Moo

                         Strange he should have seemed a god: A short goldhaired gods with a smile wrought for glossy headshots, a sharp charm radiant from cool vulpine eyes. Ice eyes, them, but they seemed practically Apollonian once upon a time, and when he visited from Atlanta, his red car worthy to replace Helios' chariot in my eyes, it seemed as if he wore a mask of hammered gold that caught the sun and not a mortal face.

                    When he left, I wept, for I loved him so much, huddled in my bunk sheets.

                    Then we, the darker two, gained years and some stature, though very fresh faced boys if ever two trod creation we remained, my younger brother and I, and the chemicals, the hormones, instigated by latent genes, fructified in that heady cocktail concocted by nature and refined by natural selection, culminating in manhood, began to stir, and committed our first great sin against our half-brother: we grew taller than him. No more would we stare up to him as he loomed.

                  No, we would wax greater, stronger, and worse, manifest in different form the talents of our father, whom he had hated and feared so much to such extent that he, and not his own father, held the greater influence over him. And things changed: the world, stable for eons, untold millenia of childhoood, entered a new cycle of the sun, and the poles, formerly north and south, flipped. The god became an imp, a malignant dwarf who would find himself eaten up with rage and wrath, eager to find fault with our every thought, inclination, attempt, until in his presence, my utterances became monosyllabic and brutal: he became, from this present vantage, the very get of Rumpelstiltskin's indiscretions. For he attempted, as best he might, to spin gold for us, imbricated out of the work of others, work he never did, but it turned to dust, for whatever he desired, he would not impart to us, and he, never made to pay a price for anything of note, could not conceive of giving freely to others as he had been given. And this was fine, though it took years to realize this truth.