Blood on the rally stones

The summer heat clung to Athens like a wet rag, and the air in Kaisariani was thick with the smell of souvlaki and exhaust. Myrto Zervou adjusted her black dress, fanning herself with a folded newspaper as she watched her son, Aris; hammer away at a broken chair in their cramped apartment.

"Poutana, the heat," she muttered, wiping her brow. "Like Hades opened his doors early."

Aris smirked. "Maybe you should sit down, Mama. You’ll melt before the rally even starts."

"Rally?" Myrto’s sharp eyes flicked to him. "What rally?"

"The pro-junta one," Aris said, shrugging. "Down in Plateia. Some big-shot colonel’s giving a speech. Police everywhere."

Myrto’s lips twisted. "Fascists." She spat the word like rotten olive.

Then BOOM.

The explosion rattled the windows. Myrto’s coffee cup trembled.

"What in God’s name...?"

Aris was already at the door. "Stay here!"

"Like hell!" Myrto grabbed her shawl and followed.

*    *    * *    *    *

The square was chaos. Smoke curled from a shattered podium. Police shoved through screaming crowds. A man in a bloodied shirt lay on the ground, groaning.

"They threw a bomb!" a woman shrieked.

"No, it was a gun!" a man argued.

Myrto’s eyes narrowed. She spotted something, a single leather glove, dropped near the wounded man.

"Ari," she hissed, "that’s not a bomb wound. That’s a knife."

Her son frowned. "So?"

"So someone wanted it to look like an attack on the rally… but this was personal."

*    *    * *    *    *

Back home, Mary called, panicked. "Mama, the police are arresting people! They think it’s anarchists!"

"Idiots," Myrto muttered. She dialed her old friend, Sergeant Kostas.

"Kosta, the glove, check who lost it."

"Myrto, stay out of this!"

"Or what? You’ll arrest a widow?" She hung up.

A knock came. A nervous young man, Dimitris, a waiter from the café near the rally.

"Kyria Myrto… I saw something. A man in a suit stabbed the speaker, then dropped the glove. But he ran when the explosion happened."

"Whose explosion?"

"I don’t know. But the stabber… he had a tattoo. A snake."

*    *    * *    *    *

Myrto and Aris tracked the tattoo to a retired army doctor, Lambros Vlachos, who’d been kicked out of the junta years ago for stealing morphine.

They found him in a dingy Piraeus bar.

"You stabbed the colonel," Myrto said flatly.

Lambros laughed. "Prove it."

"The glove. The tattoo. And the fact you hated him for ruining your career."

Lambros’s smile died. "He deserved worse."

Aris stepped forward but then gunfire erupted.

A masked shooter, junta loyalists, cleaning house. Lambros took a bullet to the chest.

Myrto and Aris barely escaped.

*    *    * *    *    *

Back home, Myrto pieced it together.

"Lambros stabbed the colonel. But the bomb? That was the junta’s own men—to blame anarchists and justify a crackdown."

Kostas arrived, grim. "You’re right. We found wires, staged."

"And now Lambros is dead," Myrto said bitterly. "Convenient."

Kostas sighed. "Some battles aren’t ours to win, Myrto."

She poured him coffee. "Maybe. But I’ll still say what happened."

*    *    * *    *    *

Days later, whispers spread. The junta’s lies unraveled. The colonel survived but his reputation didn’t.

Mary brought the grandkids over, fussing. "Mama, you could’ve been killed!"

Myrto shrugged. "Better than staying quiet."

Aris grinned. "Next time, maybe warn me before we run from gunmen?"

She smacked his arm. "Next time, be faster."

Outside, Athens burned with protests. But in Kaisariani, Myrto Zervou sipped her coffee, quiet, watchful, and far from done.

The End