Shy Amalan Ubis – The Small God of Wishful Obituaries

[image description: A jackal-headed being sits in a room of large sandstone pillars writing runes at their desk with a quill pen. Is that blood being used as ink? They wear gold and lapis and look to the viewer resentfully. Text reads, “28, Shy Amalan Ubis, The Small God of Wishful Obituaries”. Note: Many worshippers believe him related to SG#2 Herman Ubis.]

He visits most of his faithful for the first time somewhere around the second grade.  That’s when they fully come to understand that they are individual creatures, not bound to their parents through unseen channels, able to want things the adults around them think unwantable.  That’s also when most of them have experienced death in some form—a great-grandparent or a goldfish, it makes little difference to the second grader—and understand that it can change their lives.

“I wish you were dead” doesn’t cross the mind of every small child, but it finds enough of them to grant Shy access.

He lives in the fleeting fantasy and in the carefully honed dream of revenge, and distinguishes little between the two.  Someone who wishes someone else were dead and someone who dreams of a great inheritance are basically the same, in prayer.  His stock in trade was once mysterious relatives and unknown patrons; now it has become strangers on the internet, people with different political views or who don’t want to get naked for the enjoyment of his worshippers.

He is starting to get uncomfortable with the people who choose him over all other gods, concerned that perhaps they have some emotional problems.  But he is not the small god of effective therapy, or the small god of good moral choices, and he must continue to make do with what he has.

Still, sometimes he misses the high schoolers dreaming of their eventual deaths leading to specials on PBS about the impact of their lives, and the middle schoolers who don’t exactly want their rich uncle to die, but would really like to own a flying car.  Sometimes he wonders if the internet might not have been a mistake.

And then another million of his faithful send another million emails wishing death on a stranger, and he has to get back to work.  It’s not much, but it’s a living, and not all gods have that.

Shy is the small god of the wishful obituary, but he’s still a long way from composing his own.

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Artist Lee Moyer (13th Age, Cursed Court) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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The Small God, Jitterbug

Sometimes it’s because you think you can dance.  Sometimes you have no one but yourself to blame for making a fool of yourself at the high school reunion; sometimes you really don’t care after your fifth tequila, and in your heart you’re tearing that dance floor up like Fred Astaire crossed with Ginger Rogers.

And sometimes, the small god Jitterbug is with you, putting the boogey in your bones and the wings on your feet.

They don’t dance because they want to look cool.  They dance because they are cool, effortlessly so, bejeweled in natural rainbows and equipped with more elbows than your ordinary artist.  They dance their joy and they dance their sorrow, they danced when Rome burned and as the Titanic sank, they danced when you were born and one day they’ll dance on your grave.

Their faithful understand what it is to give in to the moment, to run free of inhibition and allow the music to move them.  They put their right feet in, they take their right feet out, they put their right feet in, and they shake them all about.  They clap their hands because they know that happiness is the truth, and sadness as well, and every other emotion.

They have season tickets to the ballet, and they live in the tapping feet of restless children, keeping them from growing sedate before their time.  They can live in you as well, if you just let them in.  Or don’t.  Insects will always find cracks to grant them entry, and those who resist the Jitterbug most determinedly are always prone to becoming cathedrals to their delight.

Welcome to the dance floor.  The party never stops.

No one wants it to.

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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Great Grandma O’Keefe – The Small God of Wrinkles In Time

Some gods are young for millennia, and other gods are created already old. They don’t experience time the way mortals do.  For them, it is an infinite cup, never fully drained, and the passage of days is no more consequential than the passage of seconds.  Very few entities, god or mortal, count the passage of seconds.  (Ore Ville, Small God of Microwave Popcorn, is among the few who must measure time so very closely.)

Great-Grandma O’Keefe has no children to speak of, has never once been a mother, but we are all her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, from the youngest of us even to the oldest.  All will pass into her keeping, given time enough to do so.

Those who die before she comes to claim them are still commemorated in her scrapbooks, preserved as they were while they lived.  She is not the afterlife. She is a lavender-scented pausing place along the road to that sweet and lasting destination.  But she loves them all.  She does not judge.  That is not the purpose of a great-grandmother.

In her softly wrinkled hands the world is born, and ages, and dies, and is born again, over and over, forever.

Some look upon her works and see wisdom, or character, or a life well-lived.  All she sees for herself is time.  Time spent, penny by penny, as if it matters no more than what it’s worth, when what truly matters is how little of it there is.

At the end of the day, Great-Grandma O’Keefe is there, with a plate of cookies and a handkerchief, ready to soothe the last of the world’s aches away, ready to take her gifts back from those who no longer need to carry them.  It is the only gift she has to offer.

For so many, it has been enough.

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[image description: A smiling old woman wearing thick black-rimmed bifocals. She wears a green beret over her short grey hair. On her viridian shawl is a blue pin in the shape of a tesseract. In the background, a beautiful galactic formation in blues, pinks and violets. Text reads, “25 Great Grandma O’Keefe – Small God of Wrinkles in Time.”]

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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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The Small God, Pumpkin Spice

[image description: A black pony with large rust-brown eyes and a smiling pumpkin on her hip stands on golden and orange fall leaves. Behind her, the dark sky is filled with stars and her flaming orange mane shines brightly against the blues of night. Text reads “24, The Small God, Pumpkin Spice”]

• • • • • 

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.

She is, now and always, a god of war.

Yucan Tu – The Small God of Faking It Until You Make It

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.

He is a god of falsehood, yes, but also of sincerity, and of effort.

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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Oliver Jasper Throatwarbler IV – The Small God of Superior Jaws

[image description: 3/4 view caricature of a pale smirking light-eyed man with a jaw as large as his forehead is small. His hair is slicked black and he wears a suit. Behind him, Polaroid snap shots of other large-jawed men are taped to the wall in rows. Text reads, “17, Oliver Jasper Throatwarbler IV, the Small God of Superior Jaws”]

Oliver Jasper Throatwarbler IV has always known that he was living on borrowed time, and that knowledge has made him petty, and cruel.  Neither pettiness nor cruelty are unique among the small gods; they are jealous guardians of their domains, and envious coveters of the domains of their peers, and when the opportunity has arisen for one of them to overthrow another, it has all too frequently been taken.  The past is littered with the bones of gods who failed to rise to their own defense.

So pettiness and cruelty are not a part of his domain.

He was no more born than most of the small gods—some, like Medusa, have been elevated from the ranks of the living by their actions, or by the actions of others, but most have ascended into godhood from the airy realm of thought, or ideology, or, in some terrible cases, prejudice.  Oliver found his voice in every mother who praised her son for having a strong chin, a noble profile, the face of kings.  He found his visage in the mirrors of those same boys as they grew toward manhood, convinced that the shape of their bones made them superior to everyone around them, made them somehow better than those without their genetic gifts could ever hope to be.

There are more obvious gods of racist thought, gods of skin color and gods of genealogy, gods arisen on the back of centuries of white supremacy.  It would be more surprising if there were not.  Gods arise where humans place importance, and however repugnant some find certain ideas to be, there are others who believe them with their whole hearts, and thus grant them a power they should never have possessed.  For Oliver Jasper Throatwarbler IV, his blood and breeding will always make him better than you.  His heritage alone should buy him honor and respect.

He cannot be taught.  He cannot be improved.  He can only be defeated, denied, and hopefully, one day, destroyed.  He knows this, and it makes his hatred burn all the brighter.  If he cannot win, he will besmirch everything he can before his time is finished.

Some ideas are poisonous ones, and the gods they spawn are little better.

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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Queen Qatar – The Small God of Side Eye

She is with you even now.  It is rare for a small god to be omnipresent; their limitations keep them confined to their own spheres, unable to act outside them, save in the most extreme of circumstances.  But for Queen Qatar, that sphere is vast as the scope of human experience. Even when you stand alone, she is there, watching, assessing, and judging what you do.

She is with the novelist who writes of woman as if they are nothing more than a delivery vessel for their luscious, bouncing, perfect breasts, untouched by any gravity.  She is with the suburban mother as she brags of the “ancient secrets” that she learned from her health food store, allowing her to “lose the baby weight” faster than her doctor thought was possible.  And she is with that doctor when he refuses to treat another woman’s actual complaint, focusing instead on her weight, claiming that her sinus infection will clear right up if she just starts an exercise program and loses fifty pounds.

Queen Qatar sees it all, and she very rarely approves.

She is judgmental, but she is kind.  She does not turn her eyes on those who do their best, even when that best is by any objective standard terrible.  She is here to judge, not to oppress. Children are not exempt from her sphere, and can attract her attention long before their parents believe them capable of such malfeasance, but neither are children her primary burden.

She is with the bigots and the racists, with the homophobic and the fatphobic and those who stand in their own glass houses with arms all full of rocks.  She is with us all, and if we err, she will turn her eye against us, and she will remind us that we are only mortal, while she is so much more.

Do not fear her wrath.  Fear her disapproval.

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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

Tumblr: https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com/

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Sir Tunty of Chants – The Small God of Custom Game Dice

Small gods are not like large gods in power or potency, but they are exactly like them in the same way they are exactly like poison ivy, or like mushrooms: there is no point at which they decide who they are going to be.  They find a source of nourishment and grow from there, feeding on fertile soil.  They can remain small for centuries, if not millennia, until their circumstances change.  Like all other things, they grow according to their environment and the resources it contains.

Sir Tunty came into being four thousand years before the beginning of the current calendar, his temples sculpted from bone and rock, his symbols etched by hand, and for a very long time, it seemed he was destined to be a very small god indeed.

And then in 1974, the Great Guy Gax appeared as some small gods do: all at once, already in the height of his power, calling forth his creations from the firmament.  He built of earth a dungeon, and filled it with such great beasts as he could summon out of his imagination, dragons and more.  And he invited all the people into his temple, and so many of them came that they overflowed the halls and spilled off to form temples of their own, temples of starships and vampires and beloved television properties and superheroes and cartoons.

And in all those temples, Sir Tunty was present, ready to roll, ready to give his gifts and his misfortunes to the faithful.

The Great Guy Gax waned, as those who make the biggest of entrances must often do, and in his place rose other gods, and when the vasty Bee Yawned appeared, Sir Tunty rose to his greatest prominence yet, crafted in thousands of homes, coveted and pursued, random and rolled as ever.  He is proud of what he has done, and will always remain so, but he takes nothing for granted.

After all, as his acolytes will gladly remind any who asks, anyone can roll a one.

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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Bewariel – The Small God of Not-So-Little Mermaids

All gods of the sea are gods of hunger in one way or another.

Gods of drowning.  Gods of the deeps.  Gods of thirst—for who, surrounded by saltwater, can find a single drop to drink?  Gods of everything but plenty.  The sea is the greatest cornucopia the world can even know, filled with fish and seaweed and salt enough to season the sky, but nothing there is free for the taking.

Once upon a time, in this glorious feast of silver and salt, there was a sea king whose daughter fell in love with a human prince and followed him to the shore, where only death, despair, and the dry death of the unwanted waited for her.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved a boy, a girl who was a dream of a man who loved a man, and both found themselves voiceless in the face of their futures.  And one was real and one a dream, but as time went by, it became harder and harder for the world to know which had been which.  And the man was glorified and had all his rough edges sanded away by the sea, and the girl was given the happy ending he could never have given her, until his original creation faded away.  Like seafoam.

Rough edges and unwanted girls must go somewhere.  No story is ever truly, totally forgotten.  And in the shadow of all the voiceless ones, the ones who yearned to be remembered, the ones whose love had been denied, she formed.

Bewariel, small god of not-so-little mermaids.  She has the teeth and claws her charges do not; she has the power to defend herself, and them.  She hears the prayers of the voiceless, and she comes, on fins of sapphire and silver, to do what must be done.  She is the answer and she is the question and she is all that remains of a girl who loved not wisely but too well, who shattered in the shadow of the sea.

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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

Tumblr: https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com/

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O.R.B.O.T. – The Small God of Tiny Robots

He is not a new god, for all that many would treat him as such.  He has been with us since the very earliest machines, when tinkers would stack wheels and simple boxes and press them into children’s hands.  He grows more sophisticated year upon year, but no more powerful, for he does not yearn for power; he has allowed ownership of drones and nanotechnology to pass into other hands, hands which may be less gentle than his own rounded pinchers, but which hunger for new things to hold.

He is happy with what he has and with what he is, and understands a lesson that many newer gods have yet to learn: he understands that to expand his portfolio is to change himself to fit it, and to become something other than he is.  But he has no desire to be other than he is, nor dreams of power.  He is powerful enough in the dreams of children both young and old.

He has saved the world a million times in their hands.  Has been a towering behemoth who crushes buildings beneath his mighty treads, and a bead of living metal rolling through the veins of an unwell mother, chasing illness aside. He has been hero and villain, monster and mechanist, and he will be all those things again and again until the human heart has no more need for a friendly automaton, until the human eye ceases to seek a friendly face in the inanimate. Until that day, he is content to serve as himself, and to seek for nothing larger, for nothing larger could ever be as kind.

His domain is small and limited and merciful.  In ORBOT’s name we gather.

Amen.

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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

Tumblr: https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

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Homepage: http://www.smallgodseries.com/