“NEW AGE MONA LISA” by Michael Creese

What I’m about to tell you hasn’t been told before.

It’s what they call a secret.

You know all about the sphinx. You know all about the Mona Lisa. You know all about the oracle at Delphi. Actually, you know nothing. All you know is that they are the essence of riddles, the molded representations of the mysterious and unknown. And that is all you need to know.

For if I told you that once upon a time, the Sphynx was the most beautiful woman in the land, who tried to steal away on all four breezes of the earth in order to escape her nonplussed suitors? If I told you that one of them was a shape-shifting magician who stalked her first as a man and then as a black cat? If I told you he was so enamored and obsessed with her beauty that he turned her into a stone cat when he finally caught up with her in Egypt? Would you believe me?

If I told you that the Mona Lisa posed for a specific purpose… what would you think of that, I wonder. If she’d known—far ahead of her time, far ahead of ours—that the soul is captured within a picture, either a painting or a photograph. If she’d been trying, forever, to read the minds and heart of the men and women around her, and failed. If she’d immortalized herself in a painting in order to keep staring, keep reading, until she might finally unlock the secret method of doing so? This is why you shiver when you do realize her eyes never leave yours.

And what if I told you the girl at Delphi never believed in prophecies. That her father was about to wed her with a man who had more nose hairs than head hairs, who had more appetite than kindness, who had a dangerous gleam in his eye that would unsettle a giant (much less a girl). That she devised a plan with her lover in order to come up with supposed truths, and be stigmatized as a witch and banished from her village? Her lover was a philosopher, of course.

That is only the beginning. How these three fates combined is a different story… altogether…

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