By Amira Mazzawy
“Apollo!”
Zeus’ roar could be heard from anyone zooming through the clouds. Considering that Apollo was currently raising the sun over the northeast, he couldn’t miss it. Luckily he could call on one of the muses to take over sunrise for him. Otherwise he’d risk an eclipse, though the humans had seemed more fascinated than frightened over those in the last century.
So Apollo snapped his fingers and appeared in the throne room on Mount Olympus.
The throne room was one of the few things that had remained stable over the centuries. With the humans accelerating their technology use throughout the twentieth century, the gods couldn’t help but make their own upgrades. Zeus had started collecting electronics he could power with his lightning bolt. Ares fixed an M1 Abrams tank barrel to the front of his battle chariot. Even Apollo had given in and installed a cup-holder to his chariot that would warm his nectar, making his morning view even sweeter without him having to lift a finger.
But the throne room was the same. No one really wanted to upgrade the hall where they had the most boring meetings, so there were still the twelve golden chairs, sitting in a circle with a crackling fire pit at their center. Columns that resembled Ancient Greece’s buildings sat behind each chair, except for Zeus’. While the rest of the chairs were in a lower part of the floor, his sat on the same level as the rest of the room, and was more regal than everyone else’s. The gold almost managed to shine brighter in the firelight. His armrests and the half circle that crowned his chair had large lightning bolts etched into them. And now, as Zeus sat in it, each etching emitted sparks.
Apollo made sure to appear in the entryway, which would allow him time to deflect a fatal shock.
“Your ex is trending on Twitter,” Zeus said.
Apollo almost stumbled into the chairs.
“Excuse me?”
Apollo hadn’t seen it before, but when Zeus held up his right hand, he revealed a large tablet the size of a textbook. Prior to him turning it around, one could see a light blue case with a black eagle silhouette in the center.
Almost tripping over his feet, Apollo raced forward. It had the Twitter app open, specifically on the account of Cassandra Papadopoulos.
Apollo felt his stomach turn.
Each tweet was only a sentence long. It sounded like the very truths that Apollo had cursed the public to never believe if they came from Cassandra’s lips.
Tomorrow, Sephora will have a 50% flash sale!
The governor of Kansas will lobby for free school lunches at noon!
In one week, Brazil will invade Mexico.
The last one really started a fight in the comments. But no one seemed quite so doubtful as they should, especially with the millions of likes that each of these tweets received.
“I thought you handled her ability to predict the future,” Zeus said.
He pulled the tablet away from Apollo’s view.
“I did. This doesn’t make any sense. Typed or not, my curse should still be in effect.”
“Well, clearly, it isn’t. I’ve already had Ares complain to me that his epic invasion was ruined by Cassandra informing the Mexican government of his plans. I don’t want to hear any more complaints from other gods. I want you to fix your curse.”
Thunder boomed beneath them, shaking the room. Apollo wished in that moment more than ever that he had never met Cassandra.
“Yes, yes, I will fix it. Just a moment.”
Apollo snapped his fingers, leaving Zeus alone to observe any more potential Twitter anomalies.
Meanwhile, Cassandra was laying on her coach, writing her new Twitter prediction for the day. The amount of traffic her tweets received allowed her to afford a decent apartment in New York City. All she had to do was keep up with her posts, and then go about her day, writing down predictions as they came to her so she could debate on which one to use the next day. She was looking forward to the afternoon, and the lovely walk that she’d take around the Bronx.
That was, until Apollo grabbed her wrist.
She would have screamed if she hadn’t seen Apollo’s face. Instead, she started laughing.
“This is not a time for laughing,” he said.
Cassandra struggled to stifle her giggles.
“Oh, but it is.”
She flicked Apollo’s hand away from her wrist. The god blinked, his face blank as he tried to process a mortal flicking him.
“I know why you’re here. I found a loophole in your unfair curse on my life.”
“Unfair?” he shouted.
Apollo stood up, putting his head in his hands.
“I give you the gift of seeing the future, and then you dump me via text? How is my curse after that unfair?”
Cassandra slammed her phone down on her side table. For a moment, she worried she’d shattered the screen, but she was so upset and focused on Apollo that she didn’t bother to look.
“Because you’re leaving out the part where you didn’t tell me you were a god when we started dating, and only a month later you decided to tell me and prove it with this gift? I didn’t expect to find the Greek god of music on Bumble.”
Apollo tried to ease his rage. It wasn’t his place to strike down a mortal, that was more of his father’s thing. All he needed to do was figure out how Cassandra managed to break his curse.
“You know what? You’re right, you do know why I’m here. I need to know how you broke my curse. Did you sacrifice a goat or something to my sister? Or perhaps you tried serenading me in a disguise?”
Cassandra almost started laughing again, and she had to physically pinch her lips shut for a moment to not do so.
“Um, none of the above. There are people who still don’t believe me, Apollo. But it’s Twitter. Tons of information on there isn’t real or even fact-checked, yet people decide to believe it anyways. It just so happens that a lot of people decide to believe and see if my predictions are true, and when they are, they stick around and follow me. It’s not my fault your curse didn’t account for people believing anything on the internet.”
Apollo didn’t know what to say to that. She was right. When he had made the curse, he had only accounted for Cassandra gossiping about the future to her friends, or even trying to be one of those people with signs that say the world is ending. Not once did he think about using it on social media.
So the god tried to stutter for a way to fix this.
“I-I-Aren’t there more misinformation rules coming to Twitter soon?”
“And? The ones they currently have still don’t stop my posts from going through. Now that I have a large following, I can move to another platform, and people will find me.”
Apollo didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t know how to process the fact that he was bested by a mortal woman, even one he had been fond of due to her intelligence. As he stood there gathering flies, Cassandra took a moment to look at her phone and finish posting her tweet about a total solar eclipse occurring in the next few minutes. Then she got up and patted the god on his shoulder.
“You got dumped, Apollo. Next time, don’t misinform the woman about being a mortal.”
Cassandra left her apartment, looking forward to her walk in the dark in spite of what sounded like thunder in the distance. Apollo, on the other hand, made two decisions in that moment:
- He would delete Bumble from his phone.
- He would never give gifts to intelligent women again.
Author Bio
Amira Mazzawy is a graduate student currently obtaining her MFA in Popular Fiction and Publishing from Emerson College. While obtaining her bachelor’s degree from Texas A&M she won their Cushing Memorial Library Science Fiction and Fantasy Creative Writing Contest for her fantasy short story “A Great Goliath.” She also serves as the Submissions Manager for Emerson’s literary magazine, Page Turner Magazine. In her free time, she tries to read as many novels as she can alongside playing with her two Labradors, Moira and Panzer. After graduating, she intends to obtain a Ph.D. and become an English and Creative Writing Professor. You can find her on Twitter/X @AMazzawy and on TikTok @that_english_major_chic.