The Site of Big Shoulders: Fiction: The Beautiful Son

The Beautiful Son by Anne Sterzinger

"Ahhhhhhh!" sighed Giuglio, not so overwhelmed that he wasn't still pinching Azienne's bottom. "I don't even know what we'd call that."

He vaguely remembered the timid little girl; he was suddenly aflame to know what was going on in her underground hotbed of artistic foment; he descended to Earth, shoved past the son, and strode down into the hovel. The timid little couple was just waking from their stupor, still too drunk to care that their son was gone.

Giuglio, of course, was horrified. "Is that your son singing outside?"

'Zat where he went?" mumbled the timid little girl. The imprint of the logo from the bottle she'd used for a pillow was legible on her face. "Call that singing? Well, callit whatever you wannit, iron thighs."

"Lady, if you don't want to spend the next thousand years pushing a rock up a mountain, you can. Augh! I said don't touch me!" It didn't take Giuglio very long to figure out what was going on; the timid little couple freely "confessed," as they'd only the vaguest notion that their childrearing methods were less than optimal.

To the gods, the concept of child abuse was abhorrent - how could one be so animalistic as to mistreat one's own flesh and blood?

To the humans, the concept of "child abuse" sounded absurd. On the witness stand the timid little girl stared into her hands and whined: "You made us dig in a mine. We made him sit in the basement. Hey, at least we didn't make him dig."

What was the definition of sin, anyway? And how dare you address me in that tone of voice?

To the gods the dilemma of the trial had nothing to do with the facts of the crime. The humans had obviously done something disgusting and wrong; true, the gods were terrible punishers and random abusers; then again, they were gods and that had always been one of the perks. There was no debating the timid little couple's essential guilt. What did speak in their favor was the unexpected result of their sins: the pure preserved beauty of the son's talent. Encouraged, petted, made a celebrity on earth, or even granted entry to the City of Heaven (a boon rarely awarded to astonishingly valuable offspring of men) -- why, he might have become a conceited prick and wasted his gift chasing tail and snorting heroin, and the concert of the millenium would have never occurred.

It was a head-scratcher, all right. After they were cross-examined the timid little couple watched for day after boring day while the debate raged. If a terrible sin had a universally good outcome, should the sin be punished nonetheless? What was the definition of sin, anyway? And how dare you address me in that tone of voice? The timid little couple got so bored they began wandering around the courtroom looking for the source of the doughnuts the gods were stuffing their faces with while they yelled, and they realized no one was paying them any attention whatsoever, so they snuck down the hall and back out into the forest, where they were never again traced by immortal eye. When they realized the timid little couple was gone, the gods were pretty relieved.

They turned to the much easier question of what to do with the beautiful son. They couldn't refuse such a creature ascension to the City of Heaven, where he was rewarded appropriately for his stunning talent: with a job in the Celestial Choir. He was named Head Valet. Not knowing any better, he became a loyal employee for life and, while never allowed to perform, he sang along during practice (gods with the suss would sit in on practices and avoid the mediocre concerts the old boys tended to put on). The beautiful son was not granted immortality but he did father a boy of his own, the pride of his life, with a demigoddess. The demigoddess disowned the boy as a fetus and had him implanted in the womb of an octoroon, who disowned the baby as soon as she got paid; the life and times of that talented, sexy, and fractionally immortal bastard make a tale for another day.