[The Oxford Dictionary defines a harpy as a rapacious mythological creature with a woman’s head and body and a bird’s wings and claws or as a bird of prey with a woman’s face. Harpies are perhaps best known for being sent to punish the blind King Phineas, taking his food and leaving a revolting smell in their wake.]

           The ringing of the silver phone burst into the harpy’s sweet dream of ham and dinner rolls and bloody retribution. Unheard for ages, its ring was tinny and harsh and dissolved the remaining fragments of her dream. But the noise was welcome. It meant work.

           Her two sisters continued to stare in dull absorption at the television screen. Disgusted with their lassitude, she snatched up the receiver with a sharply taloned hand and nervous anticipation. Some of that excitement withered when she heard the voice of a mere nymph, and not a god themself, relaying the details of the assignment over the line. It withered further when she learned they wouldn’t be working for one of the first-line gods (like Aphrodite or Ares), but for Hermes, who was much lower in the hierarchy. Actually, there would be no “they”—only “she”; the crawl of time and disuse had left her sisters obese and sluggish, and she doubted there was any point in trying to roust them to fly. But that was fine; she’d had nothing to do for the longest time and was grateful for the activity.

           The mortal victim’s name was Norbert Phelps. The harpy had long ago forgotten her own actual name and now called herself “Agnes” because she liked the sound of it. The business wasn’t unusual—she wouldn’t need anyone’s help to handle the task. The mortal had offended the god and thus had to die, blah blah blah; she didn’t care about the nature of the offense, which was some instance of disrespect in a shoe store in Spokane. These gods, she thought, not a peep for years on end and then suddenly they’re in a lather about some stupid mortal’s stupid blunder; it seemed silly. But then, no one cared to hear the harpy’s opinion; she was just the instrument of vengeance.

           It hadn’t always been that way. She could remember—if she shut off the TV and tried hard—a time when the harpies (there had been many more of them eons ago) formed the body of the west wind, were almost minor godlets, and were propitiated regularly by seafarers and people who lived on coasts. It was the Furies who dispatched the gods’ justice (or whatever), but the Furies had left the planet several hundred years back, and the gods’ revenge calls had devolved to Agnes and her sisters, then decreased in frequency as the gods themselves grew bored or distracted and receded, then decreased some more, until she had begun to wonder if she would ever be called on again. But now, once again, she was about to fly out of the interdimensional nook one of the gods had carved out for the harpies, while her remaining sisters stared at reruns of Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show. (The only channel they could get reliably with the rabbit ears showed mainly American TV from the 1950s.)

           The door of the harpies’ high abode opened onto an atmosphere that was thin enough to leave mortals gasping for breath. Below was a vast abyss of air and mountain ranges the size of ridges on a crocodile’s back. The harpy opened her wings slowly, luxuriating in the muscle sensation, to their full span. Violent winds riffled her feathers. She mentally recited the information on Norbert Phelps’s whereabouts to make sure she had it; she did. She pushed off with her big, flat, lethal claws and was airborne.

           By the time she had the mortal’s house in her sights, it was night, but Diana was apparently in a pleasant mood because the moon was bright and it was easy to see. Below, two or three people might have spied a huge bird flash across the white of the moon. Farther below, some might even have heard the whooshing of immense wings and the settling of black feathers freshly dusted by the winds. Or not. Mortals had long since given up or lost the capability to detect immortals, which generally suited the latter just fine because, as the harpy Agnes was aware, most of the old gods knew they’d been forgotten and so had decided to blend, some quietly and some ostentatiously, with the stinking, death-riddled but occasionally attractive mortals for whatever modern advantages they might eke out. Mortal targets of a god’s wrath were extended sight, of course, so that they could better appreciate their unfortunate and nasty fate. Beyond that, only a miniscule number of people could recognize a god or a god’s agent. (As it happened, however, Norbert Phelps lived on a woody lot without any neighbors near, so no one saw or heard the harpy.)

           Her eyes were fine in the dark, so she could see it was a run-down hovel, most every rotting or tilting or peeling or drooping inch in need of some repair (not at all like the palaces she and her sisters had had to invade in the past). Television light flickered in the bay window; otherwise the place was dark. She was prepared to shatter the door theatrically, but it wasn’t locked.

           As the door burst open, Norbert Phelps leapt from his recliner, knocking over the tray stand that bore his Jack-and-Coke and beef jerky. His first flash of thought was that the hallucination or the practical joke by his cousin Hiram was blocking the closet that held the shotgun. His second thought was that the intruder smelled, well, awful (historically, this has often been said of harpies, justifiably). He stood there and tried to force his brain to make some sense of this. It was a large bird, but also a naked woman, or, more accurately though less logically, a not-entirely but largely repellent blend of the two. It—she—had huge serrated black wings that arched out furiously from—her—bony shoulders, a squat milk-white body, short arms and short legs (drumsticks, he thought perversely), huge bird feet—claws actually; the arms and the feet were tipped with metallic-looking talons. The woman’s head had a thick nest of matted salt-and-pepper hair, and the face was elongated forward, roughly beak-shaped. The eyes were a furious red and, yes, they blazed. (They blazed because Agnes the harpy was psyching herself up for the violent duty the god had demanded.) Though clearly powerful, the creature stood only chest-high to Norbert Phelps, but this wasn’t much comfort.

           “What in the living hell?” Norbert managed to sputter out.

           The harpy, for her part, looked at a skinny, sixtyish man with a pencil mustache, a pinched nose, only a thin ring of hair, and a bald, slightly pointed head. He was wearing a tee shirt, striped boxer shorts, and black socks. This should take about twenty seconds, she thought, a far, far cry from past dispatches where she’d faced swords and bodyguards (challenges, yes, but ones that were ultimately fruitless against an immortal).

           “You are the mortal called Norbert Phelps? Answer!” Her voice was old and dry as dust; it had been a long time since she’d used it to any effect.

           “Um . . . I guess so . . . yes, yes.”

            “You have offended the god Hermes, and for that the god has called for your death.”

           At the last word, Norbert Phelps blanched and wobbled and grasped for a handhold. Questions swirled in his brain like hornets in a jar, but all he could manage (and he remained unsure whether this was an especially peculiar dream) was: “I . . . I did what?”

           The harpy was under no obligation to explain anything to this or any other mortal, but, perhaps because she had been inactive for a long time and needed the diversion, or perhaps because countless hours of TV had, insidiously, inculcated her with a slight trace of sympathy for the humans, she condescended to tell Norbert Phelps his offense. To her shock, the white skinny thing did not cower or wail or beg, but dissolved into snorting, hiccupy laughter as she stared at him, open-mouthed.

           “You find your penalty . . .  funny?”

           He wiped at his eyes. “So you’re going to kill me because I stepped on some dandy’s outstretched foot in the aisle of Shoe City? Is that the scoop?” He placed his hands on his bony hips. “Really?”

           Agnes the harpy floundered for words. “You . . . you have offended the god, and for this—”

           The mortal flung himself back into the chair and clicked the television off (the harpy stared at the remote, mystified). “Fine,” Norbert said, “have at it, whatever you are. What do I care? Look around, you’ll be doing me a favor. Shit, what are you, anyway?”

           She spread her wings and prepared to launch herself at him, but suddenly he was talking again. She couldn’t help it; she listened; it was better than the old black-and-white shows the rabbit ears conducted into the harpies’ abode.

           “Listen,” he said, “ you think some god has grudges? Phooey. You want grudges?” The mortal grew animated as he spoke, shaking his fist, smacking it against his palm, waving his arms. His voice rose to a shout then dwindled to a whisper, then was bawling, then he was snarling; he was all over the place. Agnes the harpy listened, although in the torrent of words she was able to grasp only highlights. At first she simply held herself back from destroying him, then she grew intrigued. Then the heretical idea began to congeal.

           “—could barely walk before the crap started, when my sister emptied a carton of sour milk over my head while I was still in the damn crib—Ma thought it was a stitch—brother-in-law took me for five thousand in an lousy business scheme, some new damn chewy candy or such— married barely a week before the wife started banging my cousin Jacky, then she empties me clean in the splitup—I got an ulcer, bad eyes but I can’t afford no damn glasses, a skin condition on my back that don’t let up—So I stepped on a god’s little foot? Boo hoo hoo. Waah.” He made a sour face and rubbed his knuckles on his eyes. “Hell, I sprained my own ankle five times, twice in one single year, now I can hardly hobble because of the arthritis—passed up on that promotion over and over and over, like to pop that uppity kid with his master’s degree right in the nose—Back in high school Lillian Fry socked me right in the gut while the whole damn cheerleading squad looked on—little weasel picked the wallet right outa my back pocket and maxed out the Sears card—locked me outa the stinking trailer and it’s thirty degrees out—dude sold me that lemon now I just sunk another five hundred it—old witch left it all to my worthless sister up in Twin Cities, not a shriveled little nickel to me—”

           This mortal, the Norbert Phelps, she saw, had a cornucopia of enemies and grievances—and he showed no signs of winding down his recitation—that made the offenses done to the immortals, her overlords, look paltry and dull. The harpy smiled (a disconcerting sight; the mortal paused his tirade to gape at her fangs, but then plunged on). She would do something she’d never done before. She would show this miserable mortal a measure or mercy, if letting him retain his wretched life, so pockmarked with little catastrophes, could be considered such.

           Their eyes met. Norbert Phelps had a flash of terror, while the harpy had one of crackling revelation. She would not simply let the mortal live, she would serve him. With his inventory of slights, there would be no more staring dully at the TV in her abode, listening to her sisters grunt and grumble and snore. She could spread her wings and ride the wind nightly, claws outstretched, a bellicose shriek on her lips, bearing down on this unfortunate or the other one, employing her dreadful harpy nature to its fullest—

           But as soon as the intent had formed in her mind, she felt the god’s displeasure. For the god Hermes had been following her mission from afar, and like his divine colleagues, he hated professional disloyalty more than any other sin except blasphemy. Immediately he dealt the harpy her punishment.

           She felt the indignant god draining the immortality from her. Her killing talons dropped from her hands and feet and clattered on the filthy tile floor, and she was left with mere pudgy fingers and toes. Her spine straightened and resorbed the wing bones, and black feathers sifted down to her ankles in a large heap. Her face lost any avian aspect, and her blazing red eyes cooled to plain brown. The metamorphosis was so rapid that she could barely catch her breath, and then—there she was, naked in the inauspicious and tacky living room:

           Just.

           Another.

           Mortal.

           Woman.

           Norbert Phelps, speechless at last, gaped at the transformed monster, then switched on a lamp for a better look. “Well,” he said after a while, shaking his head, “whaddya know?”

           Eventually, inevitably, Agnes the former harpy and Norbert Phelps married, and she went to work in the snack shop of a nearby Phillips 66. She lived her new life as bewildered, frustrated, selfish, and even occasionally happy as most other mortals, until one afternoon she failed to check before crossing the street and was run over by a motorcycle.

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