[Image description: A portrait in blood red. The figure of a woman rises over a silhouetted cityscape – a white dress, a smoking gun and bright red lipstick. Her pupils bright red under a wide-brimmed hat. Red flames rise from the black city and her brief reflection lights the docks and barges in the river below. Text reads “252 • EVA • small god of FEMMES FATALE.”]
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She walked into my theology like a queen walks into a throne room, or like a knife slides into a wound; making her own space even as she was stepping into it, absolutely certain that the world would yield before her, and she swung that certainty like a sword, guaranteeing her own ascension. She leaned up against my desk, all red lips and dangerous curves and legs that went all the way up to the promised land, and she whispered, “You’ll be fair, won’t you?”
I think I promised that I’d do my best, and I think she laughed that husky, whiskey river laugh of hers, and said, “That’ll do, doll, that’ll do.”
And then she was gone, and I was here, anchorite in her scriptorium, trying to write out the lives and lessons of all the small gods without getting myself condemned by any one of them, and Eva’s kiss was burning on my brow, and I had a tale to tell.
Sometimes a girl gets tired of nocturnal visits from unspeakable powers.
She’s not just a god of women, although most of her followers are female: she’s the god of a space inside the story, a specific role to be fulfilled. Her people are mysterious, beautiful, seductive, alluring; they lay traps, planting poisoned seeds throughout the soil of their narratives. They enchant and enthrall with a look, a kiss, the scent of their perfume. And all too often, their redemption comes in the form of dying to save the hero, the poor sap who followed them into danger to begin with.
Eva comes for the femmes fatale who choose that role, who select their lipsticks with their heads high and their hearts proud, and she comes for the ones who don’t, the ones who blossom beautifully but without understanding it, the ones who would rather be overlooked and left alone. She understands that beauty can be just as painful to carry as ugliness, when heaped in too much towering profusion, and she weeps for them, the ones who’ll never know a moment’s peace, the ones who will always be called upon to play the role of instigator in someone else’s story.
Eva loves the ones who call on her, and she smiles with her metaphors painted plainly on her face, and she tries to keep them safe.
She almost never succeeds, but oh, how she tries.
Lee Moyer 