Small Gods

“Are you doing Secret Santa this year?”

“Yeah, but I got Chloe, and you know she never likes what anyone gets her, and she always comes in under the dollar amount by as much as she can get away with.  That wouldn’t be so bad, except she brags about it.  You were supposed to be getting me a Christmas present!  Why is it appropriate to tell me that you saved seventeen dollars out of a twenty dollar budget?  It’s like, come on, Chloe, read the room.”

“At least you don’t have to put too much effort into whatever you get for her.”

“True.  It’s just going to wind up at next week’s White Elephant party no matter what.  Ooo, maybe I should get some of that bodywash I like!”

“Isn’t she allergic to that?”

“Show me where I care.”

Santa—true Santa, Santa prime, Santa in the sky with reindeer—is not a small god.  Santa will insist that he isn’t a god at all, but he carries the hopes and prayers of children, monuments are built in his honor, and priests garb themselves in replicas of his raiment to grant absolution.  He is a god, like it or not, and he is not a small one.  He stands outside the purview of our chronicles.

Krampus, while he once had a shot at the big sleigh, lost that bid thanks to a less than marketable image and a fondness for stuffing naughty children into his sack, and has since settled in to a slightly narrower sphere of holiday cheer.  And while he still does all the traditional Krampus things—lots of respect for tradition at the North Pole—his main sphere of influence is a little more adult in nature.

When you think “I could pocket half the budget” or “I don’t like Becky from HR enough to get her anything good,” Krampus is there.  Putting you on the naughty list, remembering your name.  When you think “peanuts are delicious, who cares if she’s allergic, maybe she’ll give them to me,” Krampus judges you even if no one else can.

Judges, but doesn’t stop.  Because there are many ways to punish the naughty, and they don’t all end with childhood.  He can’t truly live as he desires unless you sometimes misbehave.

Disappoint Krampus.  Be a good Secret Santa this year.

They weave his earthly incarnations out of sticks and straw, erecting them as monuments to the harvest, as bulwarks against the closing cold.  They build him because they can, because they are compelled to do so, because they remember, on some deep and binding level, that it’s the sticks and straw and tinder or it’s beans in the bread and blood on the snow.

Sometimes it is both.  We still require our temporary kings if we want the sun to remember how to rise.  Some rituals are old even before they begin; some patterns must repeat, over and over, until time itself unwinds into dust and shadow.

So they weave him, year on year, and they stand him in the city square, and they set guards against the inevitable.  Look at him, they argue, look at his greatness, look at his glory.  Look at the way he stands, golden against the winter sky.  Surely we owe him our protection.  Surely he should be preserved.  Surely that will keep us from the cold.

They forget to consult with the divine.  They forget to ask the god they tend with such devotion what he wants.

The god wants to burn.

Spring is not only the turning of the year; it is the restoration of hope, the dawning of a new chance to be better than we have been, and hope is bought with sacrifice.  With blood on the snow, or fire in the straw.  He wants better for us, he wants us to burn brightly, and so he yearns for the flame.  When released from his temporary embodiments, he carries the darkness and debris of the dying year out of the world with him, and leaves us renewed, restored, ready to be more than we have been.

Weave him well, thank him for his service, and allow him to burn.

That is how we worship.  That is how we serve.

She began with a mondegreen.  This is not a unique origin among the small gods, although she is perhaps uniquely proud of it, as had the mishearing occurred under other circumstances, it might have turned out far less well for everyone involved.

“The boy thought that ‘is parents were telling ‘im as ‘is good old auntie would be coming on Christmas eve to leave presents for the good children,” she chortles, whenever given the opportunity and opening to do so.  (Her accent, too, is an artifact of the circumstances of her creation: the babysitter who first gave her voice had been deeply enamored of British television at the time, and had done her “very best” London accent for the friendliest bear she could imagine.  It wasn’t very good, but the god is stuck with it, at least for now.)

“Didn’t want the boy to be afraid, did she?  And so she spun—”

Spun the best story of her life, worth well more than the fifteen dollars an hour she was getting paid.  (Fifteen dollars and not even snacks, since his parents kept a close watch on the cupboards and had once docked her the price of a pack of Oreos.  Full price, even, when she knew full well they shopped the sales!)  Spun the tale of a warm and loving anthropomorphic polar bear whose only wish was that all the children of the world be safe and warm and fed and happy.  Who brought gifts for all those children, although she went first to the good ones, to reward them for all the opportunities for mischief and merriment they had allowed to pass them by.  That babysitter, long may she be remembered, didn’t believe in punishing children for having childhoods.

It is said by some gods that everyone has one true story in them, and somehow, on that hungry December night, the babysitter found hers.  A story so real, so true, that it became enough to call a god into being, small, yes, and specialized, but true, all the same.

So children, latch your windows loosely, and perhaps on the coldest morning of winter, you’ll wake to find claw marks on the windowsill and a polar fleece jacket folded at the foot of the bed.  Or perhaps you’ll have asked a bear into your room, and you’ll be eaten in the night.

People assume she’s a newcomer, a fad, a frivolous flash in the pan.  But she was there when the first pumpkin pies were being baked; she was there when the first colonist cookbook was published, in 1769.  She was there when the British raided the rest of the world for flavors they could steal, and while her appearance may be sweet and adorable, her hooves are soaked in the blood of empire, for without conquest, she could never have been born.

But people, unwilling to consider the structure beneath the surface, look at her and see only big eyes, a flowing mane, a coat as soft as silk and as dark as midnight, and they mock her adherents, call them “basic” as if anything could be considered truly basic when it had been built through so many crimes.

Every piece of her was stolen.  Every pinch and particle was the subject of a terrible war.  The price of cinnamon is slaughter.  The fee for nutmeg is subjugation.  And now we serve her sacraments with whipped cream and sugar sprinkles, as if both those things had not also been stolen at some point, as if a foamy cloud could somehow clean the blood from those long lashes.

In these modern days, her most common manifestation is blended with sweet cream and coffee—a drink that has many gods of its own, that has sparked even more wars than her cinnamon pungency.  But for most of her time, she has been carried in the pie.

Pumpkin pie.  The ultimate jewel in the crown of colonialism.  Cooking techniques from Europe, spices stolen from India, Asia, and the Middle East, and a vegetable crown taken from the Americas, sliced and mashed and mixed until its wildness is lost, subsumed into custardy blandness, become one with the melting pot.

She’s not a newcomer.  And she’s not nice, either, and so few of those who worship her understand, anymore, that she’s not a god of whimsy or basic delights.

[image description: A pointy – and grinning – green dragon holds lance in his giant claw. On the lance, the largest marshmallow you’ve ever seen. Lightning crackles in the background and a bright orange fire lights the scene. Text reads, “3, SMAURS, the Small God of Perfectly Applied Flame”]

They call on him so much more than they ever realize.

Want a car to start? Want an engine to fire, an egg to cook, a cigarette to light? Want to go through your life without being wreathed in a halo of brief, brilliant fire, burning away to nothing in the moments between the cinder and the scream? You call upon Smaurs, for without his grace, the fire goes where it will, does what it will, untamable. He is not a god of fire per se, leaves that act of terrible creation to greater forces than his own, but the control of fire? The application of fire? That’s entirely on his beautifully scaled shoulders.

They call on him so much more than they ever realize, and he rewards them with days unblistered, with hours unimmolated, with the knowledge of what it is to exist without burning. He loves them, in his distant way, for when they were children…

When they were children, they were his. No one calls upon a god of perfectly applied flame more often or more clearly than a child just embracing the catch and the candle, just learning how to angle a magnifying glass or light a match. He has sat at millions of campfires, marshmallow sticky on his claws, glorying in the taste of chocolate and graham and the sweet, bright wonder of young things on the verge of catching fire in their hands for the very first time.

They will grow to serve other gods, greater means of destruction, other ways of burning. But when they are children, they are his, and when they are his, he may do as any god does, and attend to his worshippers as they so ardently request.

In his claws, the marshmallows never burn, and neither do the hands that hold them.

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Sometimes education isn’t enough.  Sometimes you can study and study and try and try, and never quite cross the last bridge between where you are and your heart’s desire.

Sometimes you need to tell the perfect little lie to get there.

Once upon a time there was a small god of goldfinches named Yucan who wanted nothing more in the world than to be a god of toucans, to manifest himself as a big, beautiful, tropical bird that people would stop to ooo and ahh over when they saw it in the trees, something impressive.  It was a good thing to be a god of songbirds.  There weren’t as many of them as there had been before cats became quite so popular as house pets, and the ones remaining needed all the divine intervention they could get their wings on.  He appreciated their attention and their worship, but he wanted, so very badly, to be more than his nature was allowing him to be.

So he hatched, over the course of several slow decades, a plan, and one night, with no warning whatsoever, his faithful woke and found him gone.  He had abandoned his divine duties, flown the coop, left the nest, and no one could find a single feather left behind!  All the little birdies were distraught…but not for very long, as little birdies have short memories, and there were other gods of songbirds around to serve.  If it wasn’t quite the same, well, nothing ever is, not even following the same god from one day to another.  They adjusted.  They adapted.

And far away, a very small god with a very big dream put his plans into action. He donned a false face, he told everyone who met him that he was the god of endangered tropical birds, and if no one had ever seen him before, well, some of those birds were very endangered.  Deforestation and poaching, don’cha know?  So many dangers to evade.  So many fledglings to protect.  So he lied, and lied, and pretended, and did his best to live up to his own lies.  He protected those who came to him, he spread his wings over the nests of species unknown to science, and he tried, and he lied, and he tried.

Until one day, the mask would not come off when he went to go to nest.  One day, he noticed that his wingspan was greater, and he no longer heard the prayers of songbirds, but of the birds he had claimed…and of more than them. Of frightened high school drama students and would-be figure skaters, of novice computer programmers and new-made lawyers.

They had their own lies to tell.

And Yucan Tu would be with them every step along the way, singing goldfinch songs in their ears and spreading his wings to defend them from the risks of their own actions.

The cat is in the way. 

This is a basic fact of the universe, simple and immutable.  The sun is shining, the wind is blowing, the cat is in the way.  The world is spinning, the atomic structure of the universe is decaying, the cat is the way.  The faithful pray, the apostate condemn, and the cat is in the way.

How is the cat always, inevitably, unavoidably, in the way?  When did we get a cat, anyway?  How did that cat get in here?  Hey, is anyone willing to take responsibility for this cat?  Can someone tell me whose cat this is?

No.

No, no one can tell you whose cat this is.  No, no one is going to take responsibility for that cat.  No, no one let the cat in, and the cat is in the way because it is the nature of cats to be in the way.  If the cat were not in the way, something much more terrible than the cat might rise in its absence.  The cat occupies space to ensure that the space is occupied, because the space will be occupied, whether it is by the cat or by something far more terrible.  The cat is doing you a favor.  Do not count the cat’s eyes.  The cat’s eyes are none of your concern.  The cat can see you.  Isn’t that enough?

Isn’t it enough that the cat is being generous enough to protect you from the terrible thing that would be looking at you with some uncounted number of eyes if the cat were not there?  Isn’t it enough that the cat is soft, and the cat is purring, and the cat is in the way?

Isn’t it enough?

Let it be enough.

The cat loves you.  The cat will love you even into the void.  The cat will forgive you for your frailties, and the cat is in the way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.