Small Gods

If she could make people understand one thing and one thing only, it would be this: that food has no moral value, and that anyone whose pantry can be considered “full” is a virtuous person in her eyes, regardless of whether that fullness is kale chips and quinoa or Girl Scout cookies and pre-mixed buttercream frosting.  She cares about the quality of the shelves, their fullness and fineness, not their contents or what the latest diet craze has to say about those contents.

If she could make people understand two things, it would be that a well-stocked, well-indexed pantry is a palace beyond price, a lofty cathedral filled with miracles waiting to be mixed.  Cakes to be baked, potatoes to be peeled, spices and seasonings over which people have so very often gone to war, ready to be sprinkled over meat or folded into casseroles.  Holes in the shelves are not to be borne; a regularly updated shopping list is worth a thousand impulse buys or once-a-year stocking runs.  Every household should, in her eyes, be able to shut its doors and sustain itself for as long as plausible.  She understands all too well that not everyone can afford the luxury of a proper pantry, and she weeps for those outside the warmth and light of her hearth, whose stomachs are too often empty, whose soups, when they exist at all, are too often unseasoned.

She would feed the world, given rice enough and time.

If she could make people understand three things, it would be that another cup of water can always be added to the pot, that one more potato can always be diced into the hash, that one more egg is not so great a sacrifice, for look, the poorest among her following understand these things, make their offerings both wise and wide, fill the bellies of those around them.  For even the fullest shelf will be empty in a moment if placed before the starving, and so she will accept no hunger among her faithful that could be filled, will believe no table full when a single plate more could be placed upon it.  There is always room to feed your fellows.

She was a god of harvest once, and plenty.  She still is.

But seriously, replace your spices every four years, or they won’t be anything but faintly scented powder, and that is a blasphemy in her sight.

She has so many more faithful than she desires, or than realize their loyalty to her.  Fully half of those who worship her with unflagging devotion would be horrified beyond all measure if forced to clearly confront the damage they have done, if forced to see with open eyes that they betrayed their own ideals.  She despises them for refusing to look at their children without preconceptions, for refusing to understand, for refusing to see as they are seen.

To some, a mother is an architect.  She builds a house, one brick and board at a time, from the substance of her own body, sacrificing blood and bone alike to give her child a place to all their own.  But all too often, those mothers forget that when you give something away, you surrender the right to dictate its every use.  Their children decorate the house as they will.  They build new additions or cut away old construction that doesn’t suit them.  And at some point, a failure to accept this will move the mother into a new religion, as the Iron Lady takes her toll.

To others, a mother is a collector of beautiful things in need of nurturing and protection, and has no part in the original construction, but only and essentially in the ornamentation.  And in those cases, she must still find a way to accept that her child will one day change out the wallpaper, or hang new curtains, or discover rooms neither of them were aware had been built in the original blueprints.  Those mothers, too, must master the art of stepping back and saying “I see you, I know you, I love you even if you are not exactly as I assumed.”

Too many assume the Iron Lady owns only the hearts of those who are actively abusive, intentionally cruel, the ones who hit or deprive or withhold their affections out of malice.  But rot has no morality, and even those who mean the best can damage without understanding the depth of what they’ve done.

She has too many faithful.  She can turn none of them aside.  She only hopes that kinder gods will see the scars of those she does not claim, and take mercy, and lead them to a safer haven, a harbor, and a home.

Bring the whole family, come for an hour or an afternoon.  She has something for everyone.  Apple-picking and pumpkin patches for the littlest ones; hayrides and bonfires for the teens; scare-show tableaus in the barns out back and a corn maze suitable for all ages.  She’s happy to see you all, happy to accept you all, yearning and burning for the chance to lead you into the rustling gold, into the shadow of the cornfield, into the deep, slow places where the spiders spin and the soil smells of loam and secrets, into the liminal space that exists only when she rises, when her time is come, when she returns.

Her time is very short, year on year.  Her memory is very long.

She remembers fields without fences, soil without sorrow, crops without conquest.  She remembers harvests of blood and bone and body, days when tears ran down to water the roots, and apples that tasted of grieving.  The harvests are sweeter now, if not so open-eyed as once they were.  And still Grace holds sway over them all, ready to welcome the children, the teens, the adults, the innocent and the condemned all into her haylofts and her orchards.

And if not all of them come out again, well.  It’s not like she hasn’t given warning.  Not like she hasn’t always been open about the link between crop and corpse, between corn and consequence.

Bring the whole family, come for an hour or an afternoon.  Come into the shadows of her towering fields, come into the spaces where no one hears the screaming, come into the comfort of her eternity.  She is brief.  She is eternal. She is patient.

She is vengeful.

Come for an hour or an afternoon.  Come forever.

No one ever expects her to be happy, but she is.  She is comedy and catharsis, she is merriment and murder, and she is a bucket of blood balanced over a half-open doorframe, ready to fall upon the first person to push it open.  Her laughter is a constant and a genuine delight, and she is truly glad to be here.

And yeah, she’s had her moments.  Sometimes the newest “hot young things” to join her priesthood think she needs to be taken more seriously, and they bring their own opinions to the sound stage, their own angles to the shoot, and you get a batch of gospels that are humorless and hard.  But the pendulum always swings back, whether or not there’s a pit beneath it.  The House of Usher always falls, and people remember it more clearly when it falls in hope and joy than when it falls in grim inevitability.

She wants to be remembered.

Some people say she’s one of the ascended, a former mortal who loved the genre she now represents so purely and so absolutely that she woke one day after dying and found herself divine.  This may not be true—this probably isn’t true—but Marquee encourages the theory, if only because it would be a sort of horror movie in and of itself.  Human woman dies, wakes up divine but also condemned to spend eternity in a waking horror movie?  Oh, the pathos!  Oh, the drama!  Oh, the sequel potential!

Other people say that she’s the natural end result of all those midnight movie festivals, the pinups of Elvira, and the dulcet tones of the horror hosts whispering through the night, and those people may be closer to the truth than anyone can understand.  It doesn’t really matter either way.  Marquee is a sweet, sunshine soul who guides her little slice of creation with an unwavering hand, and she’s going to keep doing that no matter what people want to say about it, or her.

But she does suggest you keep the lights on.

Because that sound wasn’t the wind.

It’s not a joke unless everyone’s laughing.

It’s not a prank unless no one gets hurt.

A prank that ends in pain is something altogether different.  We call it “cruelty” and “abuse” and “malicious.”  Someone who plays pranks that hurt is not a friend.  Someone who plays pranks that hurt is an enemy.

But that laughter in the distance after you open the door and dump a bucket of glitter on your own head?  That giddy giggling down the hall when you grab the bathroom doorknob and pull away a hand covered in whipped cream?  Those receding footsteps running along the sidewalk as banners of toilet paper wave from the tree branches to the evening air?

Little Miss Chief has been here.

Too many who consider themselves her acolytes serve crueler gods, and would know it if they stopped and examined their own motivations.  But by claiming to serve the Little Miss, they can veil themselves in righteousness, can convince themselves that they’re only having fun, even as they’re harming people.

She doesn’t care for those “acolytes,” is happy to foil the antics that do fall close enough to her domain for her to complicate, reveals their location to anyone who opens their eyes to see.

She is the giggle on the wind and the superglue on your shoes.  She is the smile from the darkened hall and the dollar bill on a piece of fishing line.  She is not here to hurt you, but she needs to hear you laugh, and she’ll keep trying until you do.

So let the peeled grapes become eyeballs, and the ketchup on the doorframe become blood.  Surrender to the silliness, and she’ll let you be, and remember, Little Miss Chief will never, ever intentionally do you harm.

There’s no single way to be a vampire.  If you’ve met one vampire, you’ve met one vampire, and even those who have walked the night for centuries won’t pretend to have met them all.

There are vampires in the classic mode, suave sanguivores who only come out after the sun goes down, who sing to the wolves and transform themselves into flocks of leather-winged bats.  There are vampires who reach into the minds of their targets—their prey, if you will—and twist them until all they see is what the vampire wants them to see, all they know is what the vampire wants them to know.  There are vampires who feed solely on the blood of virgins, of infants, of the dying, and vampires who only consume menstrual blood.  And all of them are vampires.

In death, they have found community more complete than any they had known in life.  In death, they have found acceptance.

And in Carmilla’s case, in death, they have found a lot of lesbians.  Lesbians, she must say, like hot dead chicks who smell like roses instead of rot, and have agency and wit and functional credit cards.  Maybe everyone likes that.  The occasional bisexual who has followed her back to her boudoir definitely seemed to enjoy her presence, and when they get down on their knees to worship her, as befits a god, she worships them in answer, as befits a lover.

Divinity was a bit of a shock, she must admit.  Everyone assumed that when the world finally manifested a small god of vampirism, old Vlad would take the shiny trophy and the rest of the undead would be left to do his bidding.  Carmilla hated the idea of doing Vlad’s bidding, the old creep.  She just wants wine and roses and beautiful women, and none of this world conquest or inappropriate luring of strangers.

But here she is, and this is her world, and her night, and all the children of that night are her children.  What beautiful music they make.

What beautiful music indeed.

Sun’s going down, and now’s where you have two choices: turn off all the lights and go to bed right now, or light the pumpkin and set it out in invitation.

Now, I know it’s been pouring for the last three days and not a child with a lick of self-preservation is going to be out on the streets tonight.  What’s more, even if those children exist—and those children always exist, let’s be realistic here—then they’d need to have parents who were never really all that interested in having children, who just want plausible deniability when they get called down to the county coroner’s office.  No, we’re not looking to attract actual children, or we’d have needed to buy a lot more candy.

You got them, right?  Two full-sized Snickers bars, a roll of dimes, and an old Archie comic from the grocery store?  Good.  I know you promised, but a man likes to be sure, especially on a night like this.

But as I said, we’re not looking to attract actual children.  Wouldn’t know what to do with them.

We’re going to lure in a god.

She walks the world one night a year, as solid and material as any human child, just a child who goes from city to city in the process of going house to house.  She starts in Samoa and stops in New Zealand, and in-between she sees the whole world wide, like some sort of reverse Santa Claus, taking away with her.  If you’re lucky, of course.  Her bag is an infinity of toilet paper and raw eggs, her smile a gap-toothed gateway into darker realms.  She is redemption and she is damnation and she is going to choose the second on our behalf if you don’t get that pumpkin lit before she rings the bell!

She doesn’t hold grudges, but she remembers, and her memory is the long, slow memory of childhood, which never forgets the house with the good candy, or the one with the mean dog.  Her blessing will see your windows unbroken and your tomatoes untrampled by generations yet to come, and her curse…

Well.  You were thinking about moving, right?

Someone’s coming up the walk.  Light the pumpkin!

Rain or no rain, it’s always time for trick or treat.

A corpse is a corpse, of course, of course, And no one can talk to a corpse, of course, That is of course unless the corpse Is the famous Mister Dead!

He walked among the world of the living before his ascension to the ranks of the divine.  This doesn’t make him unique by any standards—the heavens and the hells are filled with horses of a different color—but it does make him well-equipped to understand the trials and travails of the human world.

And one of the things he figured out shortly after he died (on the set of a penny Western) and watched the children of the extras prodding his corpse with sticks—he!  Who had been the hero of Hollywood, the best known of the equine actors of his generation—was that humans, by and large, are dreadful creatures, all the more beastly because they fight so hard to deny that they are beasts.

So he decided to remind them.

His gifts are inner peace, contentment with the world, and a gnawing, endless hunger that will eventually bring even the most pacifistic of humans to consume their neighbors.  He reminds them that they are animal, and then he reminds them that they are dead, even as he is dead, even as all flesh will one day be dead.  He sets them free.

And if he triggers a nice apocalypse in the progress, well, he’s down for that.

The other gods argue over whether he should be considered a god of vengeance or pestilence, or even war.  Mister Dead never gets involved.

He knows, above all, that he is a god of mercy.

She slithers in through any opening she can find, so much smaller than she looks from the outside, so much larger than anyone wants her to be.  Her coils can constrict empires, her jaws encompass unions, and her venom can kill creatures so much larger than she is that it seems ridiculous.  What is the purpose of any single creature carrying so much potential to destroy?

Some say that she could slaughter gods, if she ever got it into her head to think there would be a benefit to her in the act, and so when she slides through heaven on her scaled belly, no one meets her eyes, and no one moves to attract her wrath, and no one lingers in her presence.

She must be very lonely, this serpent god of the unspent dollar and the unfinished deal.  She must yearn for the company of her kin.

But you wouldn’t know it to watch her moving through the world.  She thrives on the false belief that twenty dollars today is better than ten today and ten tomorrow, sparking the impossible belief that twenty today will mean twenty tomorrow, and not nothing tomorrow when every cent is spent, every dollar is divested.  She puffs herself up to seem threatening, and her faithful point and claim this proves that profit without end is possible, endless growth, endless expansion.

She will swallow the world, given room enough and time.

She will take both those things if no one intercedes.

But look: there’s a sale tomorrow.  And what beautiful things there are to buy, what wonders, what delights…

What a profit to be made.

He got used to being treated as a cautionary tale a long time ago.

Every time a parent points to a sanitation worker, a janitor, a cafeteria lunch lady, a salesclerk with derision in their eyes and judgment in their hearts, he is there, standing between his faithful and the cruelty of the careless, trying to intercept and absorb the blow.  He can never take the hit completely, is too insubstantial in mortal eyes to protect them in full, but he does what he can to lessen the sting, to keep them from the inevitable realization of the fact that they are seen as less in the eyes of their fellows.

He is a god.  The best of humanity has always been forced into the lowest of positions, placed there by accident of birth, by gender, by the absence of connections, and he has been there from the beginning, since the first time someone laboring well below their capabilities wept to the heavens.  He’s had time to understand two great truths about the universe:

That without his faithful, the world would crumble into ruin.  There are no unskilled jobs, only jobs that people have chosen, for whatever reason, not to value.  Leave the garbage to pile up and the hospitals will be overwhelmed in weeks with all manner of disease—overwhelmed, and unable to provide aid, as their own waste will be swallowing them whole.  Leave the bottoms unwiped and watch the babies rot in their diapers, leave the burgers unflipped and watch the hungry mob lose all patience with the world.  No unimportant positions, no unimportant people.

And that humans, being hierarchal creatures, will reinvent the hierarchy of worthy and unworthy over and over again, despite the fact that it serves them poorly.  They will always push someone to the bottom to place themselves at the top.  And his faithful, being only mortal, will never have the time he’s had to find acceptance of their lot.  This will happen, over and over again, forever.

But he can shield them.  He can deflect.  And he can love them.

That much, he is more than overqualified to do.

Every time you send a message that paints you as a wild duck enthusiast, she is there.  (Unless, of course, you’re a birder, or an ornithologist, and then every time you send a coworker or casual associate a message that paints you as a wild sexual enthusiast, he is there.)

Every time you misspell your own name, the name of a lover, the name of a dear friend, they are with you.  Ze is in every word, every syllable, every utterance, studying and dissecting, looking for the word you were most likely to have meant and discarding it.

Hey, Dom, are you coming to thinner tonight?  We’re having naked potatoes and barbequed rakes.

The only reason we haven’t collectively declared the need for an exorcism is that ze’s not a malicious god.  If anything, Autarch is a trickster god, dedicated to keeping us from taking ourselves too seriously through whatever means necessary, twisting our own words into parodies of themselves, making palindromes of poetry and poetry of palindromes.  How can we not laugh, when they are with us?  How can we not accept the glorious escape from accountability that ze provides?

How can we trust our own words in any context, when hey fight lave tin reformed while we weren’t paying attention?

Some gods are more trouble than they’re worth.

He is a god of frontiers.

He is born again in every child who turns their eyes toward the stars, toward the sea, toward the horizon, and he grows with them.  He is young and old at the same time, all ages and all things, and always looking outward.

Windows are his.  Portholes.  External cameras.  He is not a god of surveillance, but he is a god of seeing, of the endless need to behold the wonders of the cosmos, of the world around us.  He only wants to look.  He has no desire to settle, or to damage, or to claim.

When first a maritime explorer donned a diving helmet, Yuri was there to egg them on, cajoling and encouraging, begging them to let him loose on new sights and new experience.  And when humanity set their skills toward space, Yuri was on the first satellite out, waiting for the moment when his faithful would join him, when they would see.

He was there with Laika when the heat grew too great, when her breathing grew too labored, and he did what good gods have always done, and held her close for so long as he was needed.  He looks now in her honor, as he looks in the honor of all those who have reached, whether of their own volition or at another’s.  She was not his by choice, but she was his at the end, and he is a god of his word.

He only hopes that you can have the chance to see.

He hopes you will keep your eyes open, and take him with you when you go.

Okay, so Carl, you were—you were—excuse me.  Just need to…

What?  No!  No, you’re not boring me!  Just sucking all the air out of the room so I need to—need to—damn it!

All right.  So you were saying that you got enough sleep, you feel completely rested, you have no earthly reason to have yawned in your husband’s face, but you did and now he’s mad at you?  And you can’t figure out why you did it, except that the cat yawned and then you couldn’t hold it back?  Okay.  I think—I think—

I think you should stop saying the word “yawn,” Carl, before I come over there and shut your stupid mouth!

Everyone, take shallow breaths and try not to make eye contact.  Sharon Cher Alike is here.

What do you mean “who’s that”?  Did you not read your Manual of Supernatural Office Threats?  It was in your orientation packet!  You signed a form swearing you’d finished the whole thing!  I—oh, I am surrounded by amateurs.  Always amateurs.

Sharon Cher Alike is the small god—yes, small god, lowercase g, stop interrupting me, Carl—of contagious yawning.  Once she comes into the room, any time someone else yawns, you’re going to have to fight the urge to do the same.  And sometimes “yawn” is just another way of saying “opens their mouth too widely in the middle of ranting about their husband getting mad because they yawned in his face the night before.”  Oh, don’t glare at me, Carl, it’s obvious that Sharon followed you here!  You brought a god into the office!  Did we ask you to bring a god into the office?  No we did not!

Today’s meetings are going to be a misery, and it’s all your fault, so maybe unruffle your feathers before I unruffle them for you.

Everyone, try to keep your mouths shut.  No yawning.  If she doesn’t have anything to do for long enough, she may just leave.  If that doesn’t work, one of us will have to donate our evening to a French art film marathon, and no one has the time for that.

No, I don’t know why we have a god for this.  Why do we have a god for anything?

All right, now, back to work.  Carl, if you need to whine about your home life, make it an email.

Meeting dismissed.

Doesn’t feel like real money when it’s a swipe card or a button on a screen, does it?  Does it?  Doesn’t feel like gambling when it’s a loot box of random cosmetics and power boosts that can make your character better, does it?  Does it?  Doesn’t feel like gambling when it’s a cattle prod shot straight into the happy chemical dopamine factory inside your skull, when it’s making your synapsis light up with happy funtime feelings, when it’s not real, not real, not real until the bill comes due.  Plenty real then, every time, and that’s the biggest gamble of them all: can you keep playing until the piper comes for payment?  Can you keep the party going?

Pleasure Island is everywhere thanks to them.  They have brought the lights and dazzle and glory of the midway to every pocket, to every home and every hand, and they are with you for every microtransaction, for every midnight call of “it’s only a dollar for another spin, what’s a dollar, I can afford a dollar?” that doesn’t account for the hundred dollars already poured into the gaping electronic maw.

They are a god without care and without compassion, and that don’t mind you breaking yourself against their stygian shore.  They were born of human innovation, and one day they will die when there are no more humans left to innovate, to toss virtual coins into their collection plates and exalt in their potential gains.  They know nothing of tomorrow, nothing of yesterday; they dream only of the now, of the glory and the glitter, the lights, the buzzing chimes.

They are always victorious.  After all, the house, as they say, always, always wins.

She didn’t always look like this.  Blame the British for occupying Malaysia in the late 18th century, when they encountered the ginger flower for the first time and came home calling all their redheads gingers.  As if the redheads of the British Empire didn’t have enough to worry about, what with the witch hunts and assorted forms of libel.  But then, the people of Malaysia also had better things to worry about at the time, what with being occupied by the British, who they hadn’t exactly invited to the neighborhood, and maybe we need to move on from the origins of terms, because this is a conversation that could go on all day…

Her image was beginning to shift again when the 20th century rolled around and a television show mirroring the seven deadly sins stranded on a desert island with the Devil Himself began to air, presenting a new redheaded girl to the world.  Her name, of course, was Ginger, and Ginger found herself locked into another century of looking like a pasty white girl, sparking discussions of cultural appropriation whenever she comes to one of the culinary god potlucks and recipe exchanges.  But she doesn’t complain.

She’s here to add a little zing to your life, a little flavor to your savor, and a little joy to your tastebuds.  She only wants you to enjoy what you’re eating.  And if that’s not enough, she has medicinal benefits, too; she’ll help your cold, ease your congestion, and hasten your recovery.  And she’ll do it all with a smile on her face and a red flower in her hair, glorious to the last, forever happy to be here.

The great small god Ginger.  Long may she blossom and grow.

He’s aiming for the big time. He always has been. And he’ll tell you, if you ask, that he’s an All-American God, as patriotic as sunshine and apple pie and the fourth of July—all things, that if you stop and think about them, aren’t patriotic at all. They’re just things. Eating apple pie doesn’t make you a good person. Everyone gets sunshine, and the fourth of July happens all over the world, whether there are people there or not. Patriotism is an illusion, and illusions are his true stock in trade.

Murdoch claims to be a god of truth. He is, and has always been, a god of lies. He tells you what he wants you to hear, what he wants you to think, what he wants you to believe, and he tells you that anyone who tells you different is lying. He has managed to find several loopholes in human thought, weaknesses we are all born to bear, and he weaponizes them against his audience. Conservatism bias, for example: the first thing a person hears on a given subject is the thing most likely to be believed, no matter how untrue it is. All Murdoch has to do is make sure he’s the first voice on any subject, and he’ll be the most trusted source of information.

And he wants that. Oh, how he wants that. He wants you to believe his lies, because believing his lies is believing in him, and he’s aiming for the big time. He wants to be the only god anyone believes about anything, and that would be fine, if he wasn’t a compulsive liar.

He wants you to be frightened. He wants you to know that you have no hope unless it’s endorsed by his panel of experts, unless he’s the one selling it to you. He wants you to be so afraid of the world that you can’t hear anything he doesn’t tell you, and once he has made himself your one true god, he wants you to spread his gospel. This is how he gets to rule the world.

And oh, he’s going to.

Unless we stop him.

Goin’ climbin’?  Just be sure you’re ready to be careful out there.  Eld’s been active lately, and not everyone we see heading up this trail has been seen again heading down this trail, if you get my meaning.  He’s a tricky one, that—

Shit, you wanna tell me that you’re climbers who don’t know Eld Hamtunscir? He’s your most probable cause of death past this point, unless you forget about social distancing when there’s a rattler involved.  See, Eld makes people, especially novice climbers like yourselves—don’t get offended, there’s not a scrap on you that’s seen a mountain before, and you look way too excited about what’s honestly a pretty low-grade climb.  You’re babies.  And Eld loves babies.  Loves the funny splat sound they make when they hit the bottom of the canyon.  Loves it more than I can say.

Eld’s a god.  Maybe he’s a demon.  Maybe he’s just an asshole.  I don’t know. But the most treacherous climbs belong to him, and that would be fine, if he wasn’t also the god of making you look at the flakingest, nastiest sandstone rock face and see it as clean strong granite, ready to hold your full weight.  He’ll guide you out over the emptiness, and then he’ll let the rock go back to what it wants to be, and you’ll get a quick course on gravity.

If I’m scaring you, that’s good.  You should treat the mountain with some respect.  That’s the best way to avoid Eld’s attention.  That, and going out with someone who already knows the terrain.  Mebbe come back when you’ve got a guide.

Me?  Hell, no.  I don’t climb.  I’m more about the cautionary tale and the convenient warning you’ll ignore.

Then no one has to feel bad when you get dropped.

Have a nice day now. Mind your grip.