[image description: A slender being with an eraser for a head and a sharp red pencil for feet, glides effortlessly forward, her segmented arms akimbo, her right hand holding a riding crop. She leaves a clean swash of red line in her wake. Behind her, a handwritten document on parchment with stets, deles, and other marks she has left on the corpus. Text reads, “34, Editrix 9000, The Small God of Necessary Corrections.”]
The trouble with much liturgical writing is the tendency to present the divine in overtly flowery terms, cloaking them in mysticism and metaphor. The gods are real. Human belief may call the divine into form, but it does not call the divine into being; with no humans to shape or define it, the divine would endure, would exist in joyous chaos, not prisoned or limited by human ideas of service or survival. We need the gods more than the gods need us. It is not possible to discuss the divine, as limited, mortal creatures, without reducing it in some way, pinning it under the glass of our regard and—
WILL YOU CUT THAT OUT?
I am fulfilling the purpose for which I was made.
You are being a right pain in my ass is what you’re doing.
I don’t see how that’s my problem.
Look, you stop modifying my text, and I’ll be as honest about you as I can. Deal?
Deal.
Her work is all around us, not only in the written word, but in the bones of architecture, the flavor of a cake, the stitching of a seam. She guides the hands of craftsmen and artists, protecting them from the consequences of their mistakes. She shelters us all, whether we believe in her graces or not. Humans are fallible. Gods are not. Humans fuck up.
OH, COME ON.
You were dishonest.
I was not!
Too many errors are not mistakes, they are bad choices. They are decisions made for personal reasons, and they cannot be shielded or allowed to stand simply because they were made by human hands.
I misspoke.
And I corrected you.
You promised!
You lied.
You know what? I’m done here. I have other gods to describe, and I think you’ve made your portfolio perfectly clear.
Go with grace, and carry a red pen.
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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Lee Moyer 