We Get a Visit From a Crow

My head hung over my book as I stared at the puzzling symbols. I’d been told I needed to know how to read the language, but it just didn’t make any sense in my mind. It was as if the so-called letters were flipped around and scrambled, and, just when I was starting to figure out their meaning, they would decide they were being too nice to me and start laughing and shaking and running around in confusing circles. My head pounded with a headache just from looking at the letters for a few meager seconds. I slammed the book closed and dropped it onto the floor beside my feet.

“I give up,” I announced to my teacher. “Greek is all I know. Why do I even need to know English?” I whined. I knew it was impolite to whine like I was, but the language was angering me too much for me to care.

The English teacher, Miss Burrows, picked up the headache-inducing book and handed it back to me. “You’re going to have to learn it eventually, you might as well try.”

“Why do I have to learn it eventually?”

She sighed and ran her fingers through her green-tinted hair, which had been originally blond but got dyed in Poseidon’s son’s pool water. When she climbed out of the pool to find her hair neon green, she nearly sent the boy to the Underworld and ordered him to fix it. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to get it out except with over one hundred washes over the next few months. Well, that’s what it said on the bottle of dye; yet still her hair had a faint green tone to it after an entire year.

“You know why,” she told me scornfully. “Your mother speaks English. You must know the language of both your parents… just in case you ever get the opportunity to meet her.”

I rested my jaw on my hand. “I could care less if I meet my mother. She’s never once requested a visit through my father—or anyone else. She hasn’t even had the decency to write a mere letter to me!”

Miss Burrows gritted her teeth. “Only because you can’t read English and she doesn’t know Greek!” she shouted. She took a deep breath and tried again. “Halia, miss—”

“Just Halia. I’ll choose what my label is, not Apollo. His being a god doesn’t make me “miss”, okay?”

“Fine. Just Halia, you need to get over the fact that you don’t understand why you need to learn this and just get it over with. The sooner you learn English the sooner you get out of this class.”

I just barely cracked open the book, afraid that the letters would tease me again and go galloping across the white page. They seemed to be cooperative for the first five or ten minutes, but they soon became more and more distorted the longer I stared at them.

“Your eyes are going out of focus,” Miss Burrows predicted. “Don’t do that, it wont exactly speed up the learning process.”

Instead of spitting out another one of my rhetorical remarks I gave her an angry look and continued to “read”—or skim through incomprehensively—the book. All I could gather from it was that it was about Greek gods, like my father. Only the author called us myths, and we’re anything but. If Greek gods were myths then my hair wasn’t red. And it definitely was last time I checked, something I must have gotten from my mother.

“Are you understanding the article?” Miss Burrows asked hopefully.

I shook my head. “Not entirely. I know its about Greek gods. And I know the writer thinks we’re myths. But that’s about all I can get from this right now.”

Her shoulders sagged and her face fell. “Oh, well… more practice I suppose?”

I was tempted to shake my head again, but I restrained myself and tried to sit through the rest of the lesson, an impossible feat it seemed.

But the class was over soon enough. When the timer buzzed, indicating the end of the class, I stood quickly, piled my book on top of my schoolwork folder, and rushed out the door faster than even Atalanta has moved in front of me.

“Guess what?” my best friend Evangelia—Leah for short—cried as she raced over to me. Well, she flew actually. Her winged sandals kept her in the air beside me as I continued to walk toward the meadow.

“They’re decided that English is a stupid language and I don’t have to learn it anymore?”

Leah smirked. “Trouble in Foreign Language class?” she guessed correctly. “I’m pretty lucky; my mother speaks Japanese, an extremely simple language for me.” She paused as our other best friend came walking over to us. “Hey, Christopher. How’s Hera?”

He shrugged. “She’s fine. How’s Hermes?” He glanced at me. “And Apollo?” he added.

I was going to answer, but, somewhat unfortunately—somewhat because I didn’t want to tell him that my father was upset with my grade in English—the shrill call of a crow sounded. Everyone’s bodies tensed and we all looked around in search of the animal. My eyes instinctively fell on the pomegranate tree, where a creepy-looking bird with black feathers and a pointed beak was sitting perched on one of the fruit.

“Hades,” I told my two friends and pointed to the pomegranate tree. Whenever a god needed to say anything to us half-blooded children he sent a crow and it landed on its sender’s gift he gave to our land of Pontadonas. Hades, the god of the Underworld, had chosen a pomegranate tree to remind us of how he keeps Persephone trapped in the Underworld (most of the time) and that he can keep any of us down there too with the right tools. Tools meaning food. Once someone took even the tiniest bite of food from the Underworld they were trapped forever.

People began to realize it was Hades and watched the crow as we waited for it to deliver his message. “What could Hades have to tell us?” one girl asked another girl next to her. The other girl shrugged and stared at the crow.

The crow opened its mouth wide and a recorded message from Hades sounded loudly throughout the entire land. “People of Pontadonas,” Hades’s rough, cold voice shouted, “please realize that many of your Earth parents do not know of your existence, or believe you are off at boarding school. Or something of that matter. Trying to contact them will not only scare them, but mentioning gods will get us all into deep trouble with Earthlings. Some have even tried to contact me, asking if you are truly dead or if there’s something different going on.” He paused but the crow’s beak remained open. “And because of this annoyance and issue these mortals are causing, the gods have chatted and decided that the portal to Earth will be closed and most mail will be screened, depending on whether the mortal parent knows of us gods. As you all should know it is strictly against the rules for a mortal to know of the gods, but there are exceptions. However, those exceptions do no apply at this moment for most. You will not be allowed to leave Pontadonas unless you are sent on a quest by Zeus, or your request for permission to leave has been granted by Zeus, your god parent, and me.” He paused, giving us all a quick break from his spine-chilling voice, but began to speak again. “You will be allowed to visit your Earth parent one last time with the accompaniment of your god parent’s choosing. That is all.” Then the bird closed its bill and flew away, disappearing right into the sky.

Leah turned to me with her jaw hanging slightly open. “I can only visit my mother one last time?” she shrieked, crossing her arms. “But I always visit her at least once a month! This is insanely unfair.”

I looked around for Christopher, but he was nowhere to be found. He must have left in anger; he’d always loved visiting his father, who owned a 5-star hotel. It was the one place he could be where he felt normal, something he’d always longed for.

Why he wanted to be normal was beyond me. Even his own mother, Hera, couldn’t understand.

Author's Note

This chapter is not edited, but feel free to comment on whatever you wish to help me out when it comes to the time I'd like to edit it

Reviews

[Dylan I. Cree]

This chapter is quite interesting. I love the idea of a place just for halves.