no gods, no masters

“Oh, bullshit. Bullshit!” Phoebe’s hand shook from how tightly she was gripping her phone, and she was talking to herself, but she didn’t care. “Bullshit, can you believe-- can you even believe this?”

The news reports were out for Oya’s concert. Who wore what, who arrived and left with whom, those were the usual. “Fantheon” bloggers gushing about their favorite parts of the performances. And then the official word from CNN, the Times, the Times Union, and the Post: “Rave at the Ramble: Designer Drugs ‘Rain’ on Oya’s Congregation in Central Park.”

Her voice was shaking, too, but Phoebe was in no mood to reel in her outrage. “As if-- as if-- I went to art school!” she snapped. “I know from fucking mescaline and LSD. And they expect people to believe there’s a drug that makes everyone see the same thing? Hear the same things? Bull-fucking-shit.”

In everything that was happening around them, never mind the colliding of thunder and anticipation and adrenaline in their chest, their eyes were locked on Phoebe.  Over the din of it all, a voice of concern could still be heard in the back of their mind.  They opened their mouth, about to ask if the woman was okay for a second time - or maybe what she was thinking about, it was difficult to remember when just as Riley made to speak, lightning cracked across the sky like a whip.  It illuminated the park in a brilliant flash, their words forgotten.  With it came a new emotion.

Nervousness.  

Suddenly, it was all a little overwhelming.  They were reminded of the first time they listened to Dionysus, the way the hive mind had only made them feel panicked.  Something in it spoke of first coming across Lucifer, too, and how the pull towards him had only inspired wariness.  Maybe they were just too young for it all, or maybe they’d spent too much of their life made to worship one god to simply accept the control of another.  When Riley paused to think about it, the power they all possessed was nothing short of terrifying, and Oya was proving herself no different. 

All of that hesitation, though, was washed away - not with the rain, but with the woman’s words.  ‘She’s already here’.  A wave of comfort ran over them at the thought. 

      “Good,” the word was pulled from their lips without thinking.  Riley paused, trying to pretend that in itself didn’t startle them.  “It’s her concert, after all.” 

“I don’t like it,” Phoebe blurted. Or tried to. She was tongue-tied. She wanted to sit down. All that came out was, “I don’t.”

There was lightning and thunder and rain, and the stars shone too-too much, and then... and then, almost in unison, it was as if the whole gathered crowd pivoted to face Oya’s “stage” on the wet grass. She was her own spotlight, and she flickered like a zoetrope and moved too fast, in the wrong directions, impossibly, without falling-- all at once, and all before the dancing even really began.

The endorphins kicked in. Phoebe’s teeth were still chattering. But then in the shifting lights of whatever was happening to Oya, or what was being shown of Oya, or whatever Oya was, it was as if she turned and looked into the eyes of everyone in the park at once. Or maybe it was just Phoebe-- she couldn’t tell, except she felt rooted to the spot, and then the beat felt like it was daring her pulse to keep time.

This isn’t real. I don’t like this. This isn’t real.

Who are you trying to convince?

Phoebe looked at the teenager who was staring back at her, and cackled, roughly, scraping her guts with it like the laughter could hollow her out. Oya winiwini, Oyansa Oya winiwini. The wind and the music wrapped around them and pulled the sound away almost faster than Phoebe could hear herself. “...Well, I’ve never been to a concert like this.”

He let out a laugh, at her almost immediate reaction to the word, the exhaustion with which she seemed to want to avoid any talk of gods, low and good-humored. Almost a chuckle. It wasn’t often that he came across someone at random who didn’t want to talk about the Pantheon as much as he didn’t, who didn’t latch on for any sign of news, any tweet that so much as mentioned one of the twelve.  A kindred spirit, in that regard, maybe– a recruit? if she proved to be the kind who could be useful–

     “No, no,” he replied, still laughing, as they pushed their way out the door and headed down the block. “Just the normal one my mom always said gave His only son to save us and I stopped believing in around the same time I bought my first video game console. Just taking the regular old God’s name in vain, none of this reincarnated celebrity nonsense, not from me.” 

He stuck his hands in his pockets, as he walked, falling into easy step beside her as they headed for the corner of the block.

     “But I can avoid that one, too, if you’re opposed.” 

“...Good to know.” Phoebe smiled, relieved, if a bit surprised. “And thank fuck. No particular opposition to, ah, that one-- but he’s not exactly my taste, either. Funeral parlors tend to do that to a kid.”

It was an odd thing to admit, so abruptly, but it was true. Her immediate family had never been religious, Phoebe’s own radicalization had sunk its teeth into her early, and... death was nonsensical. Blood wasn’t holy. It was just blood. Nothing really drove that home like seeing it firsthand.

“It’s just-- I’m nobody’s puppet. And even if I was, I’ll be damned if I’d sit here believing Gepetto’s anywhere near the Top 40 Charts, y’know? I bow to no man, woman, or vinyl, and definitely not at the insistence of, like, Ryan Seacrest.”

They were getting close to the diner, and Phoebe moved to grab the handles of its door before turning to her companion again. “After you-- I don’t know your name.” She laughed sharply, once, and shook her head before swinging the door open and (ironically) bowing elaborately. “Phoebe Hunter, at your service.”

They were more than a little taken aback by the swearing.  Maybe it was an individual thing, but Riley was more inclined to just embrace what they were experiencing, almost mesmerised by it.  The woman in front of them, though, was almost panicked.  Confused, definitely, and seeming to not want to just give in to it all. 

     “This is incredible.”  It was said more to themselves, it difficult not to be distracted from their conversation.  That, and something told them the woman might not agree.  They still had their head tilted upwards, eyes squinting against the rain as if to try and understand its source.  It was a futile effort, but they weren’t alone in it.  It was like the freak weather were spreading, more and more people caught under it.

Riley dragged their gaze away, glancing around the suddenly rain soaked Central Park.  There was a completely different atmosphere to it now.

     “Maybe it means she’s here, nearby - or about to do something.” 

“Something about the rain...” She couldn’t stop shaking, and Phoebe had to struggle to keep her words together. They couldn’t keep up with her brain, even worse than it had been since she was a child. It feels like stepping outside your own skin-- only not--

Dance had been trancelike, when Phoebe got it right; just like running, past a certain point. Not quite an emptiness, but an elimination of conscious thought... a purity of self that Phoebe only got into when submerged in her work or to that degree of physical action. The only thing that was real was your pulse, right now, and then you stopped being anything but that pulse, and ceased to register it as independent from yourself, alive, this moment.

(There were spiritualities like that, Phoebe knew, but they weren’t hers. Shamanic traditions to go beyond exhaustion and see and hear things nobody else could, and talk back to them in turn. But there weren’t any gods for her, and there never had been, and that was a comfort in itself, in a way. The world is chaos. All the kings are dead and all the dodo birds are gone. The world keeps spinning.)

This, though... instead of collapsing inward, it was losing yourself like shedding snakeskin, exploding out, and the rain had become every rhythm and pattern and pulse stitching the world together; and standing in the park like this was like being an atom and watching all the bits and bobs of what held the world together spinning around you; and also like being blown up big enough to see where all the seams of the universe came together in between the drumbeats’ syncopation.

“She’s already here.” Phoebe didn’t know why she’d said it, or why she knew it, or why it was true. But it was, and it scared her more than she’d thought it would.

Julia Jones ('Wind River') poses for a portrait in the WireImage Portrait Studio during the 2017 Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2017 in Park City, Utah.

They let her pull away.  The group they’d been stood with forgotten, they couldn’t help but watch her.  With every raindrop that hit them, Riley feeling the way it suddenly but steadily went from a drizzle to a downpour, they understood what the other woman was so thrown by.

It was as much a normal shower as it was when God flooded the Earth.

That was all they could equate it too - something religious, something divine and otherworldly.  The thunder reverberated in their chest, shaking their ribs and jolting their heart.  They’d been around gods, be it brief chance encounters like Baal or sustained conversations with the likes of Lucifer.  They knew the feelings that could be prompted from just being near them, but this was different.  This was the first time they’d seen one do something.

Riley doubted it’d count as a miracle, but feeling their clothes become soaked, they decided it was something.  They were experiencing something people would be talking about for a while.  Turning their head to the clouds, it left them breathless.

      “Do you think this is Oya?”

Phoebe’s teeth were chattering, despite the lingering summer heat, and the fact that the rain was, all things considered, not that cold. The teeth were probably due to adrenalin, but she shivered thinking about the implications of the water’s temperature-- where could it have come from? It may have been August, but New York wasn’t the tropics.

She shook her head again. The teenager in front of her was drenched now, and Phoebe was sure they hadn’t been, she’d have noticed, wouldn’t she? “Oh, my--” Pheobe pressed her lips together and swallowed the ‘god‘ back down out of sheer stubborness, with some struggle. “...Fuck! Fuck!”

This wasn’t supposed to be how it was. People had talked about what it was like being around gods before, sure-- she’d thought it was just hype, or magnetic personalities, or gut intuition, or starstruck fans. Not whatever this was. Not some kind of crisis of see-it-to-believe-it faith.

She did manage a desperate sounding cough that could’ve been a laugh, under better conditions. “Either that, or I’m losing my fucking mind.”

When the sound started, they’d been chattering away to a small group.  They were people Riley had just met - fellow followers of Baal, they’d been stood near each other when he’d happened to pass them in the crowd.  A few pictures with the god later, they were bonding over the sheer excitement of it all.  That’s when Riley heard it.

They glanced up at the sky.  The rumble would’ve made them think of thunder, if they hadn’t felt it like that.  The hairs on the back of their neck stood up, a feeling of anticipation swelling inside of them.  Someone grabbed their arm before they’d even felt the first raindrop. 

       “Are you alright?”  It felt like a stupid question, but it was the first thing they thought upon looking at the woman.  They didn’t pull away, looking at her expression in concern.  “Yeah, it’s - it’s probably just the rain,” they said, even if they didn’t believe it themselves.

Phoebe shook her head, mainly only resisting the urge to nervously laugh because of feeling like the air had been jostled from her lungs. “I don’t-- I don’t know. That’s what it sounds like, but there’s no...”

And then another soundless crack of thunder rolling over the crowd like a wave, like drums, like wind-- and it wasn’t that the rain started so much as it was an in-progress, full-blown downpour was suddenly visible. And tangible. Phoebe looked around. There were people standing around her in the park completely dry; and then a few, like she had, began looking around, and then started to show raindrop stains on their hair and clothes.

She let go of the teenager’s arm, and took a quick step back; rain fell on her outstretched hand as she moved, and Phoebe hurried to rub her palms on her already-wet shirt, as if that would help. Confused, she tilted her face upwards... Phoebe blinked hard, as if that would help, too. She still felt the rain, still had sunspots dancing under her eyelids from too many Christmas-tree-light stars, felt the shift from getting the wind knocked out of her to feeling winded, almost like the edge of runners’ exhaustion before the endorphins kicked in. “This can’t... be real.”

Twelve dollars in singles and feeling on top of the world; god, he’d been there before, fresh off of pay day at UNM and feeling, however briefly, like a king, the rush of a paycheck making him unusually – and unwisely – generous. He’d almost forgotten that feeling, the difference money in your pocket actually made when you didn’t always have enough of it. It felt rude to burst her bubble by offering to pay, though he sure as hell wasn’t going to let her when the time came for the check.

     “I saw a Greek diner, on the corner,” he offered, gesturing towards the door. “Coffee smelled good, place looked open, which… this time of morning, is kind of a godsend.” 

He could swing by after, to pick up his crate of chiles, before getting a lyft back to his apartment. And if she did end up being a very secretive, very subtle reporter conning him into a half-baked interview, he would let her pay the bill. 

“...You had me at ‘looked open’.” Phoebe nodded, moving the direction the man inclined, carefully depositing her chips back on the shelf, and dropping the ice cream bar back into the slide-top freezer by the door. But her grin caught as they exited-- almost snagged on the word godsend. Which god?

She shook her head, chuckling as she fell back into step with her-- guest, host, patron-proxy, whatever. “No offense, but the more we avoid the ‘g-word’ right now, the better. I promise I’m not one of those asshole grammar nazi atheists, I just. Fuckin’ can’t. Not today, anyway. No gods before coffee.”

Normally, she’d crack a joke, or turn it into a question, or soften the statement with politeness into a request, but she couldn’t. A single conversation without any deities in it might make shit feel normal again.

Phoebe had arrived late, out of caution, after Freya’s wake, and Lucifer’s concert. There had been no troubling news yet, and she could’ve just as easily stayed home; still, Phoebe was curious about... the new one. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming. Maybe it was vanity, though Phoebe couldn’t say if it was around maintaining an image, or fear of looking foolish, testing waters she knew better than to wander into. 

But Oya was a dancer, or so the rumors went. Something about that settled uncomfortably in Phoebe’s gut, pressing down against her diaphragm like guilt, while her own regalia collected dust. She’d been walking in silence, absently weaving her way through the crowd, alternately scrutinizing the whole scene and lost in absent thought, when she suddenly thought of her grandma Rolena. Rolena, who’d named her Hiloha'achinto--

There was a strange sound-- not like thunder, but the sound of rain rattling a tin roof, and a feeling like rumbling, something surrounding them in the park, then rolling its way up inside her, pushing up painfully against the back of her sternum-- Phoebe closed her eyes and took a harsh, deep breath, reaching out to grab whoever was closest to her for balance.

“Do you hear that?”

Julia Jones ('Wind River') poses for a portrait at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival Getty Images Portrait Studio on January 21, 2017 in Park City, Utah.