Ambrosia — Ann Benson

What happens when a Greek God lands in post-9/11 lower Manhattan and has to convince the first mortal woman he meets to believe in him in order to get back to Olympus? Regina Bugbee runs a shelter near Bellevue Hospital and finds this bizarre stranger's claim laughable, so she brings him in from the cold as just another client. But he's too sober, too articulate and too clean to be homeless, and the history he tells her is simply unfathomable. As he hovers around her, trying to win her soul with flattery and gifts, Gina in turn begins to look into him. All the while, she's caring for the man who would have been her husband had he not been injured in the fall of the Twin Towers five years earlier. A long-time coworker who cares deeply for her understands the complexity of her life and strives to help her. But he wants more and she's not ready.She's pressured by her family, therapist, and coworkers to abandon her investigation, to concentrate instead on her own elusive contentment, but the stranger is divinely different -- and dangerously likeable. She enlists the aid of another client, a homeless man who takes the God under his wing and tries, often with humorous results, to dish the dirt on how mortals live in contemporary New York. They become unlikely friends; the jaded mortal explains, through his own narrow lens, how his charge might convince a modern mortal woman to believe in his divinity -- which he himself has begun to do. In this bittersweet comedy of errors, these often tragic characters move through each other's lives -- mortal and immortal -- never realizing that their fates are intertwined in ways they can't foresee or comprehend. But can they believe? Will the stranger's vial of ambrosia come to life and propel him home?