“True resurrections are the kind we just observed,” Christ said. His eyes glowed dimly.

“Who on earth are you?” Lydia gasped, noticing that she was speaking normally for a change.

“Jesus Christ,” Christ said cordially.

“And Zeus, at your service,” said Zeus.

How was it that she could speak properly, Lydia wondered, ignoring her companions as new patients. “Everybody thinks they’re gods here,” she said finally, admiring the tone of her own irony. How was it that suddenly she could think clearly too?

“Of course,” Zeus answered. “We all are.”

“You all think you are,” Hera said, entering the room and sitting down, spreading her gigantic velvet skirt over the gold divan. “They’re … divinely touched,” Hera said to Lydia. “Quite mad though I admit, in a charming fashion. Without their obsessions, who would they be, after all? Or are they really senile gods?”

Lydia didn’t dare say anything.

“And you don’t have to look so dreadful, do you?” Hera asked. “Do change yourself into someone more pleasant. Even if Christ and Zeus aren’t really gods, they do think that they are, and I try to treat them accordingly.”

Lydia looked down at herself to see the spilled food crusting on her nightgown.

“Here, dear,” Hera said, handing Lydia a silver mirror.

Lydia looked, shocked, to see her old face—a bony, wrinkled, yet satisfying face, but one filled with bitterness, anger, and dismay. Even in her bewilderment Lydia realized that here, dissatisfaction was somehow out of place. “What do you expect me to do?” she asked. “This is how I look. This is me.”

“It’s just one you, dearie,” Hera said, with just the gentlest touch of displeasure. “Come now, change for dinner.”

“Fish from Galilee,” Christ said.

“The finest geese from Rome, a banquet fit for the gods,” Zeus said.

“Do change,” Hera coaxed, and Lydia stared, for in the mirror she saw her own face, seven years old and pouting. Instantly she remembered the moment: First grade. She’d thrown a temper tantrum and the teacher forced her to look into a mirror at her own angry face until she herself was forced to laugh. Now those earnest, self-righteous, furious young eyes glared out at her; so freshly, innocently outraged that Lydia wanted to cry. The child’s face was so … cosmically funny, so comic in ways that she felt but couldn’t understand, that Lydia suddenly grinned at the child’s mirror face.

“That’s so much better,” Hera (and the first-grade teacher) said.

And—Lydia gasped again—because the child she had been, saw her: the old woman, grinning, and it was that face all wrinkled yet sunny that the child saw and liked; the face that had forced her to laugh and forget her tantrum.

The mirror’s surface wrinkled. The child’s face vanished. Lydia was seeing a dignified, funny, perfectly old smiling face that was her own.