He assumed Aphrodite was an ambitious screen name until she walked into the café and every conversation around him faltered. A barista poured steamed milk onto the counter. Two strangers waiting for separate orders exchanged numbers before she reached his table. Someone near the window began crying over a person they had stopped loving twenty years earlier.
She seemed embarrassed by all of it.
Their date went well enough to make him suspicious, but she kept accepting his invitations. By the third date, he had compiled a private inventory of impossibilities: flowers that opened when she entered a room, quarreling couples who reconciled within her hearing range, rain that arrived suddenly because he mentioned liking thunderstorms.
He eventually asked whether Aphrodite was really her name.
She admitted it was closer to a job title.
After that, the stranger things became easier to notice. Desire accumulated around her. Marriages began in supermarket aisles. Former lovers called one another at three in the morning. People abandoned sensible lives because she happened to pass their buildings.
Yet something else was happening.
The longer she stayed with him, the weaker those effects became.
Flowers wilted normally. Arguments continued. A waiter served her without trembling. One evening they walked through a crowded restaurant and nobody turned to watch.
She understood before he did.
Gods survived through recognition. Worship did not require temples; wanting was enough. For thousands of years, humanity had looked at her and desired what she represented.
He had ruined that by asking whether she slept badly, whether her mother annoyed her, whether she wanted the last dumpling.
By loving her specifically, he was making her mortal.
The change spread beyond her. Dating apps emptied. Affairs ended from simple lack of interest. Love songs disappeared from radio playlists because listeners found them inexplicably tedious. Around the world, desire was cooling.
She could leave him and recover everything.
Instead, she asked whether he was frightened.
He considered the quiet city outside. “A little.”
She took his hand.
Somewhere, millions of people suddenly forgot why they had been lonely.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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