Accidental God 4.0 -- Section 01

[Here's the start of something new. Same ideas, but much, much more my style, I think. I'm having lots of FUN again with my writing, and that's a good thing.

[Did I mention? Accidental God 2.0 is going to bed. Possibly forever. I looked at what I was writing, and I dreaded it. My favorite parts had nothing to do with the main plot, and I found myself slogging through section after section to get to the irrelevant parts I most enjoyed.

[I may not be an expert, but I think that's a danger sign. I simply didn't want to read the book I was writing.

[Then came Accidental God 3.0 which made it to around 2,000 words before I set it aside and started writing this. Here it is, an Accidental God 4.0 that feels fun to me. I have no idea what the story will look like--really and truly, none--but I intend to listen to God the best I can and enjoy the ride. Let's see where Practicality Bradley Shupak takes us.]

The Accidental God

    "Over there," said Tumble Dry. He was nodding his head toward the door, which is a sight to see. Not the door--Tumble Dry nodding. He's got the kind of neck you see in cartoons about skinny guys: too long, thrusting his head out in front of the skinny rest of him that takes a while to catch up with the head, unless he's walking backwards. Also, his Adam's apple is about the size of an overgrown walnut, majestic in its prominence.
    On second thought, the door is a sight to see as well, but that's for another time.
    "New guy?" asked Midnight Jane, eyeing the man who had just walked in. Midnight Jane’s got hair the color of--wait for it--midnight. Or she would, if she weren't always coloring it. This week she'd bleached it and worked in rainbow highlights that--not that I'd ever tell her--had gone kind of muddy. Fortunately, she's some extreme kind of color blind, so when we all lied to her and said it was wonderful, she smiled. She's got a nice smile. Le sigh.
    "Definitely a new guy," I agreed. That's me, the last of our trio. My name is Practicality Bradley Shupak. I'm twenty-seven, single, and until recently the newest of an undying breed. I am, to my everlasting confusion, a god.
    "You can always tell the new guys," I said. "They have that look about them."
    "Which you see every day in the mirror," said Tumble Dry. He snorted, which, with his nose, had a particular depth and resonance--I'm trying to say his nose is big, prodigious, its sweep an Arch of Triumph--and he laughed at me. It's fine. I can take that. Yes, it hurts just a bit each time, but I can take it.
    "Don't mess with Bradley," said Midnight Jane. "He can't help that he is such a cute little baby." She reached over and grabbed my cheek, shaking my face from side-to-side in a distressingly sisterly manner. Color isn't the only thing that Midnight Jane is blind to. Le sigh.     "Besides," she went on, "we need to welcome the new guy before anyone else finds him."
    "Heaven and earth, yes," said Tumble Dry. "If the old farts get him, it will be nothing but misery for the poor sap for centuries to come."
    "Or at least for the next few hours," said Midnight Jane. "Bradley. Go get him."
    "Me?"
    "You."
    "I’m not the new guy anymore. I have seniority."
    "Which is why you're going. You have responsibilities now. Hurry up, and I'll go get us some root beer."
    "You don't have to get it," I said, noticing the waiter, Mad Hatter Barnes, on his way over. "Barnes is bringing it already."
    "Do not question me!" said Midnight Jane, waiving her hand in the air dismissively. "I am a goddess."
    "Sure," said Tumble Dry, snorting. "But not on purpose."
    "Nonetheless, I have been an accidental god for longer than both of you, so my decree is law. And if you don't believe that, I'm the cutest one here, so that works just as well."
    I looked at Tumble Dry. He looked at me. She was right. I shrugged and stood up. What else could I do? I went to greet the new guy.

    On my fifth birthday I declared to my parents that I was going to grow up to be a sign holder.
    "What kind of sign holder?" asked my father supportively.
    "No you're not," said my mother, not so supportively.
    "Just listen to the boy for a few minutes," said my father. "He might surprise you. And besides, it's his birthday."
    "Fine," said my mother. "What kind of sign holder?"
    "Construction." I said it with conviction, and I could have told you exactly why. It had to do with the vests. The reflective striping had caught my eye, and love had swept over me like a tsunami over a small tropical island. In its wake there was nothing left--nothing but love. Love was the wave. Love was the terror. Love was the desolate aftermath.
    "See?" said my mother. "Terrible idea. I'm getting the boy a pamphlet on pharmacology."
    I don't want to give the impression that my mother was unkind. She simply knew what was right. For everything. And everyone. I used to envy her confidence. I still do, I suppose. Just two years ago my mother declared that the mayor of Northern Lights, Wisconsin--where we live--had no idea what he was doing, which was the generally accepted opinion throughout the city. Everyone agreed that Mayor Livingston Formaly Brock was useless as a government official, everyone including the girl who was bringing us burgers in baskets at Horse Burgers Restaurant--their motto, ‘At least we're honest, and you'll love the taste!’ I don't know how we got onto the subject of the mayor. It might have gone something like this.
    "Here are your burgers," the waitress might have said. "Doesn't the mayor suck?"
    "Watch your language," my mother might have said, "and yes, he does. I think I'll run for mayor."
    I'm sure that isn't how it happened, since I was there, but however it happened, my mother in that instant decided she knew what was right for the entire city of Northern Lights. Before I knew what was happening, there were signs telling me to 'VOTE for BARBARA SHUPAK!' I really didn't need to see those signs, because my mother had already told me who I was voting for: her. I did. The other option was Mayor Livingston Formaly Brock, and I wasn't about to vote for him--his middle name was 'Formaly.' Apparently, nobody else was going to vote for him either. My mother campaigned like a landslide, won in a landslide, and the city had kept on sliding since.
    I mention all this, if you recall, because I had determined at age five that I would be a sign holder. Subsequently, at the age of six, my feet were solidly set onto the pathway of the orthopedic surgeon, mostly because I had just learned to say the words 'orthopedic' and--wait for it--'surgeon.' Also, Mark Fitzpatrick's father was a surgeon, and he had the most awesome pens I had ever seen. He kept them in the pocket of whatever he was wearing, and they had four colors, and he used them ALL.
    That dream lasted me until the age of seven, and to cut this all short, I had since that time decided I would be a professional pianist or conductor (I saw the tail coats), a mascot for one of three football teams (wolverine, duck, or squirrel), a poet (because I thought they didn't have to do anything except forget to comb their hair), and a professional ice cream taster. Also, I wanted to try the luge. Just once.
    Never, in all my changing dreams, had I ever told my parents that I wanted to grow up to be a god.

    I walked up to the guy and smiled down at him. It looked like I'd be doing just about everything down at this man. I had a solid foot on him, and I peak out at around six-two in thick shoes. His hair was brown and restless, sticking out in as many directions as it could, arguing with itself, different tufts making peace with each other at the oddest places. I realized I was staring at his hair, and brought my eyes down to his face.
    "Hey," I said. "I'm Bradley."
    I held out my hand and he took it, shaking brightly, a dazed but happy look on his face like a puppy who has just fallen into a bowl of butter.
    "This is really the place, huh?" he said. "I mean, this is the club where gods hang out, right? Of course it is. That's what they told me when I got all registered with the government--nice people there, don't you think? They took great care of me, gave me my ID, told me what to watch out for as a new god. Did you know that we don't age?"
    I tried to look sincerely interested--not that I wasn't, but I'd been through this already, and it had become a little tired for me. Of course, it was good that I was the first god talking to the man, because anyone else would have been so far beyond interested in all the 'new god' chatter that this little guy could have been crushed by the indifference.
    "I actually did know that," I said.
    He was nodding his head, and I wondered what exactly he was agreeing with. "I always knew gods lived forever, but I didn't know that they never age. That's just crazy. All kinds of stuff about gods. You're a god, too, right? I figure, 'cause you don't have a uniform on. The guys in uniforms are angels, right?"
    I looked around at the club's wait staff. "Nope," I said. "Actually, none of them here are angels. All just regular humans. And Mad Hatter Barnes is a demon."
    "Really? No kidding! I've never met a demon face to face. Which is he?"
    "The one with the hat."
    "Oh! Wow. Well." He leaned forward slightly and squinted at Barnes. "He doesn't look very demonic."
    "He doesn't act very demonic, either. He's an excellent storyteller, though, if you can get him to talk about the French Revolution."
    The little god swallowed and his lips turned down. "That sounds...gross."
    "Well, it's that, too. I did say he was a demon, though. Come with me. I'll introduce you to my friends."
    "Are they gods, too?"
    "Most definitely. I didn't get your name, by the way. Like I said, I'm Bradley."
    He looked up at me, the skin of his nose wrinkling. "Just Bradley?"
    "That's it."
    "But I thought all gods got some kind of name. Like Barley Fields McCoy, and Two-Tone Zuke, and Long-Song Jenny. The Brick. You know, names like that."
    I shrugged. "I guess I just don't have a name yet. Nothing has stuck."
    "That's too bad," he said. "I wonder what they'll call me."

    When I found out that I was a god, I had gone through the typical four steps of divinity. From what I hear, every god goes through them. It's like grieving, and you can't help it. It's something you have to live with.
    Actually, to be more accurate, I went through the first three out of the four steps.
First was denial. As I mentioned before, I never expected to be a god. It was never an entry in my 'To Do' list, not that I usually had one. That was more a brief flirtation with organization at the beginning of my freshman year, and pretty quickly my day planner was filled with sketches of men wrestling with octopuses. Octopods. Octopi. One of those. It was an art phase of mine, the doodles of tentacled things, and it lasted longer than my 'To Do' lists ever did.
    So what I'm saying is, again, as I mentioned before, I didn't plan on godhood. I didn't really believe it at first.
    "That can't be right," said my mother. I suppose she was going through denial as well. "Practicality isn't a god."
    Mom is about the only person around who still calls me by my real first name. I'd find it comforting if it didn't feel like a judgment every time she said it. 'Practicality,' she calls me, and she aspires for me to live up to that name, and I know I fail. I once put 'be practical' on my 'To Do' list. Then I covered it over with the head of an octopus.
    "Practicality isn't a god," said my mother.
    "I'm pretty sure she's right," I said.
    "This is so cool," said my sister. She just skipped right over the first step.
    "I'm afraid we're quite confident about this," said the man from the government. He was in a suit that had seen better days--by which I mean that it was wrinkled and worn at the edges and INTERESTING. I wanted to draw it. In fact, I wanted to draw it right then. I recognize now that I was avoiding thinking about what he was saying, another sign that I was firmly in the first step of divinity. "We've run the tests, our angelic visitors have identified your house as the correct location for the divine emissions, and, Mayor Shupak, it is an inescapable conclusion: your son is a god."
    "Well," said my dad. "This will make for a dynamic Christmas letter."

    I'd moved through to the second step: confusion and panic, which you'd think might be two steps, but new gods swing back and forth between those two so often that metaphysicians have just wrapped them into one. I drew all the time, filling sketchbooks, then wondered if gods were supposed to do art, then wondered if a god should have to worry about what gods were supposed to do, and then I dropped my paints on my sister's cat and cried. I didn't mean to drop them on the cat; that was just a bonus.
    Then I moved on to the third step: acceptance. I was a god. It wasn't going to change. It got me a discount just about everywhere and let me meet Midnight Jane, though that's another story. Also, in Northern Lights, a kind of de facto hang out for gods, it got me into the Divine Rest, one of the most exclusive clubs in the world: gods only. Hard to get more exclusive than that.
    Somehow, though, the fourth step of divinity had never caught up to me, at least not in the year I'd been a god: I still didn't have a name.

    "Bradley's a good enough name for now," I said to the little man. "What's your name?"
    "Harold," he said.
    I looked down at him, surprised, trying to not look surprised. He looked closer to thirty than fifty, and I was pretty positive I'd never met a Harold under fifty. It was like the government had decreed a cut-off date for naming your child 'Harold,' and if you didn't get all your Harolds born before then, well, you were simply out of luck. Your child would have to have a more modern name like 'Michael' or 'Bruce.' Actually, 'Bruce' was pushing it. You could probably have been born in the last forty years and be a 'Bruce,' but certainly not in the last thirty.
    Either way, Harold was far, far too young to be a 'Harold,' which confirmed something in my head that I found rather depressing: Harold was going to get a name before I was.