Venus at the Streetlight Lounge

Cheryl Wood Ruggiero's speculative work has appeared in Abyss & Apex, AnotheRealm, Bewildering Stories, Goblin Fruit, Luna Station Quarterly, Mirror Dance, Neo-Opsis, Shelter of Daylight, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye, among others. She lives, writes, and teaches in the mountains of southwestern Virginia.

Author Comments

"Venus at the Streetlight Lounge" started with a surprising image in my head of a woman stalking through a bar. A bar is not my usual environment at all, so my first challenge was to make that environment sensually evocative. Then I needed to find out who she was and Venus occurred to me. I tried to make it microfiction (150 words precisely), but that story ended with her admission that Cupid was her son, which was fine with me as a revelation, but not enough story. Then I saw that the man was as interesting as she was, as was the other woman. And I began to feel for all three of them, and suddenly there was the reversal at the end, right in front of me. Another challenge was to keep it from being either vicious or vacuous--I hope I succeeded. The pleasure was in writing this come-down, blonde-dyed, bar-hopping vision of a goddess. These days we don’t have much heartspace for a goddess--no sacred wells, no springs she visits at the equinox. So I saw that a bar, where people thirst for grape or grain spirits as a form of the ineffable, turned out to be just the right place for divine power to twist into the hands of a guy with a gray buzz cut.