I’ve never heard Mother weep so much.

     It’s attracting almost as much attention as the punishment itself, which is no small accomplishment given my brother is having whole sections of his back cut from them with weaponised electricity.  Granted, it doesn’t take long for our kind to heal from injury, but the pain must still be ferocious.  He holds out at first from any audible reaction to the lashings, but eventually, the relentlessness of it breaks through even his brute fortitude, and now, with every new strike, he screams in renewed distress, howls of protest that surely must be heard from one end of the cosmos to the other.

     He’s on his knees.  Naked, of course.  Right in the middle of Zeus’ courtyard, the rest of us (by order) gathered around to watch as our ruler rains down blow after blow on him with his lightning whip in retribution for crashing Helios’ chariot and scorching half a continent into desert, his skin hissing with the sound of burning flesh every time the weapon makes contact.  Compelled to strip, get on his knees and receive chastisement that manages to be both whipping and electrocution at the same moment.  His back is a mess of torn skin at this point, any opportunity for it to regenerate continually deferred by new blows.  Even when, physically, he’s fully recovered, he won’t soon forget this experience.  None of us will.  Which is exactly the point of it.

     Phaethon screams out in a fresh burst of pain as Zeus embarks on an even fiercer round of lashing.  Even less let up now between blows.  I wonder what’s made him decide to suddenly up the ante, and then it hits me, even before he makes eye contact with me as the strokes continue.

     He’s being spurred on by us.  Excited by our family’s horrified reaction.  Fired up by my mother’s weeping, by my father’s silent, impotent frustration at having to watch his son be physically harmed, by mine and my brothers’ discomfort at what we’re being forced to watch, no matter how much Phaethon may annoy or antagonise us the rest of the time within the family. All of it providing an erotic energy for him.  Fuelling all his desires and imaginings about me in particular, forever eyeing me up as a potential new Ganymede to corrupt or seduce.  Lust, above all else, driving every motivation.  It makes my head start to swim, the sheer decadent hedonism of it.  The punishment driven, no doubt, as much by jealousy and resentment at another of our kind daring to descend to the mortal world and potentially sample its fruits, when they should all, by rights, be his alone.  Hypocritical, covetous cruelty, delighting in its ability to enforce itself unchallenged.

     And indeed, there’s nothing we can do.  Any of us.  An audience full of power, and spirit, and creativity, all cowed by one wilful, determined tyrant.

     No different to the workings of the world we flatter ourselves we sit above.

[Christopher Moore is a Northern Irish writer, and a graduate of English from Queen’s University Belfast, as well as the MA in TV Fiction Writing at Glasgow Caledonian University. Alongside a number of playwriting achievements, including being longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize in 2019, and shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Playwriting Award in 2024, he has had a number of pieces of short fiction published in magazines and anthologies.]