The Fateful Gift

Artie J. Zeus looked down on the streets of Manhattan from the top floor of Olympic Tower. Yes, he was the top gun of Olympus, Inc., but he was constantly on guard against other, lesser gods who tried to steal his thunder. Literally. Like Monty Prometheus, VP for Energy. He had just stolen fire, to which Artie had sole rights, and given it to humans.

“I’ll fire the bastard,” Artie told Hera, as he swilled a dirty ambrosia that evening.

Hera laughed. “You can’t fire him. Once a god, always a god.”

“Not necessarily. Think of that Nietzsche. He announces there is no god, and suddenly—poof—nobody believes in you anymore.” Artie patted his comb over, trying to understand the vagaries of humanity. Where had he screwed up? As he raged over Prometheus’ theft and humanity’s lack of appropriate R-E-S-P-E-C-T for him, Zeus devised a plan.

Next day he called Harry Hephaestus, the VP in charge of arts and crafts.

“Harry, I need your help.”

“Sure, boss. Anything for you,” said Harry, a tall thin guy, a real eager beaver.

“Good. I want you to make a special woman for me. Not a real one, but something that looks like a real one. And I also want you to make a special beautiful box, something that nobody but me could ever have thought up. I want this box to be so amazing that she will just have to open it even though I’m going to tell her never to open it. You see what I mean?”

“Sure. A fake woman with a beautiful box. We can do that.”

Harry’s artsy craftsies went to work. They started with a pile of fine silt, the kind that is only found in Shaanxi, China, and the Loess Hills of western Iowa. They poured this stuff (which was as fine as cake flour and got all over them) into a hollow, 3D-printed mold in the form of a woman and powered her with state-of-the-art bionics. When she was finished, Artie cracked a bottle of Clicquot over her head and said, “Welcome to my world, Pandora.”

“Why Pandora?” she asked.

“It means All Gifts. And that’s you, sweetie. All gifts all the time.”

“What does that mean—all gifts?”

“Well, that’s just my little secret. Only mine. You’ll never know. But I’ll give you one clue.” Artie picked up a tiny box covered with slivers of colored glass. “This.”

“Oooh. Nice. Can I open it?”

 “Absolutely not. This is the most special-est box only I could come up with, and you stay out of it. All right? You understand? Because if you open it, you will be in big trouble.” He stroked his red necktie feverishly with his tiny, Vienna sausage fingers.

Pandora said, “Well, sure, like, if that’s what you want. But I’m just curious about what’s in there.”

Zeus smirked. Women. They were so predictable.

A few days later Pandora invited Prometheus over to her place for dinner. She served take-out moussaka and stuffed grape leaves with her favorite retsina. After post-prandial sex, Pandora took the box from her bedside and said, “I really want to open this. Should I?”

“Didn’t Artie tell you not to?”

“Yeah, but that was days ago. I just really want to see.”

“Pandora, honey, you’re better than this…don’t you think that you should--” Prometheus was still trying to talk her out of it when Pandora picked up a ball peen hammer from her bedside drawer and smashed the box open in one blow.

Monty looked at her, mouth agape. “What in Hades—?”

“I wanted to see what was in the damn thing.” She looked around the room. “And there’s nothing. It was a hoax.”

Monty hopped around on one foot as he pulled his on his jeans. “I’m going for plausible deniability.”

“Get out, Monty,” said Pandora. She sat in her pink see-through baby-dolls and waited, wondering what she had missed.

Soon she heard a knock at her door. Peering out, she saw an old lady wearing a blonde wig, slightly askew, and leaning on a walker. It was one of the Fate sisters.

“Pandora, I know you’re there,” gasped the woman (obviously a smoker). “Let me in. I know what you did.”

“You think I’m in trouble with Artie?”

“Very possibly. Or not. He knew you would open it.”

“He did?”

“Yes. Now let me in, and we can assess the damage.”

“Damage?”

“The ‘gifts’ in the box. It’s quite a list.”

Pandora opened the door. “OK, come in. Have a seat while I slip into something a little less comfortable.”

When she returned, Fate asked, “How would you like the news? Least terrible to most terrible? Alphabetically? Physical to philosophical?”

“Well, now you’ve really got my curiosity going. Just spring it on me. I love surprises.”

“OK, here’s the list so far: halitosis, avocado green shag carpets, stilettos, mosquitos, nuclear waste dumps….” The old lady took a swallow of retsina and kept reading for several minutes. “…fruit cocktail, underwire bras, the imperative to ‘have a nice day,’ interminable dinner parties, pestilence, famous author readings, parking tickets, scales that weigh heavy, middle seats on airplanes, canned peas, robocalls, flat tires, ideologies, racism, sexism, all the

--isms, monster pickup trucks, urinary tract infections, road construction, death, the filibuster, food stuck in facial hair, taxes, bad pickup lines, the industrial revolution, Amazon (the company not the river), Rudy Giuliani, and diarrhea.”

“Is that it?” said Pandora.

“Sexually transmitted diseases,” the old lady said. “It’s still a partial list.”

“So, for the rest of eternity I’m going to be known as the girl who brought the world STD’s?” asked Pandora.

“That’s about right, kid.”

“But, but...how does that help Artie get back at Monty for giving people fire? And why did I have to open that box when he told me not to?”

“Who knows how that guy thinks. But you opening it was inevitable. Nobody escapes me and my sisters. Not humans, not gods, not even bots like you. Live with it, honey. The rest of us are going to have to.”