the story is babies are awful and take everything. Just kidding 🙂
This month we published fourteen wonderful stories by fourteen wonderful writers as part of our regular story cycle, but we also opened our doors to eight incredible pro-choice stories by eight incredible pro-choice writers. It’s been a mammoth issue to put together, twenty-two stories in total. We at Jellyfish Review believe safe, legal abortion should be a right all over the world, and if you read the pro-choice stories you’ll find links to a number of organizations fighting to introduce or protect this right. Please consider supporting them. It really is a tremendous, important thing to do.
Art by Zinaida Serebriakova Public domain
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