The Tyrant's Tomb

She looked in good health for a former street harpy. Her humanlike face
was angular but not emaciated. Her arm feathers were carefully preened. Her
weight seemed about right for an avian, so she must have been getting plenty
of birdseed or tacos or whatever harpies preferred to eat. Her taloned feet
had shredded a well-defined path where she paced across the carpet.
“Ella, look!” Tyson announced. “Friends!”
Ella frowned, her eyes sliding off Frank and me as if we were minor
annoyances—pictures hung askew on a wall.
“No,” she decided. Her long fingernails clacked together. “Tyson needs
more tattoos.”
“Okay!” Tyson grinned as if this were fantastic news. He bounded over
to the reclining chair.
“Wait,” I pleaded. It was bad enough to smell the tattoos. If I saw them
being made, I was sure I would puke all over Aristophanes. “Ella, before you
start, could you please explain what’s going on?”
“‘What’s Going On,’” Ella said. “Marvin Gaye, 1971.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “I helped write that song.”
“No.” Ella shook her head. “Written by Renaldo Benson, Al Cleveland,
and Marvin Gaye; inspired by an incident of police brutality.”
Frank smirked at me. “You can’t argue with the harpy.”
“No,” Ella agreed. “You can’t.”
She scuttled over and studied me more carefully, sniffing at my bandaged
belly, poking my chest. Her feathers glistened like rust in the rain. “Apollo,”
she said. “You’re all wrong, though. Wrong body. Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, 1956.”
I did not like being compared to a black-and-white horror film, but I’d
just been told not to argue with the harpy.
Meanwhile, Tyson adjusted the tattoo chair into a flat bed. He lay on his
stomach, the recently inked purple lines of script rippling across his scarred,
muscular back.
“Ready!” he announced.
The obvious finally dawned on me.
“The words that memory wrought are set to fire,” I recalled. “You’re
rewriting the Sibylline Books on Tyson with hot needles. That’s what the
prophecy meant.”
“Yep.” Ella poked my love handles as if assessing them for a writing
surface. “Hmm. Nope. Too flabby.”