“For a moment, she stood transfixed, conscious of all the eyes that were staring at her, some admiringly, others lasciviously. Then she began to dance. Gracefully & nimbly, not vulgarly. There was no need to separate her thighs & wrench open her cup to display her hymen. Such an act would be unbecoming for a Goddess. Thus, she danced as the Goddess Artemis would, or the Goddess Hebe would, or the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite, herself would, dance with the Graces in the gardens of Olympus.[MMT]”

“Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.”

“My sister, with her ratty red-highlighted hair and her linen pajamas and her combat boots—how could she possibly worry about being possessed by a goddess? What goddess would want her, except the goddess of chewing gum?”

“When you dance, sister, you feel in your heart the blessing of the Goddess, her peace, her kindness. But when you are with him, then the power of the Goddess is in your heart, crashing through you. The Goddess is no thing of stone. The Goddess is breath, desire, despair. She is the green of the brushing leaf, the baby's cry, the lovers bite, the fragrance of the rose. You feel the Goddess moving through you. ”

“And it was told that as soon as Poseidon saw the young Goddess, who looked no more than eighteen years of age, by human reckoning, passion immediately overwhelmed him. Unlike all the other Goddesses & Nymphs of the Sea, Aphrodite was not naked. She wore a huge girdle around her slender waist which covered her breasts & her hips as well as her crotch & buttocks. And, thus, instead of impaling her with his trident, Poseidon was overcome with curiosity as to what she hid beneath her girdle. He thus introduced himself as the King & Sheriff of the Seas & told the young Goddess that, as such, no secrets should be kept from him by all those who wished to live in the sea. He would therefore request that she removed the girdle to show him what she hid beneath it.”

“She opened one eye. “The goddess Artemis is going to talk to the supreme god Zeus … about me?” “Yup.” She closed her eyes again. “I’m so not okay.”