Excerpt: Iron Vines;

“Oh I like this place a lot,” Dionysus is telling him with his usual relish.
“Small.” Apollo eyes his water glass. It has captured a few lights like drowning fireflies that flicker as they fly.
“Which is why it’s great.” He downs Apollo’s water. “Yes?”
“Oh, go on, swallow both, why don’t you—“
“And I love the lighting.”
“Nice ambience,” Apollo murmurs.
“Very. The light against the dark…”
“Sun’s still out.”
“Up.”
“…I—“
“When you say out it sounds as if it’s been extinguished, right.” He moves from water to wine—his own this time, some specific shade of dark red. The hue isn’t far off goat’s blood in water, not that it really matters. It tastes expensive and it sort of is. Annoyingly subtle. The word extinguished is a word to taste wine on or to make out with. English.
“It has not,” a sun god notes dryly.
“Nor will it.” A grin. “It’ll explode.”
“This makes you happy?”
“It scares me,” says Dionysus. “That was bravado. But,” and this more brightly, “we may well live to see it. It’s to be hoped.”
“…It frightens me, too,” says Apollo at last.
“What I call, I mean what someone calls avaricious—“ (another wine tasting word.) “—this, two thousand-odd years and still we want more. This is the place for us.”
“They only had two hundred…” It’s an ellipsis kind of night. Intermission or not, Apollo is quite damned distracted; music and light in abundance to assess and it was reason that brought him here, wasn’t it, reaosn coupled with an uncomfortable intuition. He’s been warned that he’ll find something (one) here along with the strange dusted-off opera shot through with modern curiosities and he knew that much already. Does he want to? Yes. Does he want to want to?
Ourobouros slithers through one ear and out the other, hissing like a tambourine.
“They?”
…Did he really speak aloud? He of all people should be aware when he’s doing that. Aah. “America.”
“Two-hundred-year-old America, it’s not a person—“
“It has a birthday and a character, friends, enemies, a name, a notion, a history—“
“It’s a…a space, and an idea at bes--…”
“Are we different,” says Apollo.
Dionysus looks at Apollo, looks at his own faint reflection in the marble of the table as lit by candles and ambience, sighs, and looks at the stage. There are only two exits. There are fewer exits from the stage than there are from the restaurant. It’s been like that for a very long time. Barring flight, it’s even that way in an amphitheatre, unless… “We’ve rehearsed this one.”
Apollo’s taken aback for a second, but then he pulls a resigned face and leaves it onstage next to an amplifier. “We have.”
“You know what it can’t do,” says Dionysus.
“What?”
“This."