Congratulations Harpy Mom!

Your brood will shuffle into the mini-van, wings bursting from t-shirts.  They’ll be fixed with dour looks – sour, bloodless faces.  Telltale scratches, bloody worry marks, will curl up beneath their eyes, into their hairlines. Their feathers will be trailing out as they move, filling the Dodge Caravan’s interior.

“What’s wrong, dearies?” you’ll croon at them before reflexively making a cawing sound, as all harpies do.  They’ll look at one another, dejected.

“We lost the big game,” they’ll collectively murmur under downturned eyes.

Your mind will wander to thoughts of ancient eras, times when this would have been a call to arms: your brood would have annihilated their adversaries with greek fire and blood soaked claw.  There would have been no “Easthampton Warriors” left to battle on the soccer field the next day.  There would only have been eyeless corpses, so stained in blood that the mark of the tears they wept upon sight of their homes were annihilated, if only just barely.

But this is the old way – this is not the way of things now.

So you’ll croon softly at your children, assure them that it’s not their fault that they puncture soccer balls with their talons and that these things, which make them atrocious soccer players, also make them tantamount warriors, craftspeople and lawyers.  You’ll sing to them, as is harpy tradition, that the world is not always in this shape and that one day, one day soon, all will awaken and those of scale and claw and flashing eye will be common upon the earth once more and all these dark days without spark or signal divine will be as a dim memory to those who remain.

Then you’ll take them to Dairy Queen, where they’ll each get a blizzard.  The lack of opposable thumbs will make eating them a messy, frustrating experience, but the Dairy Queen blizzard is one of the last vestiges of magic in our world and, as such, even as their contents is splattered about the interior of your minivan, they will give your children a respite from the horror of the modern world.

Congratulations Harpy Mom!