Excerpt from Sonny Boy

“My freshman year of college, I recounted my experience to a friend on the porch of an off-campus house, and she said to me, ‘There’s just something about mothers and their sons, isn’t there?’
 
I wouldn’t get what she meant for a few more years, so I just nodded, took a drag from the cigarette we were sharing, and tried to think about it. The moon hung through darkened tree branches, and I thought back to Artemis, considered how she cast out Callisto for her rape, searched for her constellation but couldn’t find it.
 
A semester later, I took a seminar on mythology. I usually slept through my alarm, but sometimes I stumbled into the humanities building and listened as twenty different eighteen-year-olds discussed Homer and Ovid. It was all the same when you really got down to it—a man, exalted, would rape a woman. Leda, Danaë, Persephone, Callisto, Medusa. Sometimes, she would be made a monster; sometimes, she would birth one. It didn’t particularly matter, none of it did, and when I said as much, I was told I was missing the point, so I stopped going altogether.
 
Instead, when I woke up, I would read the Crime and Fire Log for the campus and count how many had been referred to Title IX. I started to make over-under bets with myself. At times, I would hear bits of a story and connect them to an existing report number; sometimes, I’d wait for the new report to appear—usually it didn’t. Occasionally, I turned in essays about pomegranates and severed heads. At the end of the semester: a C and a note from my professor wishing I had contributed more to class discussions.
 
In retellings of the story of Medusa, it was a gift to be made a monster. Some even claimed the original meaning of the myth. The thing itself and not the myth. The wreck and not the story of the wreck. Athena, punisher or protector? Was it a blessing to be made a monster, or a curse? I figured I understood what my friend meant then.”