It’s All Over Now

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “the end of the world”….

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They were the first Emergency Responders.

Like fire-fighters in a fire station they had sat, waiting. People say that the waiting is the worst part, but they are people without the imagination to visualise the alternative. This group were ready to work when and if the need came, but hoping that it never would.

The need had just arrived.

It had begun in The Three Plinths, the bar on Mount Olympus. Adonis drunkenly suggested that since Aphrodite had had at least three lovers she was actually a bit of a slapper. She proved at least one meaning of that sentence true by slapping him hard across the face, sending him crashing onto a poker-table that collapsed remarkably easily beneath him. And, as always happens in bar-brawls, others got involved for no apparent reason.

Uranus broke a chair across Poseidon’s head. Apollo grabbed Achilles by his heel and hurled him out through the swing-doors in to the street (the double swing-doors had been installed to accommodate Demisroussos, the God of Girth). Hermes swung his winged sandal and kicked Pan hard in the pan-pipes. Gods flew across the room, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

The goddesses joined in too. Demeter smacked Nike with her cornucopia, knocking him backwards over the bar counter. Hera grabbed Medusa by the hair, quickly realising that this wasn’t a particularly wise move. Throughout it all Dionysius frantically played on the honky-tonk piano in the corner, in the mistaken belief that loud, tinkly, filling-aching music would calm everyone down.

Then Pandora swung a huge right-hook at Ares. Ares ducked and Zeus, standing behind him, caught Pandora’s box straight in the face.

The enraged Zeus hurled a thunderbolt at Pandora, which missed her, fizzed through the door and struck a rocky outcrop, out beside the crops.

And Mount Olympus, as volcanic in nature as the gods were in temperament, erupted explosively. Slowly the world of the Greek Gods began to crumble.

The Responders silently watched all of this from a nearby hill, then stirred themselves into action. Each of them climbed above their steed, and clicked them forward with their heels.

Georgios stuffed the rest of his feta cheese into his mouth. Nikos knocked back the last of his retsina.

“So,” sighed Kostas, “war, death, famine and pestilence it is, then.”

“Guess so,” said Vasos. “When they tell you to beware Greeks bearing gifts, we’re the Greeks they’re talking about.”

The Four Horsemen of the Acropolis set off to work.