Adonis was said to be the son of Theias, king of Syria, and his daughter Myrrha. There was nothing, it seemed, like a touch of incest to produce a child of exquisite beauty. When her father discovered her pregnancy, Myrrha fled and was transformed into a myrrh tree. Yet even in that form, she gave birth to a boy so lovely that Aphrodite herself took pity on him.

The goddess carried the infant to the underworld, entrusting him to Persephone’s care. But when Adonis grew into a youth of rare grace, both women fell hopelessly in love with him. It was inevitable, perhaps, that beauty would bring both adoration and ruin.

One day, while hunting, Adonis was fatally gored by a wild boar—sent, some say, by Artemis to punish his vanity. His blood mingled with Aphrodite’s tears and gave birth to the first anemone. Thus, his beauty became eternal, immortalised in a flower.

And so the story of Adonis was handed down through the ages, until it reached a boy called Banjo.

There is something wonderfully absurd about a boy named Banjo. The name had been chosen simply because his grandfather played the instrument—nothing more mystical than that. Had Banjo been plain, the name might have invited merciless teasing. But as fate would have it, he was beautiful—achingly so—and thus the name became a kind of charm.

He was the sort of young man who made strangers feel vaguely inadequate. They would take in his fine-boned features, his golden skin, his effortless grace, and feel the familiar pang of envy or desire. His beauty unsettled people, as though they were confronted by something not entirely human.

Banjo, however, found his looks exhausting. So he delighted in the single imperfection that spoiled the illusion: a missing front tooth. When people stared too long, he would flash a grin—a broad, dazzling smile—and there it was: the flaw that disrupted the marble perfection.

No one knew how he’d lost it. The rumours ranged from drugs to fights to some impoverished past before fame. The truth, however, was known only to Banjo, and he guarded it carefully. The missing tooth became his private rebellion against the myth others had built around him.

He liked the way it disarmed people, how it made him seem approachable, almost ordinary. It was a reminder that even gods have their fractures. Beauty, he thought, was not found in perfection, but in the quirks and vulnerabilities that betrayed our humanity.

If the ancient sculptors had carved him, they had stopped just short of finishing the smile—leaving him, deliberately, incomplete.

Banjo never replaced the tooth. He kept it as a secret charm, a flaw that told the truth: that myths do not survive in the real world, and perfection is the loneliest lie of all.