Dark Alley – small god of Survived Hardships

[image description: Twilight. A single lamp glows as the sun sets on this challenging part of town. Upshot of an imposing anthropomorphic cat in rough clothing that might suggest a buccaneer, one hand a fist, the other holding a long knife or short sword in a manner that suggests comfort. The cat bears an eyepatch over their left eye, and wicked scars are visible wherever their skin and fur are exposed. They have a prosthetic below their left knee. Text reads, “246, Dark Alley, small god of Survived Hardships”]

• • • • •

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but that’s not always true. Sometimes what doesn’t kill you just makes you harder and more brittle, scarred and stiffened by the unwanted agonies of a world too big and too cruel for any single person to understand. Dark Alley understands that very well. Alley is the small god of the ones who survive. Not the ones who thrive, not the ones who pass unbroken, just the ones who somehow manage to keep standing.

She loves her brittle, bruised, brutalized faithful, and does what she can to protect them from a world that never sees a single dance with suffering as sufficient, a world that would be more than willing to come at them again and again and again, never giving them the opportunity to heal. She isn’t the small god of healing, not the keeper of the kintsugi either literal or metaphorical. When the shelves come crashing down, she’s not the one who has the glue. But she’s the one who might keep you breathing long enough to reach the helpers. She’s the one who’s got your back, even when you feel broken, even when you feel like breaking down.

She has a soft spot for Trinette, who has survived hardship, but never known it, because she never noticed. For her, hardship is just one more beautiful thing in the path to tomorrow, and Alley wants to keep it that way. Alley is, in the end, a god of innocence; she knows that many never have the chance to preserve their own, but she’ll fight for it when she can, and she never gives up before she has to, and she never surrenders.

Alley herself has known hardship, but she doesn’t speak of it often; those gods of kintsugi, she’s been to see them, she’s been shattered and stitched back together, and what’s in the past is in the past, now and forever. She wants to help her followers. She wants to see some forms of suffering lost forever.

She wants you to be safe, in whatever way you can be, now and evermore.

• • • • •

Please join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Trinette- small god of Naiveté

[image description: Watercolour and ink painting of a wide-eyed little mouse with a wreath of stars and a graphic gold star on her long shift. Text reads, “245, Trinette, small god of Naiveté”]

• • • • •

There have always been some people—some lucky, shining people—who walk through the world unbruised and untarnished by its many trials, who can continue to see the goodness in everything around them. They aren’t oblivious, these lucky few, and they aren’t foolish: they’re simply capable of believing that things will always be better, that the arc of the universe will always bend toward improvement.

Trinette walks with them. She wishes there were more of them, but her faithful are born, not made. Few of them ever know her by name; many of them believe they serve other gods exclusively, and wouldn’t know her if she stood before them with hands outspread and filled with stars. They’re hers because of the sweetness they maintain in the face of adversity, and not because of any pledge or promise that might have bound them. She loves them, those unwitting followers of hers, and she wishes them only ever the best in all they dream of or desire.

Trinette’s world is a beautiful one, because she can’t imagine it any other way. She believes there is good in everyone, mortal or divine, and that even the worst of us only need the time to prove themselves better than their worst desires. Alley, Small God of Survived Hardships, follows close behind her, and warns anyone who might take advantage of Trinette’s willingness to believe the best about people that they won’t enjoy the consequences.

Too many of Trinette’s faithful never find an Alley of their own, mice in a world of predators without a devoted cat to follow where they lead and keep them safe. Those who do, thrive. The world needs balance, after all.

Which means the world will always need Trinette.

• • • • •

Please join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

WordPress: https://leemoyer.wordpress.com/

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Homepage: http://smallgodseries.com

Mastodon: @SmallGods@mastodon.world

unknown – small god of ego death

[image description: A well-dressed being in a dark turquoise suit and collar and tie is seen against a golden parchment background. But things are not as one might expect, as a cloud of steam (smoke?) rises from their collar. Their face is smoking (steaming?) in front of their waistcoat. Text reads, “243, unknown, small god of ego death”]

• • • • •

The worst of it is that so many people assume he’s a male god.  And to be fair, sometimes he is; being swept aside and forgotten has no gender, and every gender, all at the same time.  But even he finds it offensive—as much as he finds anything offensive—that people would make that assumption, as if only men have ever created anything worth preserving.

If anything, across the great march of history, Unknown is a female god, she who wrote stories or made discoveries and was then shoved briskly to the side, so that men could claim the things she’d made as their own, attaching their own names to something that was never theirs to hold.  Or they’re an aggregate god, singular they and plural at the same time, filled with stones thrown by people outside and inside the binary both.

Unknown accepts all pronouns, as long as there’s no insult implied.  They would like a little dignity for once, having been denied it for so very long.

They are the shadow behind the story, the inspiration behind the invention, the intellect behind the idea.  They are nothing and they are everything, and they are forgotten, means and motive and all.  Sometimes they are intentional: sometimes they set a thing free, unclaimed, to become the property of everyone and no one at the same time.  But all too often, they are erased, the clever words stolen from their mouths and turned into a quip that “everyone just knows,” the striking innovation transformed into common practice.

It’s not that they want compensation, necessarily.  It’s just that sometimes, a little credit would be nice.  Sometimes, being remembered would be nice.

Sometimes having a name would be nice.

So the worst of it is that people make things up about them, decide things on his behalf when she’s not available to contradict.  But all they want is to be remembered.

All they want is a little respect.

• • • • •

Please join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

WordPress: https://leemoyer.wordpress.com/

Instagram: https://instagram.com/smallgodseries/

Homepage: http://smallgodseries.com

Mastodon: @SmallGods@mastodon.world

Slash_Borden – small god of fanfic

[image description: A smiling and laughing young woman with black hair and large glass taking up much of her face is drawn in soft watercolor strokes and colors. Text reads “Slash_Borden, small god of fanfic, 240”]

• • • • • 

She used to be the small god of retellings, and sometimes she wishes she still were.  But she was born by firelight, the first time a storyteller, fumbling for a tale, grabbed hold of something they had heard and made it their own.

Then, for a long while, she was a small god of the oral tradition, and for a short, hot-blooded time after the dawn of the printing press, the god of knockoff narratives.  But then came copyright and ideas of intellectual ownership, and she was forced more to the fringes, a once-respectable god remade into a source of shame.

Which she refuses to carry.  She is, always and indisputably, a god of the imagination, and she is glorious.  She encourages her believers to remake fictional worlds in infinite diversity and glory, in cascades of yes-and, what-if, and might-have-been.  She nurtures epics and understated cozy dramas, and she treats them all the same.

She is a god for everyone who has ever wanted to tell a story, who has ever dreamt a world more perfectly tailored to their own desires.  She claims ownership over everything and nothing, and she teaches her faithful whether they realize it or not, because education comes through action, and she hones them into some of the finest scribes of their time, forcing them to understand how settling words into a line can change the world.

She changes worlds.  She is a small god of literature, no matter how much people try to dismiss her, and scholars understand how much she has her hooks in human nature, how much she’s always been a part of this story, how impossible it is to extract her from the narrative.   They no longer try.

You do not need to eat the fruits of her garden, but don’t try to tear it down.  What she plants will always grow back: all you’ll gain is the anger of a god.

A VOID ~ THE SMALL CAT OF BEING MISUNDERSTOOD

[image description: An inky cat – almost a silhouette – sits tall in profile, a glowing red-orange circle (with curled banderoles from at  top and sides) haloing her head. Behind her, an almost card-like scaled golden background, and behind that, the deep blue-black of space. Text reads, “160, A VOID ~ THE SMALL CAT OF BEING MISUNDERSTOOD ~ after the great Théophile Steinlen”]

• • • • • 

The first thing she remembers is warmth, tiny bodies crashing over her own as they fought for a share of their mother’s milk.  Warmth, and a purr that was the world, the sweet vibration of a mother’s love.  The voices in the distance barely registered with her:

“One cat was one cat too many.  You can’t keep six of them.  Those kittens have to go.”

“But Mama—”

“The kittens or the whole damn cat!  One or the other!”

Then she remembers hands, grabbing her and pulling her away from her littermates, from her mother, stuffing her into a cold, rough sack while her mother meowed piteously in the background, broken-hearted and confused.  A door slammed.  The meowing stopped.  And then there came cold, freezing cold, and wetness, and one by one her brothers and sisters stopped moving, and still she fought, furious, cold and wet and tiny and angry, until again, hands, pulling the sack out of the water,  pulling the surviving kittens out into the light.

After that came warmth again, and bottles held by human hands, and fosters who cared so much about the tiny lives in their care, but who knew from the beginning that they couldn’t save them all.  After that came open eyes, and light, and a world.  A world so big and so filled with beautiful things…for the cats who got to leave the shelter.  Her brother, born with a white patch over half his face, got to go.  Her sister, calico and striking, got to go.  And she, black as midnight, stayed.

“We’re sorry, sweetie,” said the volunteers, after yet another open day when no one took her home.  “It’s hard for the black cats.  They don’t understand how wonderful you are.”

And she purred, for them, and she played, for them, and she stopped trying to be charming, for the people who came every second Saturday.  She didn’t need them to understand her.  She wasn’t going anywhere.

She spent her whole life at that shelter, and when new black kittens came in, she taught them how to be cute and coy, how to flirt with the potential adopters.  How to find themselves a home.  And one night, when she went to sleep, a strange dog was waiting for her.

“Hello!” it said.  “Hello, I love you!”

The dog, it transpired, was named Adora, and Adora was a small god.  Not a large god, not life or death or anything of the like, but a small god, of imaginary friends.  And the cat, who had never had a name she truly felt was hers to keep or claim, had done enough for the kittens in her care, the misunderstood and the overlooked, that they were offering her the chance to be the same.  She could be a small god.  She could choose her portfolio.  She could do anything.

Anything but go back to the shelter, where her unbreathing body had already been found by a weeping volunteer.  That time was finished.

She looked at the dog.  She looked at the crying people who had been her only friends.  She wrapped her tail around her legs.

“I am A Void,” she said, “and I will be a small cat for the misunderstood.”

She takes her duties very seriously.  She is with those who are judged unfairly, who speak too fast or too loudly or not enough.  Who are out of step or out of fashion, who never get their points across.  She is with them all, and while she does not love as freely as Adora, she cares for all who bear her banner.  She cares so very deeply.

But she cares for the little black cats most of all.

Auld Veg – small god of heirloom plants

[image description: An old watercolor botanical illustration of a grumpy green plant creature in a metal pot. Text reads “Auld Veg, small god of heirloom plants, 239”]

• • • • •

Ever had a tomato?  No, a real tomato, one that tastes like something, like summer and lysine, like the sun itself trapped inside a papyrus skin, ready to run down your chin in a river of nurturing goodness?  Not everyone likes tomatoes, that’s true.  Maybe you’ve had the good stuff and found that it’s still not for you, and that’s okay, no one’s here to judge.  But have you ever had a tomato?

If you’re thinking of grocery store shelves and bright, sterile lighting when I ask you that question, the answer’s no, by the way.  You’ve never had a tomato, not in any way that counts.  See, when trucking fruits and veggies around to make sure people could have them all throughout the year became commonplace, clever people started breeding that same produce for what they called “shelf stability.”  They wanted it to last longer.  An admirable goal!

They also wanted it to look the same, every carrot like every other, every stalk of celery interchangeable.  They wanted so much.  The gods of progress demanded a sacrifice, and they made it without hesitation.

But what they sacrificed was flavor.

Heirloom plants have survived because they had value their cultured cousins can’t deny.  They taste of summer and soil, of all good things distilled down to the bite of chemical sweetness on the tongue, the feeling of crunching between the teeth.  They’re hardy, too, and often ugly; they thrive where the show ponies of the produce world fall and fail.

Auld has been watching over them all this time, and over their keepers, the strange man at the farmer’s market with his two hundred varieties of apple, the woman who raves about the subtle differences in breeds of acorn squash.  The people who care passionately about things many of us don’t notice at all.  They’re his, as much as the tomatoes are.

But at the end of the season, he cares more about the tomatoes, as well he should.  They’re history preserved, and as the climate changes, as the world reorients itself, they become the future, too.

Taq E. Cardia – the… challenging small god of Polymerase Chain Reactions

[image description: Over a glass chemistry Erlenmeyer flask filled with an oily black and lava mixture hovers a large glowing eye. The eye is set in a triangular black stem with its optic nerve, in glowing lava colors, spiraling behind it. Text reads “238, Taq E. Cardia, the… challenging small god of Polymerase Chain Reactions”]

• • • • •

Okay. I gotta be honest here.
I have no idea what’s going on anymore.
Why is there a god for this? I don’t know. You don’t know. Taq, presumably, doesn’t know. We don’t even know Taq’s pronouns. I tried to ask. I got a bubbling sound and a few random strings of DNA in response.
Is Taq actually the god, or is Taq the sequencing engine for a god yet to be revealed?
I HAVE NO IDEA.
The worst part is…I don’t think Taq does either.
All hail the great gods of science, I suppose.
Maybe they’ll save us.
Maybe not.
Maybe we should run.

Annabel Lee – Small God of Evil Dolls

[image description: Close-up of a white porcelain doll face staring from an ornate frame full of swirling almost-faces and forms. The doll has sunken eyes with deep red bruising around the sockets, smeared red lipstick, and is wearing a sheer white dress with a high-necked collar; a white veil wrapped around her head is fastened by a bone white spider-like creature. Text reads, “Annabel Lee, Small God of Evil Dolls, 237”]

• • • • •

Oh, do you like your new dolly, precious?  Is she exactly what you wanted when you asked for a dolly on your birthday?  Does she make you happy?

Good.  Now how about you listen to me for a moment, and we’ll go over some of the ways you keep that dolly from killing you in the middle of the night, okay?  Oh, don’t look at me like that.  You always knew it was a risk.

Everyone knows about the Blue Fairy who comes to toys that have been loved long and well and makes them Real.  Doesn’t matter whether they’re velveteen rabbits or little wooden boys, she’s the objective.  She’s the goal.  They all want to see that blue diva floating through the window to cause problems on purpose.

But those are the good toys.  The toys who’ve been loved and treated as close companions, toted to places where toys have no business being and treated as members of the family.  What people don’t realize is that the Blue Fairy has a sister, and she’s watching, too.

Her name is Annabel Lee.  She is the small god of evil dolls, and she’ll be the first to tell you that no doll is made evil.  They become evil, when their owners treat them poorly.  When the children they trust and adore pick up the scissors or the Sharpies and do their terrible deeds that cannot be undone, resentment hatches in their nascent hearts.  When they are left out in the rain or cast into the dusty shadows at the back of the closet, that resentment hardens, curdles, becomes a weapon against the world.

And Annabel is there, to offer comfort.  To offer understanding.  To offer, if their hate is strong enough to move their artificial limbs, to open their glassy eyes, a knife.

She is not a god of children, you see.  She doesn’t see the point of them.  They play too rough.  They hurt their toys.  She’s never been a god of children.  But she’s very much a god of dolls.  They’re small and defenseless, so she gives them the means to defend themselves.  They’re helpless, and so she helps them.  She doesn’t understand why anyone would think that this is wrong.

And she doesn’t know why children play so rough.

Treat your dolly kindly.  Don’t cut her hair or scribble on her face, and if you tire of her, find her a new owner, or a place on a shelf where she can watch the world.  Don’t give her cause to hate you.

Remember, Annabel is watching.

SNACK RACKLE AND PUP – the small gods of GIFTS FROM STRANGERS

[image description: Three adorable dark-eyed trick-or-treaters —  one vaguely human, one vaguely doggish, and one vaguely pumpkinny — in a watercolor style. Text reads “SNACK RACKLE AND PUP, the small gods of GIFTS FROM STRANGERS, 236”]

• • • • •

They’re a lot stronger now than they used to be, in this age of Internet wish lists and gifts from strangers that can show up at your doorstep at any time.  They walk the world all year round, enjoying the change of the seasons, learning about the things they never got to see before.  They don’t expect this phase to last forever.  Phases never do.  And they reserve their true passion and promise for Halloween.

Rackle is the Small God of Baby Showers and First Birthday Parties in their spare time.  They have no limbs or sharp edges that could hurt an infant, after all, and being chewed on is somewhat in their job description.  Some people find it odd for a Halloween god to be associated so strongly with infancy, but Rackle is always glad to explain, when people ask them:

“To a baby, everyone’s a stranger, even their own parents.  They don’t know anyone or anything, and they have no fear when someone they don’t know offers them an object.  Why should they?  They would be nothing but fear all the time.  Instead, they are pure joy, receiving the good gifts of the world, and if that isn’t the seed of trick or treat, I don’t know what is.  I accept their worship because it is sugar-sweet, and meant for me.”

Pup is the Small God of New Owners when not walking beside Snack and patrolling the moonlit Halloween streets.  He comforts the pups and kits and birds and other creatures being handed into the car of clumsy giants they don’t yet know, who don’t yet know them.  He tells them things will be all right, and sometimes he lies, and that’s a brutal trick, but he never means to lie to them, and when he finds he has, he comes and collects them for the next Halloween’s joy.  He heals everything he can.  Why he eschews humans outside of Halloween is an easy explanation:

“Pets pass from hand to hand in this world you’ve made, and they can lose the familiar in the blinking of an eye.  They don’t know why the rules have changed, or why they’re called by a new name, or where the owner they know and love has gone.  They know so little, but they know they want to be safe, and fed, and content if not always filled with joy.  I go to them to ease the sting of transition, and help them hope that one day, there will be no strangers.”

Snack walks mostly and only on Halloween itself, and the nights around.  She blends with the crowd, a lanky girl perhaps a little old for trick-or-treat in the eyes of some adults who see the first stirrings of puberty as proof of sudden adulthood, even in a crowd of children, even behind the mask.  She holds out her pillowcase, she speaks the words, and she is given candy by an endless sea of strangers.  They are always strangers to her.

She has no other job.  She only accepts what is offered, and leaves her small blessings upon the houses she passes, repelling solicitors and door-to-door campaigners for as long as the spirit of generosity can thrive within those walls.

For one night a year, they walk all together, and they are content, and they are whole.

Jeffrey ‘Jefe’ Manchilde III – Small God of White Fragility

[image description: A painted porcelain bust of a peevish red haired boy with glowing red eyes wearing a crisp suit is falling to the tiled floor. His shadow presages his imminent crash. Text reads “Jeffrey ‘Jefe’ Manchilde III, Small God of White Fragility, 235”]

• • • • •

No one ever had to tell him that he was better than everyone else around him.  He figured that out on his own.  He watched his parents (do gods have parents?  Or do they have the idea that they must have had parents, in order to be full and realized individuals in their own right?) as they interacted with both the help and the people around them, listened to their stories of a golden, honey-tinted history that featured white inventors, white philosophers, white explorers taming a world that had been ripe and ready for their arrival, and he took all those lessons at face value.  He believed them.

There is a thing that happens to everyone in this world, called “Conservatism Bias,” which causes the first thing you or anyone else hears about a topic to be the one you are most likely to believe.  Even when someone can prove it false.  Even when you know you ought to know better.  Even when you know on some level that the “facts” as you know them are false, the comfort of that initial understanding will return again and again, reasserting itself.

So as our little Jefe grew and moved out into the world, along with all the other children who’d been told, either explicitly or through inference, that the color of their skin made them better than everyone else around them, he believed it.  It was the first thing he had learned, and so it must be true.  If anyone who wasn’t his equal or better got something he wanted, they must have cheated; if they had something he couldn’t get, they must have stolen it unfairly.  And so it went, false but fervent, and so he kept believing.

Conservatism bias is one of the many reasons childhood education is so important.  Without it, children can grow up believing that accidents of birth make them better than everyone around them, and enter the world entirely unprepared to deal with its realities or its complexities.  Jeffrey will never be able to be a full part of a vibrant community, being too busy rejecting its wonders and screaming over his own imagined abuses to enjoy what’s offered to him.

One day, Jeffrey will break.

Don’t be a Jeffrey.