Stupid Cupid
an excerpt

He honestly had no idea why, but on his way up to the family homestead, Eros gave into his curiosity and bought The Woman in the Cultural Stream of America.

The copies had all but been sold out at the bookstore, and he only got his by ‘suggesting’ to a nice, old lady that she wanted to give hers away to that handsome young man behind her.

Eros didn’t feel bad about using his powers. After all, the woman would blush and remember him for days to come. They both won in the end.

Besides, it felt like he owed Psyche this much at least. After all, the sudden tumble of her life was virtually his mother’s fault. The least he could do was slog through her book, even if he found all that political jargon and analytical thesis statements boring.

Which basically summed the book up rather nicely. Bored and full of political arguments. Eros found it less a feminist manifesto and more a political stamen about the current state of the government. It just came off as feminist.

But he really wasn’t interesting in Psyche Lana Wayne’s views on the state of the government as it stood. After all, he was immortal. Governments and kingdoms rose and fell around him. America was doing well, and he liked living in it, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t eventually be replaced by something else.

No, what he was interested in was the actual woman that was being blasted all over the news. He needed to know what she looked like. Yes, because his mother was that shallow.

Whoever had designed the book definitely knew how to sell their product, Eros decided, because on the jacket of the book was a full-body picture of the author, in full model pose.

Hermes had been right. There was a very Grace Kelly quality about her. An Audrey Hepburn one, too. Psyche Lana Wayne was a throw back to those days of aloofly beautiful women, whose faces were coolly designed but inherently beautiful.

Heart-shaped face, and plump lips, with high slashing cheek bones and cool, asserting eyes, and a tiny aristocratic nose. Her hair was wild and sheer blonde, thick mounds of curls that rolled down her back in tangles. She’d look like a jungle queen if it weren’t for her face.

She wasn’t the most beautiful he had ever seen, but then again, no woman could really compare to Helen of Troy, could they? But even excluding her—which Eros often did as it was just unfair—he’d seen, and been with, women much more beautiful. Still, there was something striking about her.

Perhaps the little smirk that curled her lips, contrasting with the regal bearing of her face.

A Grace Kelly with spunk, Eros remembered and Hermes had been right.

He sat down on a little bench outside the bookstore and studied the girl on the cover of his book.

Immediately, it was apparent that she was too small to be a model. She could only have been about five-four in the picture, and Eros was a fairly good judge of women, come with the territory.

The about-the-author section claimed that it was Psyche’s performance with the New York Ballet corps that had propelled her to Victoria’s Secret stardom, and that Eros didn’t find too hard to believe.

She might have been quite a bit more curved than normal professional ballerinas but she was slender with it. She wasn’t all that short, and she wasn’t all the skinny, but she was tiny and slender and, yeah, he could see her as a ballerina.

The kind that got the guys to go to the theatre in hopes of catching her in a skin-tight leotard.

What she didn’t look like was someone who would know anything about politics or anything that didn’t involve clothes and the mall. But he forced himself to read three more chapters. The girl knew what she was talking about, and obviously had done some major research, but, jeez, what a boring topic.

How could anyone willing to sit through and chug this stuff out?

And why was he still reading it? That was the question.

Actually, he knew why. Because, as boring as the book, pretty much anything was better than making the half an hour drive up to the family estate. Actually, no, everything was better than making the half an hour drive up to the family estate.

It wasn’t that he didn’t love the lot of them. He did. For over three thousands years they had been the only constants in his life—everything else died or faded or was simply forgotten. But they were still all certifiable, and they were all still such a hassle to deal with, especially when they were all together, and usually they were all together.

And he’d been gone for nearly seventy years, and he’d hear no end of why did he call or write? And what happened down there? And how come he didn’t ever stop by to visit? And why did he suddenly decide to come back?

All of them were viable questions, but he just didn’t want to deal with them all right now. So he took a few more minutes reading a book that probably could only be appreciated by a women’s study major.

Then he got into his car—yes, he had a car, a little hot-red convertible from Toyota, and he could’ve just teleported himself there, but he liked the drive up—and made the trip.

It was a nice drive, peaceful and pleasant, and he took all the back roads he remembered—but when he had last been here, there hadn’t been so much asphalt and so many cars—and he liked to see that not much had changed.

But then again, the family lived in the tiny historical town of the little-known Pembroke, New York, were all the original New York congressmen had gone to get away. There wasn’t much in the tiny town—a post office, a bank, and a lone diner—other than the old colonial homes, and Eros was fairly certain that his family had something to do with Pembroke’s anonymity.

Believe or not, they liked their privacy.

The house was at the very end of the very small town, situated one a hill that overlooked the town. It was picturesque, like some photo in an old book, with wide arching doorways and round pillars and wooden walls.

Something inside Eros moved. It felt good to be home.

He drove the rest of the way up the gravel rode, toward the house standing proudly on the hill.

And after seventy years, Eros the god of Love, returned to Olympus.