Pete and The Blog

On the Road Again -- Section 05 (Still very out of order)

2011-06-06T21:36:00.003-06:00

[I only have a vague idea where this part goes in the story. It's after the chase on the mountain, but before lots of other stuff.

[I'm trying to write whatever section seems most exciting to me next, so that's what I wrote. For all three of you still following this, I hope you enjoy.]

    “You look thoughtful,” said Gretchen.
    I realized I’d been staring at the sink. “I guess I just admire your fixtures.”
    “Thanks. I try to keep in shape, but no matter how much you compliment my body, we’re not getting back together.”
    I grinned at her. “Who says I’d take you? We’re much better friends now that we’re divorced.”
    She smiled, but it was a smile with clipped wings. “I suppose that’s true, isn’t it.”
    She didn’t say all the other things she could have said, like how she’d tried for years to make our marriage something special, then how she’d hung on for years after in the hope it might become something at least tolerable, then how she’d hung on longer as my own personal rehab worker.
    I picked up my dishes and walked over to the sink. I plugged one side and started running the water in, as hot as I could manage. “I did bring some good things to the marriage, didn’t I?”
    Gretchen slid her dishes and glass onto the counter next to me and pulled a dish towel off a little magnetic bar stuck to the refrigerator. “Want a real answer, or do I get to make a joke?”
    “You’ve earned a thousand jokes. Ten-thousand.”
    “That’s sweet of you. But now I can’t think of anything funny. I’ll have to make do with a real answer.”
    I shrugged and drizzled in soap. Gretchen thought for a long moment. I wondered why I had asked her that, after so long. I realized I really did want to know the answer. I wanted to believe that I’d brought something more than misery to our marriage. I know I’d thrown in my half of the genetics for our children, but that part of being a father is the easiest part. What had I ever done for Gretchen? Anything worth looking back on? A gravedigger makes holes and fills them, but in the end he’s helped put something to rest. Had I given Gretchen any rest?
    I started washing the dishes as she thought. The water was slightly too hot on my hands, but it felt good. I rinsed the first plate, handed it to Gretchen, and stole a look at her face. There were wrinkles there that I’m sure hadn’t been there twenty years ago, but I couldn’t remember that young face anymore. Gretchen had become this in my mind, mistress of a small piece of tranquility, smooth water in rough seas.
    “You love our daughter,” she said finally. “Both our daughters. You loved them both in a deeper way than I ever could.”
    I stopped washing. “That’s not true.”
    “Yes it is.”
    I felt mad. “You’re doing it again. You did this while we were married, too. You’re making yourself less than you are. If you were the Venus de Milo you’d break your own arms off.”
    “It’s true, Lance. You loved our daughters more than I ever could.” She wasn’t looking at me. She was holding the plate, half dry. “I saw it in you from the moment Bonnie was born, from the time you held Samantha. You loved them with everything from your toenails to your earwax.”
    “That’s kind of disturbing.”
    “Shut up, Lance. I’m giving you a real answer, and if you don’t shut up I’m not saying it. Not now, not ever again.” She still wasn’t looking at me, which was strange for Gretchen. She’s one of those people who makes eye contact, even when, as a guy who’s not known for his emotional openness, I find it completely unnecessary. That got my attention more than her telling me to shut up. Being cut off by my wife was something I’d grown used to, and usually appreciated after the fact. Sometimes well after the fact. She went on. “You held our daughters and your heart was naked. You looked at them like a drowning man looks at land. You were--you were in love, Lance. You were never in love with me that way, and I hated it. I was jealous. An ugly, ugly jealousy, and I hated myself for it, and I hated you for making me that way, and so sometimes, when I should have held you close, I let you walk away, because your daughters loved you back the exact same way. They loved being your land. I told myself that they would love me, too, and they did, but there was a difference. There still is. Bonnie came with me, but only because she knew you were coming, too.”
    “That’s not true,” I said again.
    “Believe what you want,” said Gretchen, wiping the towel over spots of water already dry. “I know what I saw, I know what I felt, and I need to apologize. You brought real love to our family. It was a bit of heaven, and I couldn’t love you for it.”
    I opened my mouth, closed it, and started washing a glass. “I brought a bit of hell, too.”
    She nodded. “There was that.”
    “I did love our daughters. Do. I do love them.”
    “I know that. Look what you gave up for them.”
    That drove a small screwdriver of guilt into my intestines, but I kept it off my face, I think. “It wasn’t much.”
    “You’re right,” she agreed. “Just everything.”
    I half laughed, a puff of old despair and new craving. “Yeah. Just that.” And in spite of giving it up, here I was, back into that old addiction again. But it was different this time, I told myself. Not riding the souls I was holding bound to my soul--not even the dark one that I kept to tightly tied. They were my unlikely bedfellows, a disturbing image, especially when I thought about Annabel laying next to me behind the bushes on the mountain. Four to a bed is too many by two. Not that I would be sleeping with Annabel. Same age as my daughter, I reminded myself.
    “I didn’t mean for it to be that way,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to come between you and our daughters.”
    She shook her head and took the glass from me. “You didn’t. Looking back, I think there was room for me there, too, but I was frightened. You were so hungry for them, I was almost afraid you might turn that hunger toward me, too.” It was her turn to laugh without meaning the smallest part of it. “Jealous of the same thing that frightened me. My own fault. You deserved better.”
    I started to disagree but stopped myself, knowing she didn’t want that from me. “We probably all deserve better,” I said instead.
    “Probably.”
    “But you stuck with me.”
    “Of course. I’d promised I would.”
    I let my hands sit in the hot water and looked at her. “That promise cost you a lot, though.”
    “Real promises always do.”
    “Sure, but when do you stop? When does a promise become too much? What if another promise comes up? A promise to care for someone else, maybe.”
    Gretchen blinked at me. “Those are contradicting questions.”
    “Sure they are.”
    “Where are you going with this?”
    I didn’t know where I was going. I wanted to apologize for breaking my promise to her, for taking up necromancy again, even if it were different this time. I suppose I wanted her to understand that I wasn’t really breaking my promise to her--there was just something even more important: taking care of a friends’ daughter. She knew how much I loved our daughters. If I explained, I’m sure she’d--never mind. I was starting to sound trite in my own head.
    “It doesn’t matter. I was just thinking. It wasn’t a bad kind of love, was it? The way I loved our daughters?”
    Gretchen reached up and put her hand on the side of my hair. It was a new gesture. She’d only started doing it since we’d moved back to Colorado, and I liked it. “No, it was a good kind of love. Hungry, but generous at the same time. The kind of love only a person as crazy as you could manage.”
    I wrinkled my nose. “Thanks for that. Speaking of daughters, where’s Bonnie?”
    Gretchen went back to drying. “A boy.”
    “Oh. Of course, those are out there, aren’t they.”
    “A few.”
    “Why hasn’t Bonnie told me about this? Did I do something?”
    “No, silly. This is a very recent thing.”
    “How recent?”
    “Last two days.”
    “That’s okay, then. Maybe. Am I old enough to be calm about this yet? It’s not like it’s the first time she’s been on a date.”
    “Won’t be the last, either.”
    “Is this boy a keeper?”
    Gretchen shrugged. “Too early to tell. I’m not sure I’m a good judge of that, anyway.”
    “Right.” She had picked me, after all. “You think about dating?”
    “Me? No. As I said, I’m not such a good judge on these things.”
    I scrubbed the last of the dinner off the last of the plates. “Sure you are. I turned out all right after a while. You saw something in me and I came around. Eventually.”
    She grimaced. “I’m not sure I can handle the ‘eventually’ again.”
    I drained the water and she finished drying. “You’re smarter now than you were. For example, you didn’t stay married to me. You should find someone. You deserve someone. Bonnie won’t think you’re trying to replace me, if that matters to you.”
    “It does,” agreed Gretchen, “and I think you’re right. In fact, to hear her tell it, I know you’re right. She tried to set me up with her math teacher.”
    “Mr. Jackson?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well. He’s...skinny.”
    “Very. I politely declined. It didn’t seem appropriate to go out with him before she had finished his class.”
    “That’s a convenient excuse.”
    Gretchen made a noncommittal noise. She hung up the towel and I dried my hands on it.
    “Thank you for dinner,” I said.
    “Thank you for paying child support,” said my ex-wife.
    “It’s a good excuse to come by.”
    She nodded. “Yes, it is.”

On the Road Again -- Section 04 (which is really 2b)

2011-05-30T13:08:00.000-06:00

[A much longer section. Don't know what to say about it, but sometimes trying to be a nice guy is an awkward thing.]

    I didn’t have to pull so hard anymore. In fact, she was running ahead of me. Part of me was laughing that the same girl who had been ready to go down into a cabin of crazy shaman-wanna-be’s with nothing more than a handgun was now outpacing me, and I go running regularly. Well, semi-regularly.
    There was enough moon to see by, and the underbrush was sparse in this area, so she was able to keep a pretty straight course, but it was a course in the wrong way if we wanted to get off the mountain alive.
    “Left!” I called to her.
    She glanced back at me and I pointed on the angle. I was starting to get winded, but the Pine Dogs aren’t the most subtle of men when they hunt, and their howls dug down straight through my stomach into my legs and pushed me ahead. The night was strange with silver and shadow, dips that looked deep punching up shallow under my feet, other patches collapsing down under my weight. I felt a stab up through my back muscles with one particularly off misstep and, when I didn’t swear, I realized that Gretchen had really done wonders with my head in the years we’d been married.
    I also realized there was something I could do about the uneven terrain. I tried to let my breathing fall into a steady rhythm, told the passengers in my head to be nice and quiet, and I reached out to the spirits of the mountain.
    For a double handful of heartbeats there was nothing, which was usual. Natural spirits had never been my forte, which said more about me than about nature, I’m guessing. I gave it time, though--as much time as you can give when running up a mountain and toward a very dubious safety--and my patience paid off. At first I felt the flickering, quick animal spirits around me, hidden in the pines and aspens like still flames, quick and pure and uncomfortable against my mind like a lick of oil. I had come to realize years ago that animal spirits and I would never manage more than an uneasy peace that comes from pretending the other doesn’t exist. I ignored them, caught a quick few breaths, then hissed out slowly between my teeth. It was painful trying to do all this while running up a slope, but downhill was not an option--well, at least not my favorite option. As some great man said, he who turns and runs away, lives to fight another day. Unless that was from some movie.
    My deeper breathing and further patience paid off. Suddenly, like a rising flood of deep mountain green, I felt the spirits of the slope’s plant life lift up and surround me. Me breath evened out and my steps became more sure. Step here, through the tight branches there that suddenly weren’t so tight, another pace here, breathe in, breathe out. I felt the heart of an old, old pine flicker at me with all the curiosity that ancient wood can muster, then it settled back into the quiet sway of the night. It wasn’t much--compared to Takugara, I’ve got all the finesse with plants that a wrecking ball has with concrete--but it was enough. I caught up with Annabel in time to put a hand under her elbow as she stumbled. She would have recovered just fine, I’m sure, but I felt a strange rush of manly pride in being there at just the right moment--ah, not manly pride: fatherly pride. Hm, not just fatherly pride. The other that was riding inside me had also noticed how attractive Annabel was, but that was a not of emotion I would have to sort out later. In some ways my life had been easier when any spirits I brought back from the road had just been food and cannon fodder.
    The emotions inside me were in harmony, though, all seeking to protect Annabel, all at one with the flora surrounding me and my companions, and I heard the sound I’d been hoping for: the stream. Heavy snowpack and spring rains meant the countryside was waterlogged, and that water seeped out of the pores of the mountain and into the streams like blood into icy veins. It would be cold, I knew, but it was our best chance to avoid a fight, and that was my top priority. I could probably handle myself all right, but I had no idea how good Annabel was with that gun, and I didn’t want to have to find out. Get home, get safe, figure out the time and place to fight later, if at all.
    My manly pride and natural harmony lasted for another three strides before it all evaporated as the muddy stream bank crumbled out from under us, dropping us into the stream that was rougher, higher, and much closer than I had expected. How had I missed it? My moment of mental shock disappeared into a rough moment of extreme physical shock as the freezing water crushed my arms and legs. No, not crushed. Just cold. Extremely cold. Annabel yelped and I hissed, our little frigid duet.
    “Cold!” she said, beginning to struggle to her feet and toward other side. I couldn’t let her. I scrambled to my feet in the thigh-deep water, grabbed her by the shoulder, and pulled her back into and under the silver mirror. She came up spluttering as I dunked myself under. My ears and jaw ached from the cold, and she was saying something to me--apparently outraged, based on the way her forehead crinkled down--but I ignored it and started pulling her upstream, wading against the rough flow of the water.
    “Are you crazy?” She had to shout over the rush of the stream. “We can’t go up this!”
    “But it’s easier to go downstream, so they’ll look downstream.”
    “They’re not going to be looking in this river at ALL!” Her body was starting to shake and her teeth were chattering. “And there’s no way we can go upstream against this.”
    I blinked at her and looked back a the bank where we’d fallen in. I’d managed to pull us a total of perhaps eight feet. “You’re right,” I called at her. “Downstream it is, then.”
    “No way! OUT it is!”
    I shrugged, grabbed her across the front of her shoulders, and pulled us both over backwards into the stream. She kicked against me, but I had about seventy pounds on her and a solid advantage in upper body strength, so I managed to keep us both floating on our backs as the stream carried us down through the dark.
    A drier winter and spring and the stream would have been too shallow for us to float at all. I’d fished up here as a child in a year the flow had been more rocks and mud than it had been water, but my father had insisted, so we’d gone. It was a ‘bonding experience,’ he informed me, and my mother agreed. Go bond with your father. I don’t know why they’d been so keen on bonding that summer. It had been so very, very optional every other year, though I’m not trying to blame my choices as an adult on some kind of parental neglect. There’s a point where my choices became my choices, and one fishing trip one way or another really didn’t matter any more. We hadn’t caught anything.
    This stream was a different beast entirely, and I do mean beast. I didn’t even try to reach out to the spirits of the water; not only is running water particularly disruptive to the life of souls brought back untimely from the Road, but I’m willing to admit that water spirits frighten me. Animals may not like me, but they’re typically straight forward in their desires: feed, fight, flee. People, for all the layers of seeming and civilization that we use to cover over it all, we still are responding to just those same things: feed, fight, flee. Water, though, is unpredictable. Take a ship wreck: you never know what will be sucked down to be buried in the black trenches that are the ocean’s deepest secrets, and what will be thrown up on the shore, miles and miles away. I’d read about a poodle, once, that had arrived in Hawaii on a carton of beer. The owner’s boat had gone down off the coast of California. I couldn’t remember if the poodle had lived or not.
    The point, though, was that water has never been something I’ve understood, let alone been able to control, so I didn’t bother trying. It would have been ideal to float downstream with my feet out front, pushing off any obstacles, and turning the whole thing into a kind of alpine water-slide. Ideal didn’t take into account that I had to keep a struggling teenager from climbing onto the banks and leaving a scent trail for the Pine Dogs to pick up on. So instead of ideal I settled on second best, or fifth best, and tried to keep my eyes back over my shoulder so as to avoid the worst of everything.
    Instead it seemed like everything tried to find me. Things went well enough for the first thirty seconds, with just a bang or two to my calf from rocks tucked out of sight by the flooding. The water was splashing up into my eyes in shadowy sprays and waves, but I kept us in the middle of the flow and I think prevented Annabel from taking any blows. She wasn’t happy with me, from what I could tell--there were a few words I tried to close my ears to, but I could tell that John, inside my head, wasn’t pleased with what he was hearing. Unless he wasn’t pleased with me, but again, some things can’t be done by committee, such as using a stream-become-river to run away from a pack of human hunting dogs.
    That’s when the everything I mentioned started seeking me out. I jerked and flailed as I rock punched up out of the silver sheet of the stream and tried to strike me in the face. With a heroic contortion I managed to twist my body enough to take the blow on the side of my head--not too hard, but not comfortable--and then we were turning sideways to the flow of the stream. I realized I couldn’t do much to shelter Annabel at that angel, so I let go, probably more due to my numbing arms and the pain from the blow than from any real plan. In fact, I was beginning to think that escape by becoming human popsicles was a terrible idea, but it had been the only one I had, and it was too late by that point to do much else.
    The rocks became more plentiful, the stream more rapid in both senses of the word, and it was the best I could do to keep sight of Annabel. Water battered my face, my fingers had either fallen off or become completely numb, and it was one of those times where a wiser, deeper individual might have taken the time to consider the kind of life choices that had brought him to this moment.
    The shallow person that I am, I did my very best to stay alive.
    After something between three minutes and three hours, the water slowed and I pulled my thoughts together long enough for John’s fatherly instincts to kick into overdrive. I did something like an attempt at swimming and turned myself around, looking for the girl I had dumped into the river with me. There she was, pulling herself up onto the bank, thirty feet behind me. It was the same side of the stream that held the Pine Dogs cabins, but I wasn’t going to be picky. Besides, maybe the Dogs would assume that we’d crossed the river, and wouldn’t think to look for us on the same side. Whatever. I was too cold to be picky.
    By the time we were both up on the shore and face to face, my teeth were clacking together and Annabel was glaring at me. I thought about offering her my jacket, but decided that was idiotic. Her whole body was shaking, and another piece of soaked clothing wasn’t going to do much to change that.
    “Why?” She managed to croak the word out through the shakes.
    “They hunt by smell,” I said, shaking right along with her. “Now we’re downwind from them and we’ve washed off our scent in the river.”
    “We froze it off,” she said.
    I tried to nod in agreement, but my head was already quivering so I think I just ended up looking cold. Er. Colder. “We need to get moving. I think there are more cabins down this way.”
    I’m pretty sure Annabel started nodding, but she was facing the same problems I was, her arms wrapped around her body to try to block out the cold and hold in what warmth was left. Thankfully, the evening wasn’t much more than cool. It was just the snowmelt that had stiffened our joints and pounded its way into the marrow.
    “I parked by those cabins,” she said.
    “Why were you uphill from the Pine Dogs?”
    “I figured they wouldn’t expect an attack from uphill when the road is downhill.”
    “There’s a road up above, too. That’s where I parked.”
    “Oh.”
    “Doesn’t matter.” I swept my hand out, palm up, toward what I figured was the right way to the cabins. I was pretty sure Annabel didn’t want me touching her again so I didn’t offer my arm, even though it was the kind of thing my father had done with my mother. I wasn’t sure if it was out of genuine affection or cold formality, but I’d had it drilled into my head. I stifled that instinct and walked next to her through the cool air.
    Actually, ‘hobbled’ might have been a better word to describe what we were doing. I beat at my chest, trying to get my body warm, but feeling was starting back into my fingers and the impact of the blows stung and ached in my knuckles, all at the same time.
    “So you were going to run down this way after you killed a few?” I was trying to make conversation, though I wasn’t sure why. I don’t think you really need conversation when running for your life. The nicer rules of society might not be so applicable, I’d think.
    “I lost the gun,” said Annabel. “In the water.”
    “Ah.” She hadn’t answered my question, which said to me she hadn’t thought that far ahead. I could understand not planning ahead. I was in the same boat, taking us downhill away from my car. My car that was full of my scent. They might not be able to find me just off of that, but it was a good bet they’d recognize me if we ever met again. If I had any say in the matter, that wouldn’t happen.
    “I think we’re almost there,” said Annabel, pointing at a shape in the moonlight. My brain caught up and recognized it as the A-frame of a cabin, two long slopes that I’d never liked in architecture, just as a general rule. “I think I’m parked near the next one. No, two after that. I don’t know.”
    She was sounding tired, and I knew what she was feeling. I was getting there myself after too little sleep, a ride in a freezing river, an argument with Gretchen, a greenhouse full of dead plants, and, just to be complete, getting buried alive and bringing back two souls with me from the Long Road. I rubbed at my face. I was starting to hear things, too.
    No I wasn’t. There were voices behind us--not the calls of dogs anymore, but voices all the same, and as far as I knew, there wasn’t anyone on this mountain that we wanted to take the chance of meeting.
    “This way,” I said quietly, taking Annabel’s elbow.
    She jerked it out of my grip. I’d been right: she didn’t want me touching her. I pulled my hands back in surrender, up by my shoulders, but then put a finger over my mouth with one hand and waved her toward a clump of bushes with another. Annabel looked skeptical at first, but then her head twisted around as she heard the voices, too, and she followed me quickly. There wasn’t much space between the wall of the cabin and the scrub oak, but there was enough to crawl in--just barely. The gap I had found ended after not much more than my body length. I tried to push a pathway for myself but the branches were too dense.
    “Keep going!” whispered Annabel.
    “I can’t.”
    “I’m out in the open!”
    “I really can’t.”
    She shoved my feet to the side. “I’m coming in.”
    I blinked, John’s soul a shocked silence in my head as my other passenger seemed to radiate amused approval. Annabel grabbed onto my jeans with one hand to pull herself along, and I tried to flatten myself against the cabin and think chaste thoughts. No, I needed to do more than that. If those voices were pine dogs, we needed cover. Helped by a body that was still deciding whether hypothermia were a good idea or not, I valiantly put aside the fact that, for the first time in years, a woman was lying next to me, and tried to still my breathing.
    It didn’t work. “Not there,” I said, wincing.
    “Oh! Did I--”
    “No, you didn’t. Just a bruise.”
    “Sorry.”
    My face felt hot, and I realized I was blushing. Also, feeling was starting to come back into my toes with all the enjoyment of a massage with a pin cushion. Annabel finally settled into place next to me in some parody of thirteen-year-olds dancing, trying to be far apart but, by necessity, closer than arms’ length. I set all that aside again and breathed. Years of habit worked for me, and it wasn’t long before the spirit of the bushes warmed around me in a pale, silvery-green wash. The pain eased out of my fingers and toes and I stopped shaking, a benefit of working with natural things that never came with the darker practices. It became a simple pleasure to lie on the ground, like my soul had eaten enough and was filled. I almost laughed--not a humorous laugh--remembering the dark hunger that was all that ever came with necromancy. I was glad to be rid of that. I wanted it desperately.
    The voices were closer, and with my heightened senses I could see that they were Pine Dogs. Their souls moved like crouching wolves or hunting hounds, frayed at the edges and dripping, pooling away onto the ground but never running out as more darkness bubbled up at the core. There were three of them, pacing through the trees. They weren’t bothering to hide their voices, too excited, too overconfident, to be quiet hunters. Too young. They must have been in their twenties by the sound of their laughter.
    “They’re not down this way,” said one. “Jack and Musk will chase them down across the stream. I’m sure that’s where they went.”
    “Maybe,” said another, a large one with an oversized soul-head that seemed to be dragging along the ground. “But I still say I smelled something this way, so we’re looking.”
    “Whatever,” said the first voice, but there wasn’t much defiance in it. It was clear who was the alpha in this trio. I didn’t get a good view of the third, but I decided it was time to stop looking and start hiding. I pulled the green warmth of the plants’ spirit around me, around Annabel, drew it close and let the feeling of nature and harmony smooth away our scent and our contrary nature as humans. My thoughts went pale and soft, my body calm and ready, my eyes open and alert.
    The hunting trio jogged up toward our hiding place, were there, then were past. Moments slipped away and they came back.
    “There’s something not right here,” said the third voice, and I felt Annabel stiffen ever so slightly next to me. I reached out to her with my thoughts and the slow patience of growing things, and she relaxed again.
    “What do you mean not right?” asked the first voice. I decided to call him Whiny. “I can’t smell anything.”
    “Shut up,” said Cranium, my new name for the alpha, though from what I could tell, he spent more time exercising his physical body than the what passed for brains between his ears, but that soul-head was just too big for me to notice much else. “What are you seeing?”
    The Thinker was paused, looking right at us. “I don’t know. A bush.”
    “A bush?” laughed Whiny. “Get ‘em, boys! It’s a bush!” Whiny yelped as a large fist clipped him on the ear.
    “I told you to shut up.” Cranium looked back at us. “I don’t smell anything, either.”
    “I know,” said Thinker. “But it seems like we should smell something here. Don’t you get that feeling?”
    They might have come closer. They might have pulled back the branches and found us, and then we would have discovered what kind of violence was still wrapped up in bone and iron and buried in my gut behind promises and dreams--dreams of being a good man tangled with dreams of remembered addictions--but they didn’t. A howl went up out in the night and it was only a heartbeat before the trio was running, bounding through trees and over dips, off toward the stream.
    My breath trailed out of my mouth and I let my sense of the plant spirit fade away. I realized that Annabel was pressed along the length of my body, her face against my neck and damp hair under my chin.
    “You’re warm,” she said.
    My hand was on her shoulder and I jerked it away guiltily. I was already certain that John and I would be having a conversation the moment I fell asleep, but I wasn’t going to do anything to make that conversation more difficult that it was already on track to be.
    “We should go.” She nodded against my neck and the last of the cold rushed out of my body in a flood of good, old-fashioned hormones. “We should go now,” I added, and flattened myself against the cabin awkwardly. In fact, awkwardly was the only way of getting us out of this particular arrangement. She’s barely older than my daughter, I thought. But she’s not your daughter, added a voice that might have been helped along by the dark companion in my head.
    I held very still as Annabel worked her way out of our hiding place.

On the Road Again -- Section 03

2011-05-22T20:55:00.000-06:00

[This is actually more like the REAL section 02, since it comes right after section 01, but I think I'll simply have to post a Google Doc that keeps all the sections in the right order. Or at least in the best order I've got for them so far.

[I do recognize that this story isn't going to be for all of my readers. I recognize that it's not as lighthearted as the other stuff, and I'm sorry if I lose anyone because of that, but I do think this story is the next step for me.

[Anyway, nothing happens in this section. I'm starting to realize that when I feel like that's the case, it's actually a pretty good sign. City of Dreams was an entire book where it felt like nothing happened, and that might be my best so far.]

    I slid off my stool, picked up my bag, and made my way to the door that said ‘STAF O LY’ in black and gold stickers. I pushed through the door, turned down a short hallway that should have had photographs on the wall but didn’t anymore, and stepped into the bathroom.
   “Teal,” I said out loud to myself. The towels were supposed to be teal, since it coordinated with the tile, but Bela had decorated in a style I might have called ‘Colorblind Bachelor,’ or maybe ‘Grandma’s Leftover Linens.’ Gretchen, my ex, would never have put that color of pink for a hand towel. I’d never seen what the big deal was, one way or the other, until after we had separated. Then, for reasons probably obvious to a psychiatrist, I always needed my towels to match.
   I did the necessaries and flushed. I watched and waited as the water kept trickling into the bowl and the little knob on the toilet stayed down. I guess Bela had never bothered to fix it, either. I reached out and flipped it up, washed my hands, and made my way with my bag to the stairs.
   It was at the top of the stairs that Bela found me, two minutes later. He had his shotgun in one hand and Morzsa in the other. The little dog wasn’t happy to see me--he’s too neurotic to ever be happy, I think--but he also wasn’t scared, which was reassuring. Though I knew I wasn’t riding any souls at the moment, and none were riding me, so I don’t know what I was worried about. A dog can’t be scared of something that’s not there. Well, Morzsa could be, but he wasn’t.
   “I wondered if I’d find you up here,” said Bela. The shotgun wasn’t aimed at me exactly, but it wouldn’t take much for it to get there. “You sure you’re clean, Lance?”
   “Except for your toxic coffee and it’s lifetime supply of caffeine, I’m sober as a saint.”
   “Some of them weren’t too sober, I can promise you. Some were Hungarian.”
   “Even so, Bela, I swear on that shotgun that’s waving around my knees, I’ve got nobody inside me but the soul I was born with.”
   He sniffed. “Which your parents probably picked out in a second-hand shop.”
   I shrugged. “That would explain a lot about me, then, wouldn’t it.”
   “So tell me,” he said, jerking his chin toward the top of the stairs, “why aren’t you already down in the basement?”
   I scratched at my head. “You’ve done some remodeling.”
   “Of course I have. That’s why you gave me the house in the first place, Lance. You wanted me to keep things locked up that should never have been opened in the first place, and doing that takes extra precautions. Also, I needed to make the front of the place into a cafe.”
   “A great choice, by the way.”
   “Thank you.”
   He was staring at me.
   “I swear, I’m clean, Bela. I haven’t been to the Road in years. I promised Gretchen.”
   “And she still wouldn’t stay with you?”
   I grimaced. “Why should she have? I wouldn’t have stayed with me. She needed to move on and find someone new.”
   “Has she?”
   “No. Why? Have you talked with her?”
   “Of course not. I’m still pissed at her for dumping you.”
   I stared at him, and Bela stared right back. Then he sniffed again.
   “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “It’s okay to like her.”
   “I do like her.”
   “So call her up.”
   “No.”
   “She’s a good woman.”
   “Don’t I know it. Better than you by a long shot.”
   “I’m sure she still likes you, too, Bela.”
   “Probably does. But you were my friend first, and whether you’ve forgiven her or not, I’m still pissed, so shut up, turn around, and open the doors. Prove to me there’s nothing riding you.”
   “Don’t you trust me?”
   “Sure, I trust you. You want me to give you a free pass, then?”
   I didn’t even have to think about that. “Here I go, opening the doors.” I slung my bag over my shoulder and shook my hands out. “This is highly disturbing, though.”
   “It’s supposed to be.”
   “You’ll have to do the doors for me on the way back out.”
   “Assuming you pass the sniff test, that is.”
   I looked back at Morzsa. “You doing all right, boy? Your nose working?”
   “Shut up and open the door, Lance. The night isn’t getting any younger.”
   I nodded and turned back to the door, and I winced. “A cross, Bela? You know that’s all psychological.”
   “Possible. But you still haven’t opened it.”
   “That’s because I’m sure I know what’s on the other side, and no, you don’t have to say anything more. I’m opening the doors.”
   Psychological or not, messing with symbols of any religion that frowns on necromancy--which, as far as I know, is pretty much all of them--is hard for a Road Walker to do. There’s something about unnaturally ripping a soul out of its progress to eternal reward, and then feeding off that soul, that doesn’t mesh well with the teachings of most religions. Haven’t met God personally, but I expect that when essentially all religions agree that something is bad, you can figure that God frowns on it.
   I looked at the cross that was carved on the door, touched it with one finger, then grabbed the handle and pulled.
   “Only six more to go,” said Bela.
   “Just six? You made this door out of rowan?”
   “Rowan wood and a cross. I economized.”
   I reached into the dark and flipped on the light switch that I knew was there, the bulb flickering to life on the wall just inside the first door.
   “A crescent on the next door? I’m not even sure that’s an actual religious symbol.”
   I glanced back at Bela, and he just shrugged, then jerked his chin toward the stairs. “Keep going.”
   I felt strange as I opened each door in turn, but I think it was more psychological than anything else, a nostalgic dread for the barriers that before would have been such a pain for me to pass, and I mean that literally. Intense pain, each worse than the last. Souls ripped back from the road unnaturally don’t do well with the harmony of natural things, and each barrier embodied some harmony of the world. Rowan, bone (don’t ask me how he got a bone door), silver (mostly little bits of metal, pounded into the wood), oak, one door that looked like it had been painted in salt crystals, another door that sloshed like it was filled with water (and moved like it, too), and a final door that was more a gate than anything else, made of cold iron. Each one had almost certainly been treated by someone who was either very holy or very strong with the natural spirits of the area, giving each the kind of spiritual glow that made hell for necromancers. For my kind.
   I pushed past the last one, flipped the switch that kicked on the florescent tubes along the ceiling, and waited while Bela closed each door behind him.
   “You satisfied?” I asked.
   “Mostly, yes,” he said. “I think I’m someone who sees the good in life.”
   “I meant do you believe I’m clean.”
   “I believed you from the beginning, Lance. I just wanted you to open the doors so you’d remember the seriousness of what you’re doing.”
   “Her father asked me, Bela. He begged me to help him protect her.”
   “Did he know what he was asking?”
   “I have no idea.”
   “He probably didn’t mean this.”
   “I don’t have the strength to do it any other way. I wish I did. I wish I had a life of virtue to fall back on that would give me the power to do this some other way, but I’ve only got what I know, no matter how messed up that is.”
   “You’re breaking your promise to Gretchen.”
   “She’d understand.”
   “You think?”
   “No. But I’m doing it anyway.”
   “You sure you’re doing it for the right reasons?”
   I suppose he’d had to ask that question. It was exactly the question I’d been avoiding, but it really was the elephant in the room. I thought I was heading back to the road for the noblest of causes, because what are we without our children, right? But maybe I wasn’t. Maybe there was another way to do this. I mean, even the toughest shaman wasn’t immune to a bullet, and the nastiest necromancer still couldn’t do much against good, old-fashioned decapitation. Arm myself--borrow a gun or two, easy enough to do in Colorado--and go in, guns blazing. No, not guns blazing. Quietly. This might not even come to violence. But if it did.
   “I’m pretty fit,” I said.
   Bela shrugged. “Looks like you’re keeping up with things.”
   “I’m also a decent aim.”
   “I’ll take your word for it.”
   “So you tell me: if this comes down to a fight, you think I stand a chance with just that?”
   Bela stared at me for a long, long moment. I wanted him to say I could manage with ‘just that,’ and I wanted him to tell me to climb into the grave, step back onto the Road, to go walking on that Old Way one more time. Damned if I did, damned if I didn’t--hell, I was probably damned by this point no matter what I did, but I wanted to spend the time I had left in this world as well as I could. Was this living well? Was I satisfying my right purpose?
   Bela turned to a work table, set down Morzsa and the shotgun, and looked back at me. “Anyone you bring back just walks with you.”
   “Of course,” I agreed.
   “You don’t ride them, and you make darn sure they don’t ride you.”
   “I don’t know how to answer that, Bela. I’ll do my best.”
   “You just tell me that’s how it will be.”
   I looked him in the eye, and I didn’t know what he was thinking. I couldn’t tell if he were angry or frightened, though I suppose it’s true that those two are never far apart. “That’s how it will be,” I said.
   “Then let’s get this open.”

On the Road Again -- Section 02 ... sort of

2011-05-09T22:46:00.000-06:00

[This isn't really the part that comes next in the story--in fact this is a few chapters on, I expect--but it was the next thing that showed up for me to write. It's what I wanted to write next, I guess, which isn't a bad reason to write something. If it's exciting to me, it's more likely to be exciting to my readers.

[Anyway, imagine that Lance has done some snooping, has been to the Long Road and back, has found out who Annabel Fox is looking for, and has followed her up into the mountains around our Rocky Mountain city (somewhere in Colorado, a major metropolis, but not Denver--it's a made-up city), and has tracked her to the slope just above the cabins of the Pine Dogs.]

    “Annabel,” I whispered, guessing that the shadow in the dark was her. Apparently I had guessed right, because she spun around in her crouch, her face catching the light from the moon that was still hanging onto the tops of the mountains, and in the heartbeats after I learned a pair of new things, both jarring like a blow to the ear.
    The first was that Annabel Fox was much better looking than her father. More beautiful than her mother, even, and I’d always admired Maureen--one of those women who make accidental outfits like sweats look like she meant every bit of them. Of course, as I was seeing his daughter for the first time since his death, I’m sure I was picking up more than a little on John’s paternal instincts banging around inside my head, but I had been single and alone long enough to recognize a good jolt of female appeal when I saw it. Her hair was dark--probably just the night--and her face was pale--though everything was pale in the moonlight--but whatever the special effects, the sight of her hit me just below my sternum and my breath went away. For that moment it didn’t matter that I was old enough to be her father, and then an instant later I reminded myself that it did matter (which shook my thoughts out of their rut), and then I learned the other disturbing thing.
    No matter how often I face the end of a loaded handgun, it is always a new experience.
    “I’m a friend,” I said, slowly and calmly, my hands up, palms out. My adrenaline had been solidly pumping since I started sneaking around the Pine Dogs’ compound, but the way the gun was shaking in her hand, facing Annabel gave me a fresh jolt that made my knees shake as I crouched there. “I don’t want to surprise you, but I’m about to kneel down now so that I don’t fall over, startle you, and get shot.”
    “Who are you?” she asked, a whisper that the wind almost covered up as it pushed through the pine branches around us.
    “Dropping to my knees now,” I whispered back, still valiantly hanging onto my shaky crouch. “Don’t shoot...and...there.” I eased down into some strange fake-Japanese bow of surrender. “Like I said, I’m a friend. Lance Graywall. I did work for your mom and dad--all the plants and things around your funeral home. I run a greenhouse on the East side of town called Every Living Thing. It’s not much, but,” I shrugged, “it keeps me eating. Gas in the car. Stuff like that.” Why was I telling her about my greenhouse? Details about life are trustworthy, I decided, though I could have been lying and how was she to know? “Point is, I’m here to help you.”
    “You want to kill these guys, too?” she asked, and her face made me want to cry. She was angry--rage was painted across her face in broad strokes from a dark brush--but she was also terrified, the deep kind of fear that crawls into your heart and dies there, and rots, and never leaves. I knew that fear.
    “Not that kind of help. You don’t want to kill these idiots.”
    Her grip on the gun tightened. “Yes, I do.”
    I wrinkled my nose. “Nah. You don’t, not really, but don’t misunderstand. I’m not criticizing here. You fully intend to go after the people who killed your parents, and I can respect that. You’ve got the heart of a fighter. Props to you.”
    She blinked in the moonlight, dry lids over damp eyes. “You’re an idiot,” she said.
    I leaned back. “That’s a rather abrupt judgment, don’t you think?”
    “I’m not a fighter. I just have to do this.” Someone in the cabin behind her laughed, a loud, bragging sound, and Annabel started to turn away.
    “Fine,” I said, grabbing her attention back with my voice. “So you’re not a fighter. You’re just smart. You see a threat and you know that you need to get rid of it, or you think the police won’t get them so it’s up to you, or whatever it is, this is what you feel you have to do. Justice prevails, God speed the right, and that is probably all true, but I’m not here to help you kill them.”
    “Then go away.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “I promised your father.”
    I could hear John talking at me, that pressure somewhere in the back of my frontal lobe that is a sure sign that the riding dead are upset. I was probably doing this all wrong, at least from the perspective of Annabel’s loving father, but there are some things I figure you just can’t do by committee, and right then I decided that talking a homicidal teen down off a mountain was definitely not group work.
    Annabel’s mouth was tight. “They killed my parents.”
    I nodded. “I saw it.”
    She was shaking her head. “No, they didn’t just kill them. They tore them apart. I couldn’t tell which parts were my parents and which were already corpses and--” She wasn’t seeing me anymore, and the mountain around us was gone, too, I knew. She was in the grip of images that she’d be sharing with her therapist for years to come and we didn’t have time for her to be there just then. Of course, doing something dramatic like a firm slap was out of the question, seeing how that would likely get me shot. I toyed with that idea for a moment longer even so, just because I’d always wondered how well a slap would actually work, but my instinct for self-preservation finally pushed that aside. (Besides, she was just a pair of years older than my daughter, and I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to hit her.)
    I decided to try something a little less extreme. “Hey, babe,” I said.
    Her eyes snapped into focus and she glared at me.
    “I know,” I went on, “you’re not my babe in any sense of the word, but I needed your attention. I don’t have the right answers for you right now. In fact, I admit that part of me would be delighted to head in there with you and grind those pathetic bits of rot into rot paste.” Annabel looked puzzled, and I admit, I was confused by what I was saying, too, but momentum was the key in a situation like this; not what you say so much as the tone of voice. “Maybe we’d get one, or two, or five, but we wouldn’t get any more than that, and then the rest would be all over us like a pack of wild dogs.” I didn’t try explaining how exactly like a pack of wild dogs they would be. “So even if I can’t convince you to drop this all together, at least don’t do it now. Come back with me, we’ll talk about it, and then do it smart. There’s no rush in all this. Take the time to do revenge right, and then have the best revenge of all: outlive the sons of bitches.” I cringed a little at my choice of words, knowing Gretchen would have been after me for it, but I figured it was a technical description more than an actual cuss word, so I was okay.
    Annabel was staring at me and the gun had sagged down so it wasn’t aimed so directly at my chest anymore, which I took as a good sign. Also, the pressure from John on the inside of my brain was gone, so I suppose I must have done something right. When I thought about what I’d said, I realized that I had just tacitly agreed that his daughter should commit premeditated murder, but I was guessing that John understood what kind of extreme circumstance I was in and was waiting for his daughter’s answer.
    “You’ll help me kill them later?” she finally asked.
    I shook my head. “I can’t promise that. I have...issues with killing.”
    Her gun was back up. “But you said you wanted them dead.”
    “Believe me, I do.” As I said it, I realized just how powerfully that was true. It wasn’t just John’s anger at his own murder, or the other voice I’d locked up in my soul, the dark voice I’d carried with me out of the dark road the way an alcoholic hides away a bottle, just in case--it was more. It was anger at myself, at what I had been and what I still was, and the panic that I might become all that again, become like these idiot children in the mountains, obsessed with their rights to power and land and dominance, absurd, childish rights to rule over a kingdom made up of bones and blood and misery. They were hungering after a food that could only make them hungrier still and I wanted to feed them with their own violence until they chocked on it, gagged on it, and vomited up the lives of every soul that they’d taken in their meaningless, mindless war. They looked so small to me, rabbits in their cabin cage, laughing, probably drunk, and I could come to them like an angel out of Hell, and I could make their every wish for violence come true.
    I blinked twice, hard, and rubbed at my face. “I want them dead, Annabel, but that’s one cup you can’t un-drink. Leave it for another day. For now, let’s get off this mountain and back into daylight, and then we can think it through. If you decide to come back, I’ll make sure you come back prepared. I promise you that much.”
    I looked her in the eyes when I said it, and I can’t imagine what she saw--a bit of her father peaking out, maybe?--but whatever it was, it was just enough. The gun aimed down at the ground and brittle edge of ice went out of her posture. She leaned against the rough trunk next to her and let out a long, rough breath.
    “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”
    I felt relief for a moment, and then that moment was gone. Really gone. I realized I wasn’t feeling the wind in my face anymore. My hair was caught in the breeze, licking at the edges of my face, as the air rushed past us, down the mountain slope.
    Toward the cabin of the Pine Dogs.
    I lurched up to my feet, scratching my face on the low pine branches and not caring, grabbing Annabel’s arm and pulling her up after me.
    “Run.”
    “Why?”
    “Just do it. Up we go.”
    “Did something happen?” She was pulling at me, looking back down toward the cabins of her parents’ killers.
    “It’s about to,” I said. “Please hurry.”
    “What is going on?” she demanded, which, I suppose, was as good a time as any for the howling to start.

On the Road Again -- Section 01

2011-05-07T13:59:00.000-06:00

[Yes, Accidental God has been completely derailed over the last month or so. Honestly, I don't know how to fix it, and I may just push through and write something, but I was not writing and not writing and not writing, so Tuesday I finally started writing something. Just something. I didn't know what it was, or where it was going, but by Thursday I had a pretty complete novel idea sitting in front of me. There's romance, intrigue, a chihuahua.

[Also, the story is looking to be a bit grittier than my others. I know, I'm trying all that again, and it may fail completely, but I guess I just have to keep trying to write it.

[Anyway, as usual, read this blog at your own risk. I may never finish anything that shows up on here, but I'll try to keep writing and I hope you'll enjoy what you do read.]

    There are seven ways into the Long Road. The quickest and most obvious way is to die. That's how most people arrive: car crash, knife in the alley, cancer. They're all a trip to the Long Road, fast or slow.
    The second and third ways involve variations on elaborate rituals, candles, incense, three of the Eight Great Names of Hell, and a goat. Not to worry, the goat is fine when it's all over.
    The fourth and least dangerous way is to find a door. I didn't have time to find a door, considering that they move sideways, slantways, and upside down if a body breathes on them too heavily, making a man as likely as not to send one skittering off like a crab as soon as he’s found it, and I was on a deadline.
    Six and seven are not an option for me, not since my early twenties--at least not if I wanted to keep on living. That's another story.
    So that left me with number five.
    "What would you like?" asked Bela. That's 'Bay-lah,' and it's a boy's name. He's got the kind of hands that wrap around a watermelon and have a little to spare. That night they were wrapped around a order pad.
    “Something with lots of caffeine,” I answered.
    “That stuff will kill you.”
    I shrugged. “Lots of things could do that. Guns, plastic bags, my ex-wife.”
    Bela twisted his mouth, giving my joke more courtesy than it deserved. My ex-wife is actually a very nice woman, much nicer than I am. For example, she would never do what I was about to do.
    “I also need to use your grave,” I said.
    Bela blinked. “Now THAT is something that could kill you.”
    I looked him in the eye. “It might. Probably will one of these days. But I made someone a promise.”
    Bela leaned across the counter in his diner--a classic kind of place, all chrome and soda fountains, a juke box in the corner, the buttons covered over by a piece of paper and the black marker words, Out of order, unless you know how to fix me. Bela ignored his other customers, though they were used to that. At Bela’s you got served when you got served, or you went someplace else where the food is fast and they give a banana-cream-pie about customer service.
    “You’re scaring me, Lance.”
    “Come on. I know what I’m doing. You know that as well as anybody.”
    “That’s the problem. You start walking down that Road again, you can’t be sure what you might wake up.”
    I grimaced, remembering some of the things I had awakened on my trips down the Road--the Weird Road, the Eldritch Path, the Cold Way, and a dozen other names. I’d left my finger behind once--ring finger, along with my wedding ring--all in the mouth of something with five extra mouths, a creature that had been a man once but had become a thing of scales and hunger. Another horror had a piece of my calf, and my hair was white even though I haven’t hit forty yet, thank you very much. I was still a very solid thirty-nine. Thirty-nine and still insane, I guess.
    “Whatever shows up, I can handle it.”
    “I’m not worried about the things on the Road,” said Bela, and he reached out a finger, poking me roughly in my sternum.
    “Ouch,” I said, since it seemed appropriate.
    “I’m worried about what you might wake up inside--”
    “I got it,” I said, pushing his hand away. “You don’t have to be so dramatic. I’ll be careful about that, too.”
    “An alcoholic doesn’t take care by walking into a bar.”
    “And I’m about to drown myself in whisky. Yeah, I understand, but you weren’t listening, Bela. I made someone a promise.”
    He stared at me longer, one of my oldest friends who knew me back when I thought I owned the world. Who knows? Perhaps I could have owned a decent sized piece of it if I hadn’t had a child, if my wife hadn’t left me, if I hadn’t woken up.
    “You’ll be careful?”
    “Come on, Bela. How should I know? I haven’t been back in three years. I don’t know if I’ll come out with the brain power of a zucchini, or if I’ll slip down that long hill back to where I was, or if whatever comes back will look like me but won’t be me--”
    “You’re starting to babble.”
    “This is worth babbling about.”
    “It is, but you shouldn’t worry too much. If it’s not you coming back, I’ve got a shot gun.”
    I stared at him. “I feel comforted.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    “How do I let you know that it IS me?”
    “You think I won’t be able to tell?”
    “Might not.”
    He grunted. “I suppose that’s possible. In that case I’ll have Morzsa come with me.”
    “Sounds smart.” Morzsa is his dog, a little sneeze of a thing that fits in half of his hand. I guess the little hiccup’s name means ‘crumb,’ but Bela told me he didn’t name it because of the size. Apparently every dog he had growing up was named Morzsa. A Hungarian thing, from what Bela said. Also, Morzsa has a talent for being very frightened. Not of everything; just of the right things.
    “If you have Morzsa, I won’t feel too nervous about the shotgun. Of course, if something does manage to come back riding me, the shotgun might not be enough.”
    Bela looked disgusted. “I’m not new to this dance, Lance. I might even be able to teach you a few steps.”
    “MIght,” I agreed and shut my mouth, looking around the diner. “Place needs mopping.”
    “I could use an extra pair of hands,” said Bela, and that was that. He went off to grab me coffee--foul stuff, but a step up from what I used to do to my body--and we stopped talking about what I’d be doing later. That was the nice thing about Bela: he’d beat you over the head to make a point, but he wouldn’t break his bat doing it.
    My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I always keep the thing on vibrate since I can’t seem to find a single ring tone I want to hear more than twice. I pulled it out and answered, not recognizing the number.
    “This is Lance.”
    “Lance Gravel?” asked a woman’s voice, somewhere in her fifties, I figured, or maybe just a smoker. Maybe both.
    “Graywell,” I corrected her, “but yeah, that Lance. Is this the Rabbit?”
    “Sure is, honey. How can I help you?”
    “There’s a girl I need to find.”
    “Daughter?”
    “Yes, but not mine. A friend’s.”
    “And is this friend’s daughter in trouble?”
    Bela slid my coffee in front of me and I nodded my thanks. “Might be. Right now she’s an angry kid, and I want to find her before she does anything stupid.”
    “Typical teenager,” said the Rabbit with a laugh that turned into a hacking cough, so I figured I wasn’t too far off with my smoker guess. “They’re like puppies, have to eat all their food right now, scatter it over the kitchen floor, and it’s the grownups who have to come after with a broom.”
    “Right,” I said, mostly because I didn’t know what else to say. “So you can help?”
    “Of course, hon, but I assume you called me for a particular reason. You don’t find the Rabbit to help with something the police are better suited for, now do you?”
    I thought about two or three ways I could answer that, all of which were sarcastic and none of them helpful. I suppose I was starting to get on edge. I needed to get down to Bela’s grave soon to have the time for what I needed, and the idea of what I was planning was starting to eat at my mind the way bleach eats at your scalp.
    I went with the simple answer. “No,” I said. “You call the Rabbit if you need news about the Twilight World, and that’s what I need. The girl’s name is Annabel Fox.”
    “Oh, honey!” Her voice sounded shocked. “Those Foxes?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What’s that girl doing? She isn’t trying to pick a fight!”
    “I think so.”
    “She’s stepping into a war!”
    “That’s what I hear.”
    There was silence for a while. I didn’t have more to say, and I figured the Rabbit needed a little time to decide if she was interested in helping me or not. I knew I was asking her to start poking at a beehive, but from what I’d heard, if anyone could keep the bees quiet, it was the Rabbit.
    “How old is the girl?” she asked after a while.
    “Nineteen, I think.”
    “You don’t know?”
    “Never met her, actually. I know the parents from work. I’d helped them with the gardens around their funeral home.”
    “You do landscaping?”
    “Run a plant nursery and greenhouse. Working with living things is good for me.”
    “Which nursery?”
    “Every Living Thing, on California.”
    “Right. The new place, isn’t it?”
    “I just moved here two years ago,” I admitted. “Following my own daughter.”
    “Huh,” she said, and we sat in silence for a moment more. “Two years is plenty to know what you might be getting into, am I right?”
    “You’re right.”
    “You know that picking a fight with either gang can be bad for your health.”
    “I’ll be prepared.”
    “The girl already killed one of them, didn’t she.”
    “From what I hear, but I’ve stayed out of this war so I don’t know which side she’s picking a fight with.”
    “Well,” said the Rabbit. “Well, well, well. I’ll help you find her. I’ll help that far, but no further. I’ve got a husband, two horses and a cat to take care of, and I’m not sticking my neck out for revenge.”
    “It’s for a girl,” I corrected her. “A frightened, angry girl.”
    “You say it however you like, hon, but I call it like I see it, and I want no part of it. I find her, I tell you where she is, and you take over from there. I wash my hands of all this. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”
    I turned my coffee mug in front of me, leaving a small arc of water behind it. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this,” I said, “to visit the fatherless.”
    “Don’t you go quoting scripture at me, necromancer,” said the Rabbit. “Yes, I know who you are. I asked my questions about the new greenhouse, don’t think I didn’t. I find her, and I expect to get paid. I’m not stepping closer to this war without a fat paycheck to go with it.”
    “How much?” I asked.
    “Three-thousand.”
    “What?! Just for information?”
    “Three, or go find yourself another oracle, and there ain’t no other oracle with ears as long as the Rabbit. Besides, I know you’ve been keeping to yourself out on the edge of town. You don’t know the innards of city at all, and so if you want to find little Miss Fox before she does herself a harm, you’d better find another guide and fast--or cough up the three-thousand.”
    Three-thousand. Actually, it was less than I was afraid it might be, but still more than I had sitting around. Maybe a little creative bookwork with the greenhouse would do it.
    “Fine,” I said, “though I might move in with you if I can’t make my mortgage payment.”
    She snorted. “Half in cash by tomorrow. You know where?”
    “Sure,” I said. “I’ll get it there.”
    The call cut off and I looked over at Bela who was waiting expectantly. “How did it go?” he asked.
    “She started out friendly then got angry.”
    “Sounds like her,” said Bela. “For all her talk, she scares pretty easily, and it’s not much of a trip to stumble from fear to anger. Not sure why she stays in this business, if it causes her so much anxiety.”
    “She charges enough, just for a bit of information.”
    “Information about a war.”
    I took a sip of my coffee. Terrible stuff, but I hate the flavor of energy drinks even more, and I needed to be a bit wired. Bela was right. It was information about a war. “I never should have moved here,” I said.
    “I thought you were following your ex-wife?”
    “She never should have moved here.”
    “But it’s her home town. Your home town, too, if you remember.”
    I shrugged. “True, but things weren’t like this twenty years ago. The place was safer.”
    Bela made a sound somewhere between a snort and rice shaking in a bucket. “Maybe safer after you left.”
    I bobbed my eyebrows. “Maybe safer for the ladies.”
    Bela looked at me. “Sure. We’ll go with that.”
    I grimaced as I took another swallow of coffee. “I am trying to make up for it, Bela. It’s not much, but I’m trying. I still can’t figure out how Susan managed to stay with me as long as she did.”
    “Some of us can’t figure out why she married you in the first place.”
    I pointed my finger at him, opened my mouth, then closed it. “You’ve got a point.” If I’d been asked, I couldn’t have told you why she’d married me either, though I’d thought I’d known when I was nineteen. I’d been like a god in my own eyes then, Hades just discovering that he had his own kingdom and it was good to be king.
    “Let me know when you’re ready,” said my friend, and he walked off to help someone else. Bela’s place is an all-night diner, so he gets everything from regulars to crazies in there, but that night it was pretty light on the crazies, by which I mean that everyone there looked like they’d had a bath in the last day or so. All as normal as normal gets, except for maybe me. I stared at the last few swallows of my coffee and I couldn’t get myself to drink it. Bela called an order over to his cook--Shauna, a cute thing wandering her way through community college a class or two at a time--and came around the counter to sit on a stool next to me, leaning on his elbows.
    “You don’t like my coffee?” he asked.
    “I hate it.”
    “Then why order it?”
    “You know why.”
    “Because you’re stupid.”
    “Pretty much.”
    “The Foxes’ girl?”
    “Yep.”
    “How were the parents?”
    “As good as could be expected. In shock. We didn’t have much time to talk.”
    Bela wrinkled his nose. “These gang wars are bad business. I’ve even heard that the police are calling the Feds.”
    “Our fair city about to get a visit from the Esoteric Crimes Division, is it? That’ll be lovely. I wonder if there will be anyone I know.”
    “I think you should count on that. Count on it, and be careful. You should avoid any misunderstandings.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind.” I spun my coffee mug around again, wasting time that I really shouldn’t have been wasting. Every minute brought daylight closer.
    “You sure you need to visit the Road?” asked Bela.
    I nodded. “It’s not my first choice, but the way I am right now, I couldn’t protect Annabel from a squirt-gun fight.”
    “Give yourself more credit. You’ve been working with plants quite a bit over the last couple years. I’ve seen what you can do, and it’s not shabby. Your little banzai is particularly impressive. It’s like a little old man that can hold up a mountain.”
    I shook my head. “I inherited that from someone. Did you know that? Takagura.”
    “The Takagura?”
    “Yep. Not entirely my work, that little tree. In fact, not much at all.”
    Bela considered that. “But it’s still with you,” he said finally. “It looks healthy, and that says something.”
    “Sure, but not much. I’m still pretty well clueless when it comes to anything but humans.”
    “A shame. You still positive you need to go?”
    I looked down at my hands, shaking. “Coffee’s kicking in,” I said, though I knew that wasn’t it. “Stop asking me, Bela. I need to go. You didn’t see the Foxes’ place.”
    “I read about it.”
    “It’s not the same. I was there, maybe a half hour after it all happened. I’ll probably have some mental disorder after what I saw.”
    “You?”
    “Me. It was--” I stopped talking, remembering. The smell was what was worst, a greasy overlay of bacon and vomit and fear, and I’d heard that memories get attached to things like smells, which didn’t look good for my ever eating a BLT again. “Bad,” I said finally. “It was bad. Whoever or whatever did all that was angry and strong, and after what they did they’ll be bloated with power like a rotting tomato.”
    “Are tomatoes powerful?”
    “Work with me. I don’t have a better metaphor.”
    “I get your point.”
    We sat in silence and I stared at nothing, then I closed my eyes. “I know I’ve seen worse,” I said, “but it hit me harder this time. I guess I’ve become soft.”
    “I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh,” said Bela.
    “Now you’re the one quoting scripture.” I reflexively took another swallow of coffee--it was in my hand, and I was nervous--and I grimaced. “Terrible. I can’t finish this.”
    “You’re depriving my coffee of its purpose.”
    “Its what?”
    My friend held his hands up, palms out, as if he were painting the universe in front of us. “Everything has a right purpose in this world. Fire’s purpose is to burn and consume. Water’s purpose is to flow, to give life, to make things wet.”
    “Make things wet? That’s a purpose?”
    “Shut up, Lance. I’m making a point. Coffee has a right purpose, too, and that is to be drank. Drunk. Which is it?”
    “I have no idea, and that’s ridiculous. Coffee does not have some kind of cosmic purpose. It’s just coffee.”
    “People have a right purpose, too.”
    “Really? What’s mine?”
    Bela shrugged. “How should I know? I’m not God.”
    I blinked at him. “No. I guess not. Are you Moses?”
    “Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
    “Moses held up his arms and stopped the sun in the sky. It gave Israel time to defeat their enemies.”
    “I can’t stop morning from coming, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    “Then I guess we’d better head downstairs.”
    “Go ahead,” said Bela. “I’ll just finish up a couple things with Shauna. You know the way.”
    I nodded and stood up. “Sure do. Bathroom break, first, though.”
    “You know the way there, too, don’t you?”
    “Sure do.”

Accidental God 4.0 -- Section 08

2011-03-30T00:21:00.000-06:00

[Not really the end of the section, but I figured I should post it anyway.]

My uncle once looked at my sketches of the other gods. He was in town for a visit, something he hardly ever does. He loves my mother, but after a few decades of life they've realized that they have very little to say to each other. I sometimes imagine they're like those Chinese lions that stand guard outside of temples and palaces: they agree with most things, and even work well together, but there isn't much to talk about.
    "Not bad," he said. His name is Blayne, with a funny kind of spelling that isn't anywhere in our family history or anyplace. He's just a random Blayne, as he likes to call himself. "Which one is this? The one with the hotdog stand."
    "Standing Appointment."
    "He looks nice."
    "He is. He's always there."
    "At his hotdog stand?"
    "Yep. Twenty-four-seven, three-hundred-sixty-five, except on leap years."
    "What does he do on a leap year?"
    "Runs his hotdog stand. It's just that he's there three-hundred-sixty-six on those years."
    "Of course."
    We were in my small apartment, two blocks over from my temple. I had considered getting a place somewhere else, but in the end couldn't decide why I would want to. Being a god came with a certain amount of income, but not so much that a bigger place was really an option. I suppose I could have kept on with my part time work at Thai For First, one of the better restaurants in the area, but I got the impression that was frowned upon. Specifically, the government officials that gave me my introductory packet of information had asked me about my work, and then frowned. It didn't particularly make sense to me, considering what other gods in this town do for a living, but apparently 'waiter' is not considered appropriate work.
    Which is why a god who runs a hotdog stand is, all things considered, a little surprising.
    "He's a very thoughtful man," I said, talking with my uncle, sitting on my fifteen-year-old couch. "He gives out hotdogs and kind words."
    "How does he manage to be there all year long?"
    "Best I can figure, that's the miracle he performs. Never leaves."
    "Not even to...you know."
    "Not even that."
    "Wow. Takes all sorts, I guess."
    He flipped through a few more pages. "Who's this?"
    "Bagel Girl."
    "That's the name of a goddess? Sounds a bit prosaic."
    "I've always thought her name was a little unusual."
    "Does she sell bagels?"
    "Yup."
    "I suppose gods aren't always that creative with the nick names they hand out. Doesn't your friend Tumble Dry run a laundromat?"
    "Two."
    "That's nice. Miraculous cleansings, I suppose."
    "Makes your whites whiter. Absolutely."
    My uncle nodded, his face straight. That's something I like about my uncle: no matter how funny something is, I've never seen him laugh. That somehow makes everything funnier. He is the world's straight man, and he'll stay deadpan until he's dead.
    Uncle Blayne flipped through a few more pages, then back to Bagel Girl. "You've got a lot of detail on this one. She seems almost alive."
    I leaned over and looked at it more closely. He was right. I did have a lot of detail on Bagel Girl. She had become a goddess somewhere in her mid-twenties, like me, and her hair was all kinds of blonde. I mean that literally, every flavor of blonde from sawdust to straw to flax, though I'm not sure I've ever seen flax, so that one could be wrong. It had been sunny in her bagel shop that day, and I was trying to catch the way the light tangled up in her hair.
    "I guess I just got lost in her hair," I said.
    My uncle's eyebrows went up.
    "Stop it," I said. "I didn't mean it that way."
    "Oh," he said.
    "Cut it out. I really didn't."
    "I understand."
    "There's someone else, anyway."
    He flipped over toward the back of the book and help up a picture at me. "Her?"
I looked at the picture. It was Midnight Jane on one of her angry days.
    "She just gets that way sometimes," I said. "She's got a really good way with teenagers, though. She's like a mamma bear with her cubs, or an avenging angel."
    "Or an avenging bear with wings."
    "I don't feel like you're getting the point."
    He shrugged and turned the book back, flipping over to Bagel Girl.
    "Don't you need to go somewhere?" I asked.
    "Not any time soon."
    We sat longer, me stumbling around in my thoughts about what, exactly, Midnight Jane meant to me, and why my pictures of her were so much less detailed than my picture of Bagel Girl.

    I didn't go straight home after practice, like I expected I would. Instead I found myself walking over to Midnight Jane's temple. I could feel the pulse of the bass in my chest before I could hear the music. It battered me, but I pushed through it. There was a trickle of people out on the dark streets, all of us in coats against the chill, not so cold that I missed my scarf but cold enough that I walked faster and noticed I needed to use the bathroom. It's a funny thing, but whenever I'm really cold, I always have to use the bathroom. Not sure which is cause and which is effect, but there it is.
    There is no sign outside Midnight Jane's temple, just a black front with a single neon stripe across it, slightly crimped in the middle, like the glass blower had hiccuped half-way through his work. The bouncer, Misty, saw me, smiled, and let me in. Misty was one part gorilla, two parts bigger gorilla, but she carried herself with the grace of a much smaller monkey, which was enough to keep the worse elements from bothering Midnight Jane's club--as if the fact it was MIDNIGHT JANE'S club wasn't enough for most people, or at least the smarter ones. I slipped past the line of waiting teenagers and paused inside the door, letting my eyes adjust as much as they ever did to the dark and strobing lights, a sugary seizure-confetti.
    The club was full, as it always is, and I realized I didn’t want to be there. It was a bad habit, like scratching at scabs on my face, which I only ever managed to stop by virtue of the fact that I don't get scabs anymore. One of the strangenesses of being a god is the little things that simply disappear out of your life: acne, bruises, bad haircuts. I'm serious about that last one, but I don't understand it. Why would being divine naturally give a body good hair? Even Midnight Jane's muddy color job didn't make her hair look BAD. It still fell around her face in attractive waves, almost hiding her eyes but not quite. I've tried to butcher my own hair, cutting it away with my kitchen scissors, just to see if it would work, but I ended up with an attractively disheveled look that pulled a compliment out of my mother. Apparently I had finally made a positive fashion decision.
    But my haircut was not on my mind, at least not anymore than a haircut is always on a person's mind in a technical, geographical sense. I was trying to find Midnight Jane, and I knew exactly why, and I didn't like the reason. It was just another of my attempts to get her to see me, the way the Titanic just wanted to get the attention of that iceberg.
    Kids--and no, I don't know when college students became "kids" to me and not "potential dates"--bounced off each other in a jumble of glowing beverages, glowing neon lights, and glowing faces (and that last one was both metaphorical and physical due to some kind of face paint). Last time I'd been in Midnight Jane's club the theme had been 'FIRE,' and I do mean that with all capitol letters, but with all the fire there had been no smoke. This time the theme seemed to be 'NEON,' and everyone moved in glowing squiggles through the darkness. I found myself pressed and jostled and bumped, surprised at all the business in the middle of the week. It was time to find Midnight Jane and get out of there.
    But she wasn't going to go with me. No, she'd stay at her temple all night, because that was who she was. It had taken me a while to figure that out, what exactly she was, I mean, but I had gotten there. At least a little. Midnight Jane wasn't someone who talked about herself much, so it wasn't from her that I'd started to learn her history.
    Mostly it was from the kids I met at her temple. It's not that any of them knew her better than I did--at least, I hoped they didn't--but it was the kind of kids they were. There was one girl who had been on the street for three months, she told me, before she found her way to Midnight Jane's. The girl told me, while drinking something I was pretty sure wasn't legal for her, all about the best dumpsters for finding food that was mostly good, not too old, and not too fatty. It surprised me, seeing this slender girl talk about watching her weight as she brushed back frizzy hair from her face, but I suppose even homelessness doesn't change some things.
    Then there was the boys, older and younger, one blonde, one brunette, who needed a place to wait while their father sobered up. "He's got big hands," one of the boys had said.
    Then there were the rooms in the back, behind some pretty thick walls that only barely held back the bass, where single mothers could settle in with their kids for a night or a month or a year. There were the rooms upstairs for kids who needed to come down off something nasty and then get help for the time it took them to really get clean, get sober, get ready to go out into the world again. They serve alcohol at Midnight Jane's club, but never to the people that really can't handle it, and nothing harder ever makes it through the doors. Dealers don't even come close. They don't dare.
    Midnight Jane never told me what her life was like before she became a goddess, but, like I said, the kind of kids that make their way to her temple tell a pretty clear story. That's why I say she's a kind woman.
    A kind woman I couldn't find. Where was she? I pushed through the crowd, moving toward the upper level where she'd sometimes hang out with the kids. I caught sight of her chief acolyte, Big Larry, and he nodded his white-guy afro at me, jerking his head toward some tables close to the bar. I guess she wasn't upstairs then. I scanned the various glowing patrons, trying to figure out which was Midnight Jane with her muddy hair, and that's when I realized I'd been looking for the wrong thing entirely. Midnight Jane's hair wasn't muddy at all.
    What I had taken for a bad dye job was, in the dark of the club, brilliant. Literally. It glowed with a jagged weave of blues, greens, yellows, oranges. Her stylist hadn't messed up at all. We just hadn't had seen what the style was really intended for. Somehow she must have felt her eyes on me, because she turned, caught my eye, and smiled.
    I half waved and started to make my way towards her, when someone bumped into me, spilling something onto my shirt.
    "Terribly sorry," said the man.
    "Don't worry about it," I said, but he had already moved on, and I was looking for Midnight Jane again, but I'd somehow been turned around. She was back over...there. I stepped out again to go talk to her, because something was growing in my mind that I wanted to say to her. It was a small plant, a small thought, and I've never been good with plants so I couldn't tell if the idea was a rose or a dandelion, but I was ready to try it.
    If I could just get to her. Someone else bumped into me, a woman, and the bumping wasn't entirely unpleasant, but it was a bit rough and I lost my direction again. Where was Midnight Jane? The bar was over that way, so her table was--no, she wasn't there anymore. Where had she gone? Aha, there was her hair, talking to someone over by speakers, though I don't know how they could possibly hear each other. I started off that direction, then someone collided with me again, a man this time, and when I regained my balance I had, once again, entirely lost sight of Midnight Jane. What was with this? And why was that man dressed in a suit?
    The woman bumped into me again, spinning me around entirely, and she was easily in her late thirties, unusual for this club, and also dressed in a kind of suit, though a bit more stylish than the suit the man was wearing.
    "I don't believe it," I said out loud, and no one heard me, which was good, I suppose, because I actually did believe it. Mr. Obscure Pike was striking again.

Accidental God 4.0 -- Section 07

2011-03-22T18:42:00.000-06:00

[Here's summore.]

    I climbed off the bus near the Eternal Rest right about the same time that Tumble Dry was walking up with one of his sons. Tumble Dry, with his architectural nose and long limbs, looks to be in his early forties, but with the eyebrows of a much older man. His son, standing next to him and laughing, had less grandiose facial features, was equally long, and looked to be in his late forties. This was something I still hadn't wrapped my head around as a god. I'd only been divine for three years, so life hadn't had much time to catch up to me, look at me in pity, and pass me by. At least that's how Tumble Dry had described it one night, drunk on melancholy.
    "Life does pity us, Bradley," he said. "Nothing on this earth was meant to stand still. Life, death, the eternal cycle. It's how things should be, but we've stepped on some cosmic spill of laundry detergent and slipped right out of the natural way of things, like a hamster falling out of his wheel. You ever seen that?"
    "Laundry detergent in a hamster wheel?" I asked.
    He waved his hand. "Never mind. My point is, we're the wax apples in an entire bushel of real fruit. When the rest of the fruit is gone, eaten and enjoyed, we'll be beautiful and pathetic and alone."
    It was a very depressing conversation, but I found out later from Midnight Jane that Tumble Dry's youngest child had just turned thirty-five, the age the god had been when his wife had given birth for the last time. It made me curious what age his wife was, but some things Tumble Dry keeps private. I've never seen her, not even in photographs.
    But at the Eternal Rest, outside on the sidewalk, the long god looked cheerful enough, and his son was telling a story with broad gestures of his hands. I started to eaves drop as I got closer.
    "Then the entire troop of Girl Scouts surrounds the angel, and you can tell the guy is late for work, but he just CAN'T say 'no' to them, and they've got sixteen cases of cookies left to sell, and the panic starts to spread across his face. I wanted to save the guy, somehow give him a way to escape, but then I thought to myself, 'What would my dad do?'"
    Tumble Dry snorted, wrinkling up his prodigious nose and doubling over. "You let him suffer!" he wheezed.
    "All sixteen," said his son. "The poor angel bought all sixteen cases before they let him escape. I'd never seen a more determined or ruthless group of thirteen-year-olds in my life. Women like that are going to be running this country in twenty years."
    "And we'll be better for it," said Tumble Dry. He looked over and noticed me. "Bradley! You remember my son? This is Mark."
    Mark held out his hand, I took it and shook it. "Of course I remember Mark, though I admit, I'd forgotten your name."
    Mark shrugged it off, his grip firm. "Just remember who my dad is, and I'll be happy."
    "Please," said Tumble Dry. "Don't be too proud of me. Just wait and see how badly I lose in the Divine Tourney."
    "I don't see how you can lose," said Mark. "Dad set up a ping pong table in all three of his Temple Laundromats, and he'll play with anyone who shows half a interest. It's a bit pathetic how competitive my father is."
    "You're one to talk," said the father in question. "How's your internet business doing, by the way?"
    "Number one in Wisconsin. And Illinois."
    Tumble Dry looked at me blandly.
    "I'm staying out of this conversation," I said. "I'm not number one at anything."
    "No!" said Tumble Dry, sharply. "You are the number one ping pong player in the Eternal Rest. You are the god of ping pong!"
    I started to open my mouth to say that I was anything BUT the god of ping pong, but Tumble Dry cut me off.
    "Attitude! Winning starts in the head, Bradley. If you're not confident in your skills, how can you expect to bring those skills out to the table. You are a powerhouse! You will dominate! You are a god!"
    "Everyone else is a god, too."
    "Stop it!"
    "And weren't you just saying YOU were going to lose?"
    "Ah, that may be true, but I also have a keen awareness of reality, and I know one thing absolutely: you, Bradley, are much better than I am. You're carrying my hopes on this one, friend, and you will be BRILLIANT."
    Mark put his hand on his dad's shoulder. "Sorry for cutting in, but Mom is expecting me. We're putting up that new curtain rod."
    Tumble Dry smacked his forehead. "I completely forgot. That was my job."
    Mark smiled at me, still talking to his father. "Yes, it was, but Mom hasn't been married to you this long without knowing how you get when there's a competition ahead. Go, practice, and I'll take care of the curtain rod."
    "I could send one of my angels to do it, if you don't have time, with your business and your kids. Mithraelind probably isn't too busy--"
    "Dad, I want to do this. I haven't had much time with Mom recently. It's good for me to take a break."
    Tumble Dry held his breath, then nodded. "You're right. It's sometimes good to take a break. I think I'll do that, too." He looked down at his watch. "Mind if we do a shorter practice tonight, Bradley?"
    I glanced at Mark, who winked at me. "Sure," I said, "we can cut this one shorter."

    Mad Hatter Barnes isn't the only superlative staff member at the Eternal Rest. Graceless Grace is perhaps the best chef in the greater Northern Lights environs, and the Angry Triplets, who aren't actually related, are one of the more astonishing cleaning crews ever assembled by man or god--and those are simply the only staff that are coming to mind at the moment. There are several more, and I have no idea who is in charge of hiring for the club, but I expect it is a demon. It would take that kind of devious mind to whisk these people away from whatever fabulously paying job they previously worked, cooking for princes or waiting on marquises. (I failed to mention previously that one of my aspirations as a child was to be a marquis. I'm still not entirely certain what they are, but whatever it is, that's what I wanted to be.)
    Double Take French--yes, that is her complete name, and I have absolutely no idea why--had set up a practice area for competitors--multiple practice areas, actually. The staff of the Eternal Rest has learned from numerous years of Divine Tourneys that gods are somewhat competitive--something that anyone could learn who had the slightest bit of knowledge about the Trojan War, Ragnarok, or the Philatelic Crusades (and yes, that war WAS about stamp collecting, though I understand it is a slight misnomer, since Philately is the STUDY of stamps, not the actual collection)--but I'm getting away from the point. Competitive gods do not like to be observed during their training, so Double Take French had divided one of the larger basement rooms into eight separate ping pong training areas. The temporary walls between sections were thick enough and carpeted enough to be mostly soundproof, and the sign up sheet for the areas was kept by the team of Matthews that run the front desk. (Matthew the Red, Tiny Matthew, Remainder Table Matthew, and Ugly Matthew, if you were wondering.)
    I had planned on being content with just a few spare games to get ready, playing with my dad a time or two, and then diving in. I recognize that I do have some skill with a ping pong paddle--not a phrase that anyone with the slightest shred of cool has ever used at a party--but I've never felt any real need to win against the elder gods, or even any optimism. The elder gods are GODS, the genuine kind of god that did all the stuff I read about in D'Aulaires' History of Europe for Children.
    Tumble Dry, of course, had other ideas.
    "Again," he said, "but faster."
    "I've already done the serve twenty-seven times. I'm not sure it's going to GET any faster."
    In fact, I had done that serve--Water Leaking Through a Narrow Crevasse--closer to forty times, but I didn't want to sound like a whiner. Unfortunately, Tumble Dry had a point. It wasn't sliding off my paddle like it usually did, and the serve that he normally had a nearly impossible time returning was snapping back across the net at me at insulting speeds.
    Tumble Dry tossed his paddle down onto the table. "What is it?" he asked. "You are not yourself tonight."
    "Maybe I'm just tired. We have been at this for almost three hours. Shouldn't I be resting before the Tourney?"
    "Nonsense. You've been putting in this many hours training for almost a month. Your arm is fine and you'll be fine. This is hardly a warmup for you. What is the matter? Get it out of your brain. You can't afford any distractions tomorrow."
    I thought about telling him. I really did. Tumble Dry has a way of leaping at problems, grabbing them in his jaws like an alligator snatching a poodle, then shaking it around until pink fur is flying everywhere and all the problems have gone away. It was appealing, the thought of sicking him on Mr. Obscure Pike and letting someone with more experience clear the path for me. I opened my mouth to strip away all my troubles and run through the world of the Divine Tourney naked and carefree--or something like that--when my cell phone rang.
    "I know that music," said Tumble Dry.
    I nodded. "Yeah, it's my mother. You mind if I get this?"
    "Of course I mind, but I know you will anyway."
    I shrugged, pulled my phone out of my pocket, and flipped it open. Due to budget constraints, I was one of the few people in Northern Lights with a cell phone that pretty much was just a cell phone.
    "Hi, Mom," I said.
    "About tomorrow," she said, skipping over greetings entirely. "You are still competing?"
    "Yes."
    "Fine. I'm bringing someone along that I'd like you to meet."
    "What?" I said, with the usual kind of lightning thought and witty dialogue I am only capable of with my mother.
    "I'm bringing someone to watch you compete that I would like you to meet. She is a lovely girl, highly educated, and the daughter of a good friend of mine. After you have played in your first match, you can treat us to dinner in the club, though if you can't afford it I suppose I can get you some money before tomorrow night. I think it will give a better impression if she sees that you are the one paying, and not your mother, don't you? In fact, it would be best if you could put it 'on your tab,' if you can run a tab at that club. Do you need me to send you money?"
    "I have enough money for dinner here, Mom. That's not the problem."
    "Oh?" she said, and there was weight to that single syllable, like an inverted iceberg, tip down. "Does that mean that there is some problem with my suggestion?"
    My mother calls them suggestions, but they're suggestions in the same way that a chef suggests things to a head of cabbage with his knife. I could feel my life plans in threat of being hacked into pieces, but I suppose I couldn't blame my mother for trying. Her perspective was that I wasn't getting any younger--not that I was getting any older, either--and she wanted me to find someone nice to spend the next few decades of my life with. She couldn't have known that I already had someone in mind because of the very simple reason that I hadn't told her. The thought of Midnight Jane and my mother in the same room made the lizard part of my brain start to twitch, anxious to find some narrow crack to slip through into darkness.
    "There aren't enough tickets," I said, settling onto the most cowardly way of avoiding the issue that I could find.
    "Of course there are," said my mother. "I found another. That was your only objection? Excellent. Then I plan on seeing you tomorrow for your first match. It was at six, correct?"
    I nodded, realized I was on the phone, and told her out loud that she was correct.
    "See you then, Bradley, and I do hope you win. It always does look better to a girl when a prospective suitor wins, but I suppose you could always be a gracious loser. Good night, Bradley."
    "Good night, Mom." I closed my phone and looked at Tumble Dry.
    "It's not my place to say anything," he said.
    "But you're going to anyway."
    "I'm going to anyway. You need some boundaries with your mother. I have no idea what that conversation was about, but you were on the run before you even answered the phone."
    "Blind date tomorrow," I said. "Apparently she's a very nice girl."
    "And your mother doesn't know that you have a...thing...for someone else?" Tumble Dry, with the eye of a father who has married off multiple sons, had recognized my interest in Midnight Jane almost before I had, and he'd been, well, not exactly supportive, but he hadn't tried to interfere. He'd let me do my own thing. Or rather, NOT do my own thing, with all the progress I'd been making.
    "She has no idea. I'm not that crazy. Midnight Jane is--"
    "Mean," filled in Tumble Dry, "but in a nice way."
    "She's not exactly mean. She's just--"
    "Goth," inserted Tumble Dry again.
    "She's not exactly Goth, either. Well, at least not this week. Have you said anything to her about the color of her hair?"
    Tumble Dry pulled back. "Oh no! I learned long ago not to comment on any woman's appearance other than to say 'you look great' and 'did you get a hair cut?'--and I only use the second one sparingly. But either way, mean or Goth or both, it shouldn't be your mother's business whether you are interested in Midnight Jane or not. It's up to you now. You're twenty-seven."
    "She's my mom."
    "You're a god."
    "She's the mayor of a city lousy with gods. Besides, you know what the elder gods say: divinity isn't what it used to be."
    Tumble Dry laughed. "Either way, this blind date isn't a good thing. You need to be able to concentrate on tomorrow night. No way of putting it off?"
    I grimaced and shook my head. "It would be more stressful if I tried to fight it. I'll just go with the flow, like a paper ship in a gutter."
    "Nice image," said Tumble Dry, then he froze. "Hang on. How long did you say we'd been practicing tonight?"
    I checked my watch again. "Almost three hours."
    He muttered something under his breath--I assumed it was something pungent from his childhood, like 'golly gosh gee whiz!'--and started packing away his paddle and ping pong balls. "I said I was going to cut it short tonight. I'm never going to catch up with all the evenings I owe my wife even if she lives to one-hundred-fifty."
    "She's not nearly that old, is she?"
    He shook his head. "Not even close. You'll have to meet her some time."
    "She coming tomorrow night?"
    "I don't think so."
    That was all he said. I had picked up the impression, somewhere during the last three years, that Mrs. Dry wasn't comfortable around gods. I hoped that didn't extend to her own husband--he had been a reasonably normal man before his divinity, after all--but it was another of the questions I never dared to ask.
    "Thanks for the practice, Bradley," said Tumble Dry, reaching out to shake hands. "You'll be great tomorrow. Just be sure to get whatever it is off your chest that's on it. You need to play with a clear mind."
    "Sure."
    Then he was out the door and gone. I packed my paddle into its cloth carrying bag and made my way to the club's locker room. Not many people were around--I nodded at Marilyn Swing and a god whose name I had forgotten twice--and made my way to my locker. I may have given the wrong impression by calling this a 'locker room.' While it's true that each of us had our own individual space with a door that could be closed and locked, each 'locker' was large enough to hold a tall, muscular god inside with room left enough for two significant pieces of sporting equipment, such as a lacrosse stick and a polo pony. That's a slight exaggeration, but think hardwood walk-in closet more than locker, and you have the right idea.
    I pulled open my locker door and stared.
    "Really?" I said out loud. "Shaving cream?"
    I said 'shaving cream' because that's exactly what my entire walk-in closet was filled with: masculine scented foam. Parts of the mass were collapsing under its own weight back into a bluish gel, but overall the foam was holding up remarkably well. I decided that Mr. Pike was correct: his team was, in fact, excellent. Creating such a stable pile of foam must have required a real--if terribly misapplied--amount of skill.
    And I was certain it was Mr. Pike. There, perched on the front of the pile like a sort of masthead on a ship of sea foam, was his card.
    I sighed, closed the door, and left to go home without a shower.

Writ, wrote, have wrut.

2011-03-21T22:50:00.000-06:00

There are 2,190 words written that are waiting to be posted...but the section simply isn't done yet. I hope to get to it tomorrow. Sorry for the delay.

Accidental God 4.0 -- Section 06

2011-03-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

[This is fun. And writing it feels like a privilege. I think I'll do more.]

    I had gone the long way around and was waiting at the bus stop when an older man with a face like a baked, peeled sweet potato came and sat down next to me. He was wearing leather shoes, slacks, a tweed sports jacket with patches on the elbows, and his eyes peered out at me, dark and almost indistinguishable in his wrinkled, sunburnt face
    "You're Bradley Shupak," he said. "The newest god."
    I shook my head. "Not anymore. There's a newer guy, but I'm still number two. Do I know you?"
    The man smiled, an almost friendly smile. "Not likely. I'm not from around here and only flew in for work. I'm an entrepreneur."
    "What's your business?" I asked, glancing to see if the bus were on its way.
    "For now, Mr. Shupak, you are."
    That brought my head around. He was still smiling at me, almost friendly, but now it looked a little more 'almost' and a little less 'friendly.' "What do you mean?"
    He shifted on his part of the bench and got comfortable. "From what I understand, sir, you are considered a solid bet for the upcoming Divine Tourney."
    "Am I."
    "You are. I've never known much about gambling, but my employers have informed me that you are considered the favorite. In fact, there's quite a sum of money riding on your victory."
I considered standing up and leaving, feeling at the base of my spine that this conversation was starting a walk down a dark alley in a bad part of town--but one byproduct of immortality is that curiosity quickly starts to overcome any instincts a body has for self-preservation. I was sure I wasn't going to like whatever this red-faced man had to say...but I wanted to know what it would be. These are the feelings that train-wrecks make.
    "Do people bet on the Divine Tourneys?" I asked. "I guess it makes sense."
    "Absolutely, said the man. In fact, the competitions in Northern Lights are some of the more popular around the nation. They're even followed closely where I live."
    "Where's that?"
    "Not here."
    "Aha."
    We sat for a moment, and I checked for the bus out of reflex, then looked back at the man. He was sitting comfortably, like a bull settling into a field where he intends to remain for some time. In fact, he did look rather bullish. The tweed did a little to hide it, but as he adjusted his poster I could see the fabric stretch a little around arms that, on consideration, looked about as thick as my thighs.
    "Is there a reason you brought that up?" I asked.
    He nodded. "There is."
    "Are you going to share?"
    "My employers, in the interest of making themselves a modest but significant sum of money, had the idea of bribing you to lose."
    I pulled back. "I wouldn't do that!"
    "Do you mind if I ask why not?"
    "It's cheating."
    "How is it cheating to lose on purpose?" asked the man, squinting out through the cracks that held his eyes. "What if, for example, you were playing a friendly game with your sister. Tell me there are no circumstances you would learn on purpose--if, for example, she were having a bad day and you wanted to cheer her up. Is that cheating?"
    "That's different."
    "How? Isn't this simply a friendly game between the gods of the Eternal Rest? How could it possibly cheating to let a friend lose in a circumstance such as this."
    I had to think about that for a minute--I knew it was wrong, but I didn't have the exact words for it. I got it.
    "It became cheating the moment people started placing bets on the outcome. If it WERE just a game between friends, that would be one thing, but your employers have now made it a competition that people are counting on to be fair--to have our real effort as players. That's why it would be wrong."
    He pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was folded in half, but it only took me an instant to see that it was a check.
    "I don't want it."
    "Just look at it."
    "Still don't want it."
    "I'll open it for you, then."
    He did. I swallowed.
    "People are THAT certain that I'm going to win?"
    "There are some other competitors," said the man, still holding the check open in front of me, "but there are those out there who trust in your determination."
    I wasn't that determined, at least not that I knew, and that was quite a bit of money--but no. I wasn't going to take it. I took temptation by the ear and threw it right out in front of the oncoming bus. At least I would have, if the bus were anywhere close to arriving. Where was it? I had to get to practice with Tumble Dry. That moment was when I realized the money really wasn't a temptation. I was more worried about getting to my friend on time than I was about how much cash it was. Considering the state of my temple finances, that fact may have reflected negatively on my fiscal responsibility, but I decided not to care.
    "Put your check away," I said. "It's not worth that much to me, or any amount. I'm not throwing the match."
    He folded up the check and tucked it back into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket.     "That is exactly what I told my employers you would say."
    "Exactly?" I asked.
    "Pardon?"
    "You told them that I'd say, 'It's not worth that much to me, or any amount?' Those words exactly?"
    He blinked his narrow, dark eyes, which, in that red, wrinkled face, wasn't much of a movement at all. "I believe you're mocking me," he said.
    "What if I was? You just came here and insulted me by trying to bribe me to throw a sporting event. Excuse me if I'm a little upset about it."
    The man shrugged. "You can be offended, if you wish, but I'll remind you that I'm on your side. I told my employers that the money wouldn't interest you. You don't strike me as that kind of god. Take it as a compliment, Mr. Shupak."
    I closed one eye at him skeptically, then turned again to look for my bus. I wanted out of this conversation, but I wasn't going to run away, and my bus would have been the perfect excuse to depart in a courageous and manly manner. Except that it still wasn't there.
    "Now," continued the man, "we move on to the second part of our discussion. My employers didn't actually hire me for my skills in bribery."
    "That's good, because you're terrible at it."
    He shrugged, unconcerned. "I told them that as well, but when my employers are paying, I only sometimes correct their foolishness. The truly wealthy don't often like being told that they are wrong, and those who aspire to immense wealth like it even less. That, however, is beside the point. I was hired because I lead a very special team."
    "A team of bribers?"
    "No, sir. A team of hindrances."
    I blinked at him. "Come again?"
    "Ask yourself, Mr. Shupak, how do you threaten a god? With death? Useless. Torture? Perhaps temporarily effective, but ultimately very dangerous to the health of the torturer, and I take exceptional care of my health. One could threaten to ruin a god's reputation, but in the end, anyone divine can outlive and outlast all that. No, there are only two methods I have found effective in threatening the divine."
    My heart stopped and I felt the blood rush into my head, all at the same time. My vision narrowed, and all I could see was the man's red face down a tunnel of gray. "Don't threaten my family," I said through a jaw that was, to my surprise, clenched.
    The man was already waving his hands in the air. "No, no, of course not, Mr. Shupak. Threatening families is a bad business all around, though you are correct, that IS one of the two methods I was mentioning. It is, however, another method that I never use. A man must have standards, as you have so admirably demonstrated today, and that standard is one of mine. I may not be a good man, but as with almost all scoundrels, there are some depths I refuse to plumb. No, I will not threaten your family, Mr. Shupak. I give you my word."
    My heart was beating again, and the tunnel had cleared away in a static fuzz, but I was still shaking. "Is your word worth anything?" I asked.
    "Still so much anger, sir. I have told you that I am simply doing my job, haven't I? Please recall that I have your welfare very much at heart. It is critical to my employers that you do, in fact compete. If you don't play, there are no bets, and without the bets, no victory for those fortunate enough to rig the competition in their own favor. Trust me, sir, that I am very interested in your continued health and sporting prowess."
    "So if you won't hurt me, and you won't hurt my family, what can you possibly do to me?"
    He raised his eyebrows, and the cracks that held his eyes seemed to break open and widen. His eyes were dark within the wrinkles of his skin. "Aha. That, is the genius of my particular specialty. As I mentioned, I lead a team of hindrances. We will not injure you, Mr. Shupak, as it would be futile. We will not kill you or yours. We will not damage your temple, poison your goldfish, or even slander your reputation. Instead," and here, his eyes took on the same delight I've seen in little Erica's face when she is about ready to tear a page out of one of her mother's books, "we hinder you. Whatever you wish to do, we will make it awkward. Uncomfortable. Almost unbearable. We will be there wherever you turn, and inch by inch, moment by moment, we will frustrate and interfere until you have no choice but to give in to our demands." He leaned back into his chair and looked up into the sky, leaving me to stare at his profile. "Never so much that you strike back, but always enough to make your life a misery. A blow to the heart kills quickly, Mr. Shupak. We will kill you with ten-thousand paper-cuts."
    It is likely that most people have never been threatened with industrial-scale annoyance, and perhaps it was a reaction to the relief I felt after knowing he wasn't going to harm my family, but in spite of the slightly manic joy on his fact that reminded me of myself when I used to dress up as a mad scientist (don't ask), I still couldn't help myself: I laughed.
    The man took it in stride, hardly batting an eyelid. He simply waited patiently until I calmed down, then looked at his watch.
    "Where is your bus?" he asked.
    I blinked at him. He didn't mean what I thought he was implying, did he? I turned to check again, and around the corner came my bus, a solid fifteen minutes late.
    "You didn't," I said.
    "I have an excellent team," he said. "They are right on schedule."
    "On schedule? But you couldn't have known how long our conversation would take."
    The bus groaned and sighed to a stop in front of us, the doors opened, and out hopped a tall, smiling man who tipped his cap at the red faced man.
    "I'll head on to the next step then," he said.
    "Perfectly done, Mr. Twigs," said his boss. "Mr. Shupak and I had just finished."
    The tall man nodded and trotted off down the street.
    "I don't believe this," I said, standing. "I am not going to give in to threats of any kind, and I am not going to throw the match."
    "I wouldn't expect any less of your determined mind," said the man, looking at me with a mix of what looked like respect and pity. "But remember, when you've had enough, this check will still be waiting for you. You can consider it your consolation prize."
    I shook my head, turned away, and stepped toward the bus--then lurched, as something snagged my foot and almost sent me sprawling onto the concrete. I caught my balance and spun around to face the man.
    "That was juvenile!"
    "It's just part of my job, sir." He pulled his foot back and stood. "By the way, here is my card," he said, pulling his wallet out of his pocket and a card out of the wallet. "I look forward to our time together, Mr. Shupak."
    He left the card in my hand and walked away. I looked down at the print: Mr. Obscure Pike, it read, Professional Hindrance.

Accidental God 4.0 -- Section 05

2011-03-09T21:25:00.000-07:00

[Fourth writing day in a row with over 2,000 words. It's a bit tiring, and other things are falling to the side a little bit, so I don't know how much I'll be able to sustain this. Other demands may become too pressing for me to keep this pace, but it sure is fun.

[Once again, I really don't know how this is all going to end, but it's exciting for me to see the pieces start to show up that, I already know, will give me the answers I need at the end of the book. Spots of conversation, small objects, seemingly unimportant actions are poking out here and there, and I think, "I can use this! This is going to be useful."

[Writing really is a miracle. I hope this turns into a novel by the end, but right now I'm just excited to be spending time with these characters.]

    The room where I fail to dispense miracles has a pretty minimal decor. From what I've heard, under the last god to spend time here, it had been all candles and smoking incense and strange, vaguely African artwork. BB had taken all that down before I'd even arrived, and I appreciated his effort. Instead I sat down in all the modern luxury a bare-bones budget could buy, and smiled as my faithful came in one at a time.
    The Orange brothers asked for wealth, as usual, though one of them--could have been Larry, though I think it was Ted--asked for health for his goldfish. Apparently Little Magellan had been a bit wobbly in his swim the last week or so. I told either Ted or Larry that I'd do what I could, and he smiled and told me he knew I would.
    Tanice Menlow asked for help for her boy in school--not that Tanor was doing badly. In fact, he was doing great, but it was coming up on advanced placement testing season, and she wanted him at his best. I'd met Tanor, and he had shook my hand very politely, clearly uninterested in the fact that I was a god. I'd actually liked him even better for that. I pulled out my old phrase that I'd do what I could, and Tanice told me she knew I would.
    Cheryl Zerbeki asked for help with some embarrassingly personal feminine issues. I looked as serious as I could, blinked, and told her the usual.
    Then Janice Bronson came in with her boyfriend, and they sat down in the carpeted chairs across from me.
    "We're getting married," she told me, smiling over at the boyfriend.
    "That's wonderful!" I said, sitting up straighter. "When's the day?"
    "I don't know yet," said Janice. "Elvis here hasn't said 'yes' yet."
    I looked back and forth between the smiling couple. "So Elvis hasn't proposed?"
    "No," said the oldest of my faithful, "but I have. Seven times now!"
    Elvis looked at me, leaning forward a little. "I tell her it's the man who's supposed to do it, but Janice has all these modern ideas. There's no dealing with the woman." Then he turned and smiled at her, and it was clear to me at least that he intended to have that difficulty for as long as he possibly could.
    I cleared my throat. "You'll have to tell me when it's official. We'll have a party for you."
    "You'll do more than that," said Janice. "I want you to marry us."
    I pulled back in my chair. "Hang on, Janice. I haven't performed any miracles at ALL, let alone a wedding miracle. It's nice of you to think of me, but I think we should find you another temple. I'll talk to my friend, Midnight--" I stopped and thought of Midnight Jane's temple, then reconsidered. Tumble Dry? Another definite no. Bagel Girl was a possibility though. She did run a bagel shop, but her normal temple was a lovely place on Washington. "No, not her. But I have another friend, a goddess who's much more experienced than I am. Her temple has a good view out onto the Round Park, and she'll perform an excellent miracle for you."
    Janice looked out at me from her glasses and snorted. "No. It's you, Bradley. You're my god, and you'll be performing the wedding miracle."
    "But why?" I asked, sagging into my chair. "Why me, Janice? You were one of the first to seek me out, and you've been coming ever since, but I haven't done a single miracle for you. Not one! And there's no guarantee I can do this one either. Why don't you just find another god?"
She looked at me for a long time. Her hair had thinned on top, so she'd started wearing the most outrageous hats--purple with bright-green print flowers, magenta with polkadots, polkadots with magenta--but this hat was surprisingly demure: it was only red stripes across a black background. It made her look more serious than usual, and for once the smile on her face faded away and her hat and face matched. As that went through my head, she looked at me, and I looked back.
    Then she spoke.
    "Life isn't all about what we do for each other, Bradley. Sometimes it's simply about who we are, and that can be enough. You are my god, and you have been, ever since I saw you wandering around helplessly, trying to find this place. That's when I knew that you were the one god who was exactly right for me. I hadn't found one before, and I know I certainly won't live long enough to find another, so you're it." She scooted forward in her chair and pointed her finger at me. "And you're going to marry Elvis and me in a week."
    "That fast?"
    "I'm old, Bradley. I don't have any time to waste."
    Elvis straightened up. "A week, is it, Janice? I guess I'd better get around to proposing some time soon, hadn't I."
    "All you have to do is say 'yes,' Elvis. I've done enough proposing for both of us."
    He shook his head. "You know that's not how it's going to be. A man has a plan, and he's going to see it through. And I think we've taken up enough of this young god's time. Didn't you say he was set to be a ping pong champion this year?"
    Ping pong! I checked my watch--still plenty of time before my practice with Tumble Dry. One of the advantages of having so few faithful was that petitions never took very long. I looked back up at Janice.
    "That's happening this weekend, isn't it?" she asked.
    I nodded. "Starts tomorrow night, actually, then all Friday, and the championship match is on Saturday."
    "Will we be able to watch?"
    I opened my mouth, then closed it. "I have some guest passes, but I was going to give those to my parents and my sister's family. I hope you don't mind."
    Janice scooted forward in her chair and Elvis almost jumped to his feet to help her up. "No, I don't mind," she said as she stood. "You just be certain to win, all right? I've never quite liked the elder gods. Too snooty for my tastes. Give them a lickin'."
I stood up and saw them to the door. "Yes, ma'am," I said. "I'll lick them as best I can."

    BB was waiting for me in the main hall. "You going to go practice with Tumble Dry?"
I nodded. "He's the only god in the place willing to play with me who gives me a real run for my money."
    "I hear Western Moose is a solid player."
    "He definitely is, but he's off to speak at a convention of Eastern gods, so he's not competing this year."
    "Too bad!" said BB. "He'd be another solid entry for the new gods. Not that you need any more help. You're pretty much a lock for the championship, aren't you?"
    I turned my hands palms up. "Who knows? There are enough gods in this club that I haven't even met half of them. Could be a few real players out there, and I know there are plenty of fast learners. If there's anything I've figured out in the last three years, it's to never count out the elder gods."
    BB helped take off my robe and brushed away some imaginary lint. He looked thoughtful.
    "What's up, my Chief Acolyte?"
    He grimaced. "Bradley, I think I'd rather not be executed."
    "I don't want that, either, and you know I'll do my best. At this point, we haven't even admitted that you took anything, so we're okay for now, I think."
    "What if he calls up the Theological Crimes Division? They could be in here with a warrant in a heartbeat."
    "And if they are, we'll deal with it then. For now, just don't steal anything else." I spoke with all the confidence I didn't feel, and, to my surprise, BB looked calmer for it.
    "Thanks," he said. "Good luck with your practice. Also, watch out for Sage. I think her store's about to close."
    I winced and decided to take the long way around.

    Midnight Jane first noticed me when I was drawing. I had received my membership in the Eternal Rest and, after only a paltry three months, had worked up the courage to actually go there. I took one look at the front doors and almost turned around and left. The Eternal Rest has an old look to it, like someone had picked up a small piece of London, transported it across the ocean, and dropped it into the middle of a Midwestern city. It had the graceful gray stonework and arches, the weathered carvings of angels and demons, the warped glass panes that were the best they could manage four-hundred years ago. It was the total package on the outside, including the doors: a dark wood, deep brown to the point of being black, with iron bands and studs and doorknobs right in the center of the doors. It wasn't the kind of place that said 'come in.' It was more the sort of place that looked at your hair, glanced at your shoes, and dismissed you with a sniff.
    I, of course, was not going to be put off by any mere architecture, so I promptly walked right past and found a bench near the Round Park. I pulled out my sketch pad and tried to catch the image of three children at play. One had a laugh like a calling peacock, and I started drawing fanning tail-feathers out of his backside.
    "That's not terrible," Midnight Jane had said, leaning onto the back of the bench and looking over my shoulder. The first thing I noticed about her was her hair--black as her name. Then my eyes made their way to hers, and they were green, and I was in something that felt an awful lot like what I might, in some circumstances, have possibly described as love.
    "Um," I said wittily.
    "I noticed you looking at the Eternal Rest," she said, glancing between my picture and the playing children. "Is the one in the red shirt the peacock?" The kid laughed and Midnight Jane's mouth made a small 'o.'
    "Yeah," I said. "That's the peacock."
    She nodded and looked back at me. "Are you a god?"
    I hesitated, still wearing my divinity like my father's oversized bathrobe. "Yes," I said finally, "though I'm still new."
    Her eyebrows went up and she rolled her eyes--her striking eyes--just a little. "I have to tell you, that part was pretty obvious. They gave you your membership to the Rest? It came in the mail for me fifty years ago, and I almost threw it out."
    "Me, too!" I said, turning my body more to face her. "I thought it was a credit card ad. Since I became a god, it seems like I get five times as many."
    Midnight Jane nodded. "My Chief Acolyte keeps me on one of those 'no junk mail' lists. It's handy."
    "I'll have to look into that," I said.
    "You mean have your Chief Acolyte look into that?"
    I swallowed. "Yeah. That's what I meant. I'm still not used to this god stuff."
    She shrugged. "You'll get used to it. Just don't let it make you into a jerk, like me."
    "I'm sure you're not a jerk," I told her. "You seem nice."
    She smiled at me, and the bench tipped over sideways and dumped me flat on my back. It took me a moment to realize that I was actually still sitting in the exact position, looking at her eyes and feeling her smile batter at my heart.
    "I think you must be the nice one," she said, and she stood up and held out her hand. "I'm Midnight Jane."
    I stood up, shifted my sketchbook and pencils to my left, and shook with my right. "Bradley," I said.
    "It's nice to meet you, Bradley. Come back to the club with me."
    I walked with her, which, it turned out, wasn't going to be the last time I did what Midnight Jane told me to.

Accidental God 4.0 -- Section 04

2011-03-08T23:09:00.002-07:00

[Still on target for my faster goal today, though I'm so tired it makes me want to go to bed then wake up, just so I can go to bed again. I don't know what energy I'll have for writing tomorrow, but I know I want to find out what happens next. This story is exciting for me, and we haven't even made it to the ping pong tournament yet!]

     My temple, as I've mentioned, isn't a large one. Tumble Dry lucked out and was issued a more spacious temple in a more central part of town, but I don't think he's ever really used it. He already had his laundromats to fall back on, and his divine business and his business-business just sort of merged. I've thought about asking him if he felt like switching, but I never got up the courage for it. I could almost hear my mother telling me that there are some things I ought to do on my own--step up and be a man, Bradley.
    So I had never asked Tumble Dry, not because I didn't want to, but because, on the off chance that my mother found out about it, I didn't want to have to answer any of her questions. Also, I do have a little bit of pride in me, and I did want to find a new temple for myself, all on my own.
    I just didn't know how yet.
    BB led the way across the rather small gathering area--pews, not folding chairs like I'd heard of in some government issued temples--and through the back door into the office area. Some previous god had installed wood paneling over everything in the back area, an extravagance I hadn't been very well able to maintain. Everything need a good dusting and polish. (BB is excellent with people skills, but his disregard for the rules of property seems to extend to a general disregard for physical objects in general.) We had a few faithful volunteers that helped clean every other week, but it wasn't what you'd call a detailed job. It wouldn't have passed my mother's standards of cleanliness.
    "I put it in your office safe," said BB. "Figured you wouldn't want some casual visitor finding it and getting the wrong idea."
    "Like that my Chief Acolyte stole it?"
    "Yeah, something like that. Terrible the conclusions people will jump to."
    "Absolutely," I said, squeezing the back of my neck to try to beat back some of the tension that had been following me since my encounter with Forgotten Zed. "Does anyone know you have it here?"
    "The one gentleman I helped with it. He really was in bad shape. Cancer, from what he told me, and I believe him. I've never seen an old man look like that in real life. He should have been on top of a mountain in Tibet, dishing out advice, not dressed in a thousand-dollar suit."
I blinked. "How much?"
    BB waved his hand in the air. "Could have cost more. I'm not much up on the going rate for suits."
    "But he wouldn't go to one of the other gods? Why come here? I mean, I'm not exactly known for my miraculous healings." If I were going to be frank, I'd have to admit that I'm not known for any of my miracles. The entire 'miracle' thing has, for the most part, evaded me up until now. I've seen how other gods do it, but I haven't found my flow. Any flow. Flowless.
    BB opened the door to my private office and made way for me to step in. Again, not a very spacious office, and one of the first things I'd done as a god was have the massive wooden desk removed--with that dark-grained monstrosity inside, there had been room for me and another half a person. That might be an exaggeration, but I needed room to breathe. We walked around the new, more modest desk, and I bent down to enter the code into my safe.
    "I told the gentleman you weren't quite ready to start granting petitions, but he just sat down on a bench and stayed there. I thought he was going to cry, and I decided I had to do something. So I went over to talk to Upright Maddie."
    "Forgotten Zed's Chief Acolyte?"
    "Exactly. We went to school together."
    "You were friends?"
    "Who said that? No we just went to school together. She was back in Zed's storage area, and I went back there to find her, and I saw this thing just sitting around, and I could tell right away it had a bit of holy power to it, so I decided to not waste Upright Maddie's time--and here we are."
    I closed my eyes, wincing. "Just sitting around," I said.
    "Sure."
    "Was it sitting around inside anything? Like a box?" I looked up at BB. He shrugged.
    "Could have been."
    I sighed. Done was done. No way to change what had happened, though that was a nice thought. As far as I knew, though, not even the most experienced of the gods had ever managed time travel. Ah, well. Forward. I pushed the last button in the safe code and turned the handle, swinging the heavy door open.
    I looked at the artifact. I looked up at BB. I looked back at the artifact.
    "You could tell that was holy?"
    "Sure," said BB. "We acolytes get a sense for these things. What are you going to do with it?"
    I looked at it longer.
    "I have no idea," I said. "What is it?"
    BB tipped his head to the side, then crouched down next to me to get a better look. I watched as he squinted, then leaned back, then leaned forward again. "I think it's a rock."
    "Of course it's a rock. But it looks like it's been carved."
    "No, I think that's just its natural shape. An oblong...blobby...rock."
    I leaned in right next to it. "I'll give you the oblong, but I really do think it's been carved. What about those ridges under the bottom?"
    "Could be natural," said BB.
    While I'm willing to admit that nearly the full extent of my experience with rocks involves picking up flat ones to skip across Lake Minoa, I was pretty certain the shape I was looking at was NOT a product of the tumbling, smoothing, twisting forces of nature. What I wasn't certain about was why anyone would want to carve a rock into this eroded, vaguely equestrian shape.
    "What if it's a horse?" I asked.
    "I'd go with horse," said BB, standing up.
    I glanced at his face. "You don't really care, do you?"
    He grinned, completely unabashed. "Not a bit. What's the point? It healed a nice old man and, I might add, it's likely to give your little temple a bit of word-of-mouth advertising that we are sadly in need of."
    I stood up and swung the door of the safe closed, twisting the handle so it would lock again. "But then people are going to start expecting miracles from me, and you may have noticed that I'm a little short on those."
    BB sat down in my office chair and shrugged. "So just use Zed's blobby horse."
    I sat down on the edge of my desk, exasperated. I wondered if all this would have happened if I'd become a god when I was older. Would I still have been stuck with a kleptomaniacal Chief Acolyte about the same age as me?
    "You seem to have forgotten, BB, that this particular lump of rock is a good step towards getting you killed."
    He waved his hand in the air. "I don't think so. I bet this is about the ping pong tournament."
    "People keep saying that, but you didn't see his eyes. It's not just about the tournament."
    "It's the tournament."
    "It's not."
    "It is."
    "Stop that."
    "Either way," said BB, standing up, "It's time for you to hear petitions."
    Oh. I had forgotten about that. How could I have? It was the least favorite part of my day, and it had crept up on me like...like...like Sage Merlinus. "I hate petitions."
    "They're part of being a god. The people look forward to it."
    "But that's what I don't understand. My five faithful come in every week for petitions, and I haven't been able to grant a single one. Ever."
    "Six," said BB.
    "Six what?"
    "You have six faithful. Janice Bronson has a boyfriend now."
    "Well," I said. "Good for Janice. Isn't she eighty-three this year?"
    "And always the optimist."
    I sighed. Yes, she was always the optimist. They all were. "I don't even have an angel."
    "You could get one."
    "With what money?"
    "Take out a loan or something. Anyway, let's get you out there. You dressing up for today?"
    "Why? Will it make it easier to perform miracles?"
    "Come on, Bradley. You don't dress up for yourself. This is all about your faithful, if you remember."
    I rubbed at my face and pushed up off my desk. "I suppose I do. Let's go disappoint a few more people."

    It took just a few minutes before I was dressed in my godly robes, a class pair in blues and greens that BB had chosen out for me years before. When I'd first put them on, I'd felt truly godly. I'd waved my arms around like a TV weatherman, pushing clouds and continents before me. That was before I'd learned that pushing clouds around isn't as easy as it looks on TV. With all the godly power I'd managed to muster up, I might as well have climbed in a helicopter, flown up, and started blowing.
    I stood in front of my small congregation. BB was right: there were six people there today. Janice Bronson was small and round, waving at me from behind her oversized glasses, and next to her was a man just as wrinkled with a face so full of smile that I was sure he'd been practicing that look for at least eighty years. The Orange brothers were there--that was their name, not their color--along with Cheryl Zerbeki and Tanice Menlow, her white teeth smiling out of her dark black face. That was something about all of my faithful: that smile. It was like they were in on a joke that I simply didn't get.
    "Welcome," I said.
    "Thanks!" they all called back with enthusiasm.
    "How is everybody?"
    "Better and better!" they shouted. Apparently someone had coached the boyfriend, because he joined in without missing a beat. It was an old ritual, this little call back and forth between us. As much as I felt like a fraud, this made me a little bit happy. For what felt like the first time in days, I felt myself start to relax.
    "Give us some words of wisdom!" called out Janice.
    I laughed. "Wisdom? Janice, you've been alive three times as long as I have. What do I have to teach you?"
    "Just talk, son," she called back. "It's always good to hear words from your god."
    I took a deep breath. There it was again, that optimism. It was like a weight against the middle of my back, all their hope for when I'd really become a god. I almost would rather have gone to eat lunch with Forgotten Zed--but this WAS my temple, and I was going to try, as mixed up as I was.
    "My mother--you all know my mother’s gentle touch as mayor," there was laughter, "well, she once sat me down to learn piano. Some of you have heard me sing." Tanice hooted at that. "My piano playing was never much better, but my mother was determined. 'We are going to have a musician in this family,' she told me. I suggested that it should be my brother."
    "No you didn't," called one of the Orange brothers that might have been Larry and might have been Ted.
    "You're right, I didn't. But I'll tell you one thing: I learned some real lessons from my fights with my mother, day in and day out. You know what I learned more than anything else?"
Janice nodded from behind her glasses and her boyfriend looked at me expectantly. The Orange brothers, identical in their brown hair and glasses, leaned forward to listen. Cheryl Zerbeki cocked her oversized blonde perm to the side, and Tanice Menlow looked at me seriously.
"I learned to give up. I faced that challenge of the piano lessons, of daily practice, and I turned away. Slumped. Threw away the opportunity, and I've regretted it ever since."
    I took a deep breath and looked over at BB. His eyebrows were up, and I could tell he was wondering where this was going. I kept talking, hoping I’d get there quickly.
    "Since then I've grown a bit, changed a bit, forgotten all the piano I ever knew, and become a god. I didn't expect that last part, or ask for it, or know what to do with it when it came. I still don't know what to do with it, but I do know this: I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to give up, the way I gave up on piano lessons. You keep coming here, waiting for me to become a real god, and so I’ll tell you now that I will keep trying until I figure it out. You deserve that much from me, so I will give it to you." I looked around at their faces again. "I guess those are all the words of wisdom I have today, Janice. Will those do?"
    "Amen," she called back, and the others joined in. It made me feel a little better. Not much, but a bit.
    "I guess I'll hear your petitions over in the petition room," I said.
    "Needs a better name than that," called Tanice.
    "Then suggest a better one," said BB, stepping up next to our little altar. "Until then, petition room is all we've got. The Orange brothers have dental appointments this afternoon, so anyone mind if they go first? No? Okay then. Get in there, Bradley. There's a good god."
    My tiny congregation of the faithful laughed, and I laughed with them. Then I went into the petition room to fail them all for another week.

Accidental God 4.0 -- Section 03

2011-03-07T22:37:00.001-07:00

[Stayed up a little too late to write this, but it was fun to meet Bradley's neighbor. It's hard to tell if she likes Bradley for himself, or just because he's a god.

[Being divine comes with its own problems.]

    My mother never had much use for sports, especially as they mixed with schooling.
    "What is the point of institutionalizing what is essentially tribal warfare as a part of our nation's educational system?" she asked on more than one occasion. I sometimes have thought she practices phrases like that so she can use them at appropriate times, but I've never been able to catch her at it. She must do it while she's in the shower, or in the deep of the night when the rest of the world is asleep. She had more to say about it than just that, though. "We're told that sports teach valuable skills, problem solving, determination, teamwork. Ninety percent of the time all I see is ego-building and a small course in hatred and hate speech. It appalls me that my tax dollars help pay for this."
    "Have hope for the other ten percent," said my father, smiling at me and winking. I wasn't sure what that wink was for, but it wasn't his way of telling me to go out for school sports. That wasn't going to happen, not in this lifetime.
    What my mother didn't know was that all through high school, for the forty-five minutes after class that she thought I spent walking home, I was actually part of one of the five Geek Clubs of my school. The top four were, of course, Math Club, Chess Club, Culinary Club for Men, and Technologists of the Future. Club number five was my club. It was my refuge, my home that was less stressful than home.
    "Why the Ping Pong Club?" my sister had asked me. "Has anyone in that club ever had a date?"
    "Of course," I said.
    "Who?"
    "Lots of guys."
    "Name one."
    "Brock."
    "Brock Madsen? That wasn't a date. That was a 'group activity.'"
    "Sure, but it was with one specific girl. Mostly."
    "Doesn't count," said my sister, walking away. "Call me up when you're old and lonely. I'll cry for you."
    My sister got nicer since then, and I wouldn't want to imply that ping pong is an inherently geeky sport. Quite the opposite, I'd say. Have you ever seen Lao Ping Pao Men Mei Long of the Chinese go at it? I'm sure I'm saying his name wrong, but that's not the point. The point is that, when he plays, the sun stops what it's doing to watch and the four winds hold their breath. His Swallow Stopping for a Drink at a Convenience Store is perhaps the most powerful and graceful maneuver ever performed in a professional sport. Ever.
    No, ping pong is classy. It was our club that was geeky.

    "You play ping pong?" asked Harold, his eyes filled with wonder. It was starting to get on my nerves. Everything was superlative for Harold, and he always had some comparison to tell you exactly how wonderful things were. "That's amazing!" he said. "I've always wanted to learn ping pong. It's like I walked out my door this morning and found a world filled with--"
    "Yeah, I play ping pong," I interrupted. "It's my favorite sport."
    "It's not really a sport," said Midnight Jane, "but it's cute that you think it is. But that aside, we need a plan to get back at Forgotten Zed. I'm sure it's not just him, though. I can guarantee that any dirty dealing has Slick L behind it as well, and he's not someone to mess with lightly."
    "What about Apples?" asked Tumble Dry. "She's not above a bit of dirty dealing and she's still upset about last year's competition."
    "But she won," I said. "By a lot. How could she be upset?"
    "Did you see her hair at the end?"
    "Not really," I said. Fact is, when Apples is in spandex, most guys aren't paying attention to her hair. I'd spent as much of the race embarrassed and looking away as I had cheering for Noodles, the only one of the younger gods with a real chance in the steeple chase.
    "Exactly," said Tumble Dry. "NO ONE noticed her hair, except for Apples. Her hair was, I quote, 'mussed,' and she's had it out for Noodles ever since. I'm pretty sure the New Year debacle was her fault."
    I blinked. "You mean when Noodles came into the room and--"
    "Exactly."
    "And then the EMT's had to--"
    "Yes."
    "That was Apples?"
    Tumble Dry shrugged and he took a drink of water. That was all Tumble Dry ever drank, and in the whole year I'd been a god, I'd never once seen Midnight Jane lift a glass to her lips, so I was once again stumped at how the root bear pitcher could be empty. Again.
    "Will I get to meet Apples?" asked Harold.
    "I wouldn't recommend it without a full suit of armor," said Tumble Dry.
    "Are the elder gods really all that bad?"
    "Yes," said Midnight Jane.
    "Not really," I said. "Well, some of them are, but not all of them. There's just a...difference between the old gods and the new gods, as best I can tell. The world used to be a different place, and any gods over a thousand keep expecting things to be that way. You know, with hordes of chanting worshipers, nations moving at their whim, storms and wrath and changing people into animals, all that stuff."
    Midnight Jane glared at nothing in particular. "They need to get their heads cleared out. This is the modern world. Gods aren't gods anymore, not how they used to be."
    Harold was nodding. "I get it. So there's a kind of rivalry between the old gods and the new gods."
    I shrugged. "Sort of. They're not all like that. Standing Appointment is a good guy. So is Bagel Girl."
    Midnight Jane snorted. "I don't trust her. She's TOO nice. It's like she's all desert and no meat."
    That's not exactly fair to Bagel Girl. She IS nice, and easy to talk to. In fact, morning bagels had been the only thing keeping me going for the first half year of my godhood--morning bagels and her advice. She didn't make a big deal out of it, but I'm not sure I would have made it without my morning. She’s wise AND kind, and I made a mental note to visit her, realizing how long it had been.
    I didn't say any of that out loud, though, and I felt ashamed, but Midnight Jane didn't like Bagel Girl, and when Midnight Jane started going off about the elder gods, it didn't do much good to get in her way. Last time I'd ended up with root beer all over me.
    She's so beautiful. I'm such an idiot.
    Harold was nodding again. "And so this rivalry plays out every year in some kind of competition. I'd heard about it, but I only moved here recently, so I haven't had a chance to see it. That's so exciting, it's as if--"
    "Exactly," I interrupted, "except there isn't any official competition between the elder and younger gods. It's more an unofficial thing. The elder gods just always end up on teams together."
    "And they always beat the younger gods," said Tumble Dry, glancing over at the wall where Fish Fry's picture hung, next to the plaque commemorating the god’s victory.
    "Could I participate?" asked Harold. "I could start practicing ping pong right away! I might not contribute much, but it would be a fun way to get to know the other gods."
    "Sure," I said, standing. "You do that." I'd gotten over the brutality of speaking to Forgotten Zed, and I was beginning to think I needed to see BB face to face. Maybe we could sneak the artifact, whatever it was, back into Zed's temple. Or maybe an abject, groveling apology that lasted the next twenty years would do it. Either way, I needed to get started immediately.
    "We're still practicing tonight?" asked Tumble Dry as I walked away. "Got to keep you in top form."
    I said something back. I assumed it was a 'yes,' but I couldn't remember. I kept seeing Forgotten Zed's eyes.
    And his beard. Honestly, it’s not the kind of beard you ever forget.

    My sister never took my divinity very seriously. When she got married, she asked for my blessing, then snorted for the rest of the night. (I didn't find it particularly funny. Maybe a little, but only a little.) Then, when her first child was born a rather precise thirty-eight weeks later, she asked me to be little Erica's godfather--followed, of course, by much hilarity. Then, when two years later, JoBeth was born, she used the same joke all over. Apparently, she will never get tired of it.
    Once, when Erica was still tiny and Clara and her husband had me over for dinner, she asked me what kind of god I'd be.
    "How do you mean?" I asked, though I knew what she meant.
    "Doesn't every god find a niche for themselves?"
    "I believe that's referred to as a 'naos,'" said her husband.
    "What is?"
    "A niche for the statue of a god to sit. It is called a naos. It's Greek."
    Clara and I looked at him--his name is Tom--and we stared.
    "Bradley," said my sister.
    "Yes, Clara?" said I.
    "I think my husband just made a joke."
    "Are you sure?"
    Tom smiled and stood up. "I'm going to wash the dishes. You two can stay in here and be witty."
    "It's what we do best, dear. Did you make any desert?"
    Tom ignored her and carried a pile of plates away into the kitchen. Clara watched him go, then grinned at me.
    "I got a good one."
    I nodded. "You did, I'll admit it. Better than either of your brothers." I was referring, of course, to myself and our younger brother, Peace in Troubles Mark Shupak, who was off at UCLA or USC--I could never remember which--studying physics with a minor in practical theology.
    "Darn right he's better than my brothers. Did you taste that lasagna?"
    "Of course I did. Five pieces worth. Have you ever considered cooking?"
    Clara cocked an eyebrow at me. "With Tom around? Of course not."
    "Good call." I folded my napkin in half, then in half again. "So...did he make desert?"
    "Something with pudding," said Clara. "I snitched."
    "How is it?"
    "Fabulous."
    I nodded and gave a contented sigh. "You got a good one."
    "I did. But Bradley."
    "Yes?"
    "My brothers aren't too bad, either."
    I looked at her and smiled, not entirely sure I deserved the compliment, but glad for my sister. It was one of those little moments that our family stumbles over every once in a while, but that we never talk about after. It's like a sunset that words would simply spoil. Or it's like walking outside without your pants on. Either way, you don't tend to bring it up again.
    Then Erica started kicking where we'd left her in the car seat on the dining room floor, and the moment was over. Clara picked her up and started nursing, something I'd grown accustomed to.
    "So what is it?" asked my sister after my niece was all arranged.
    "What is what?"
    "Your naos?"
    I picked up my napkin by one corner, shook it, and tossed it onto the table. "I have no idea."

    It's a short bus ride from the Eternal Rest to my temple. I've thought about buying a car, but public transportation in Northern Lights is pretty solid--got an award two years ago, if I remember correctly--and insurance rates for gods are abysmally high. That's probably the one place where a god doesn't get a little bit of a break. The way my friend, Jamal, explained it to me--he sells insurance for one of those big rock or handy insurance companies--is that gods have little incentive to drive safely. Then he went off into economics, which he studied in college, but what I could pull out of his explanation was this: if there is zero chance a car wreck will kill you, you might tend to forget your turn signal. I'd like to think that we gods are, as a body, better than that, but insurance rates tell a different stories, and to hear Jamal tell it, actuarial tables never lie.
    So I took the bus the few blocks over and up to where I could hop out and walk the two blocks mored to get to the Temple of Bradley. As far as government issue temples go, it was in decent repair. The fake-marble facade was clean, no graffiti, and the plinth across the pillars had a graceful arch to it. Was that a plinth? Could plinths have arches? What is the plural of 'plinth' anyway? Point is, I'm decently happy with the Temple of Bradley. It's not where I want to be in a hundred years, but every god has to start somewhere.
    The location, on the other hand, might leave a little to be desired. My rather narrow temple is wedged into a road so narrow it's more an older brother to an alley than it is an actual street. The government architects wedged it in between one store called 'Everything Hemp' and another store that's been out of business so long that no one I've talked to can remember what used to be there. I'd be willing to bet that the store was out of business before the building was even built--it was some primordial locus of business failure, and some local contractor simply built an empty shell around it.
    With that combination of neighbors and location, my temple gets a very small stream of passers-by, and an even smaller stream of visitors that actually step through the automatic doors and into the sporadically air-conditioned and heated interior.
    Sage Merlinus pushed open the door of her shop--yes, that is correct: she is the owner of 'Everything Hemp'--and leaned toward me, hanging onto the door behind her. A bell in the shape of a 'mystical goat head' swung from the door's handle, ringing with all the grace you'd expect from a goat head.
    "Bradley!" she called as I neared the front of her shop. She was smiling and swaying in a way that I might have found attractive, if the thought of dating a woman named 'Sage Merlinus' didn't make me want to grow a mustache and flee to be a prisoner in some oppressive communist country. "I'm glad you stopped by! Come in and have some coca tea."
    I blinked but kept walking, only slowing a little. "Coca tea?"
    "It's made from the leaves of the coca plant. Excellent health properties."
    "But isn't that...what they make cocaine from? That sounds dangerous."
    She shook her head and smiled at me indulgently. "They take the cocaine out, silly. It's the same stuff they use to make CocaCola, and you don't see people overdosing on Coke, do you?"
    I had to think about that one.
    "Even if you don't want tea, you should come in to look at the new carpets I got. Hand woven by the Sleeping Monks of the Deep Woods."
    At that point I made a nearly fatal error: I paused. It wasn't really a full stop, more of a hesitation, and I felt the mistake in my gut the moment my foot halted in its forward swing, but it was too late. The secret to getting past Everything Hemp is to stay in motion, walk with purpose, look like you have somewhere to be, and never, ever make eye contact. If you fail--break any of those rules--Sage Merlinus pounces.
    My foot paused. She pounced.
    "I have you interested now, don't I," she said, her arm slipping through mine. I hadn't noticed when she'd left the door and materialized next to me.
    "In what?" I said, swallowing. She was pressed slightly closer to my side that I was comfortable with. (I'm not exactly a touchy-feely kind of guy.)
    Sage grinned. "In the carpets, of course."
    I shook my head. "No, actually. Just in the monks."
    "Oh! The Sleeping Monks of the Deep Woods." She bounced up and down and, incidentally, against me. "It's the most amazing thing! They weave in their sleep, chanting hymns to the universe the entire time. There's an award winning indie documentary about them that's playing in the Black Box Theater, if you wanted to go see it. We could go together! It's right next to this art gallery that is having a show entirely of decomposing plant life juxtaposed with the crass eternity of manmade plastics. The show is titled--"
    "'Landfill,'" interrupted BB, grabbing hold of my other arm and pulling me into motion again. "Sorry for stealing him away, Miss Merlinus, but I need my boss."
    Sage tugged at my other arm for a moment, but then let me go. I think she finds my Chief Acolyte disturbing somehow, though I have no idea why, but I'm not about to argue with it. I shrugged at her, as if to say that I really wanted to stay and see the carpets woven by the Sleeping Monks, or even have some coca tea, but honestly, what can you do when your Chief Acolyte has you in his iron grip?
    "Another time," I said out loud.
    "I'll hold you to it," said Sage.
    BB pulled me up the two small steps--we also have a ramp, for handicapped visitors--and through the automatic doors that swished open and then closed behind us.
    "Why automatic doors?" I asked. "Shouldn't a temple have either open space or something more imposing? A portcullis, maybe."
    "Those are in castles," said BB, "and I think you're just in shock."
    "She almost had me this time, BB."
    "I could see that."
    "I'm not sure I ever would have escaped. Did you know that she actually believes in the Mystical Goat? It gives the Life Milk of the Universe, nurturing man's inner soul."
    "And it's head makes a lousy bell," said BB. "You need to be more careful getting here, boss. Maybe come around the other way."
    I shook my head. "Too long of a walk to get around. I'll just walk faster next time."
    "Are you sure it will be enough? She's tricky."
    I looked at BB. He was a little shorter than me, blonde hair, warm brown eyes, and a face that wasn't handsome--I can recognize handsome in a guy, even if I'd rather spend my time looking at a woman--but he had something about him that I mentioned before. 'Cute' was the closest term I'd come up with, but a better description might have been 'trustworthy.' BB had the kind of face that less scrupulous men had used to sell used cars and win the Presidency of the United States. He had that...SOMETHING.
    "She is tricky," I said. "I guess I'll just have to rely on you to get me out of trouble when I need it."
    "Don't I always?"
    That reminded my why I had come back to my temple in the first place. "No. No, you don't always get me out of trouble. Sometimes you get me one-hundred-percent into it. What, exactly, did you take from Forgotten Zed? The god practically smote me into ashes on the spot!"
    BB slapped me on the shoulder. "Come on, Bradley. He couldn't smite you into ashes. You've got more going for you in the god department than that! He could have singed you a bit, but give yourself some credit."
    "It's not me I'm worried about," I said, and I could hear my voice shaking. In spite of his penchant for casual theft, BB was a good guy. I didn't want anything bag happening to him, and I figured execution was a pretty bad thing. "Forgotten Zed wants to invoke the Laws of the Divine Brotherhood, or whatever they're called."
    BB's face went still. "He's not serious."
    I remembered Zed's eyes. "He's very serious about something, and he was talking about the laws at the time, so I'm not inclined to guess that he was referring to anything else."
    "But no one has been executed under the laws in over three-hundred years. They're completely outdated. Besides, I only borrowed the thing, and it's not one of Zed's major artifacts anyway. From what I could tell, he hadn't pulled the thing out of storage for millennia. You can't tell me that an artifact like that was created just to be left on a shelf. Miracles are to be shared, not stored away like last-year's Halloween candy. It gets stale and gross. Miracles should be fresh and alive."
    I rubbed at my face, finding that I was agreeing with BB, and distressed that he could make theft from one of the most powerful--and vengeful--of the elder gods seem so reasonable. "What did you take, BB?"
    "It's just a--never mind. Just come look at it."

Timing Issues

2011-03-07T20:15:00.000-07:00

I need to go back and reread what I've written, but I'm pretty sure I said it's been about three years since Bradley's mother became mayor and a year since Bradley became a god. I think it needs to be longer than that, so, for now, we're putting it at five years as mayor, three years as a god. For a total of eight years. Except that those years were actually running concurrently. So it's really a total of five years.

That is all.

(I've also been having some thoughts about the nature of writing--my writing in particular--that I might share with you all sometime if I'm feeling particularly expansive or opinionated. The short summary, though, is that I'm shooting for 2,000 words a day, and trying to collect a double-portion of manna on Saturdays so I don't need to write on the Sabbath--which means 4,000 on Saturdays. Yeah, that means a total of 14,000 words each week.

(Your prayers would be much appreciated.)

Accidental God 4.0 -- Section 02

2011-03-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

[I'm trying to write every day as an act of faith, walking out into the darkness and trusting God to lead things someplace worthwhile. It means I have only the vaguest of ideas where this story is going, but let's be honest: how is that any different from my writing before this?

[Also, writing is more fun again. I hope you enjoy discovering this section as much as I did.]

The first day of the second year of high school was the first day that I decided, without a doubt, that I was in love.
    "I am in love," I told my sister, Serenity Clara Shupak, who had just taken a bite of her peanut-butter and raspberry freezer jam sandwich.
    She looked at me.
    "Really," I said. "I am now in love. I saw her black hair, and now I am in love."
    Clara looked at me longer.
    "Stop that," I said.
    She sprayed sandwich all over my face and laughed until she cried. I decided that day to never forgive her.

    "I'm Midnight Jane," said the goddess with the muddy-rainbow hair. "This is Tumble Dry."
    "Yo," said Tumble Dry. He reached out his long, long arm and shook Harold’s much smaller hand.
    "Hi. I'm Harold, but I hope I won't be much longer. How do I get a new name? I think that sounds so awesome. Ever since I found out about, you know, my divinity, I've been looking forward to trading in Harold."
    "You don't like your name?" asked Tumble Dry.
    "Oh, I like it just fine. It's just that it's so hard to beat the romance of a name like 'Standing Appointment' or 'Fish Fry.'"
    "I don't like the name 'Fish Fry,'" said Tumble Dry, glaring off into the distance--not that there was much distance to glare into. The windows on the first floor of the Eternal Rest look out on a row of trees across the street, and that's about it. "'Fish Fry' rhymes with 'Tumble Dry,'" he explained when Harold's round face looked quizzical. "Whenever people talk about 'Fish Fry and Tumble Dry,' I feel like I'm part of some low-rent rap group."
    "Do people ever talk about 'Fish Fry and Tumble Dry?'" asked Midnight Jane, looking at him innocently.
    The god with the architectural nose crossed his arms and glared at her. "No," he admitted grudgingly.
    "Then shut up. You're just mad at Fish Fry because he beat you in the pie eating contest."
    She was probably right. Fish Fry is about five-seven, medium brown hair, medium waist, medium shoe size, medium everything except his mouth. His lips part and it looks like Tartarus has opened to inhale the dead of the world in one cataclysmic swallow. I had nightmares about it for a month after, and Tumble Dry had to swallow four pies and his pride that day. Midnight Jane had laughed at him for six hours straight. She may make my heart jump a beat or two, but she has a certain mean streak running through her. It's a slash of red through her midnight soul.
    She's so beautiful.
    "So do I get to pick my own name?" asked Harold.
    "I did," said Tumble Dry.
    "Really?" Harold looked excited, like a slightly overweight puppy discovering chocolate for the tenth time. "You thought up 'Tumble Dry?'"
    Midnight Jane laughed. "Not even close. He may have picked his own name, but the rest of the gods wadded up his idea, blew their noses on it, and threw it somewhere in the garden."
    Tumble Dry frowned and looked off into the distance again. "My name was better. It had class."
    "What was it?" asked Harold, looking hopeful.
    "It was--" Midnight Jane started to answer, but Tumble Dry cut her off with a glance.
    "No," he said.
    "But you're right, Tumble Dry, it was a good name."
    "It doesn't matter."
    "But Harold wants to know. Don't you want to know, Harold?"
    "Yes, very much. I think Tumble Dry is pretty great, so if the name you thought up is even better, well, that would be like having a two-scoop ice cream cone and finding out you actually have THREE scoops, and--"
    "It's not happening," said Tumble Dry, "and that's the end. And don't tell him when I've gone to the bathroom or something, either. It was a good name, let it rest in peace until we change things around here and a body can pick his own name. Or hers."
    Midnight Jane looked at him for a while, then shrugged. "Fine, I guess. Bradley, get us more root beer."
    I looked over at her, then at the empty pitcher that Mad Hatter Barnes had left full just three minutes before. Then I looked back at Midnight Jane. What could I do? I went off in search of the Mad Hatter.

    I have to tell you now about my Chief Acolyte, Rutherford B. Hayes Smithson. (You might think that 'Rutherford B. Hayes' would be enough of a name for any small child, but his parents had to add ‘Smithson’ on the end. Inevitable, I guess. I mean, that was their name.) Interestingly enough, no one in his family knows what the 'B' stands for--his parents never bothered to find out--so, that's his complete name. It's not 'Rutherford Barrett Hayes,' or 'Rutherford Bingham Hayes,' or 'Bartholomew,' or even 'Bradley.' Just 'B.'
    I bring up BB--yes, even my Chief Acolyte has a nick name, while I remain just 'Bradley'--I bring him up, because he has a rather fluid idea of property rights. Fluid like water and as broad-reaching as the Amazon. He simply doesn't comprehend the fact that, even if he needs something, he shouldn't just take it. Your car? He'll borrow it. Your books? They looked interesting. Your toothbrush? If the need is great. Your underwear? Not likely, but let's not rule out any possibilities here. I did mention that his concept of property rights was fluid, didn't I? Is there anything that is more liquid than water? That substance, whatever it is, is the firmness of his grasp of 'yours' and 'mine.'
    Fortunately, if there is a fortunately to this situation, BB also is one of the least selfish people I know. If he were going to borrow your underwear, it's more likely he would be borrowing it for a friend than for himself. While that thought is slightly disturbing, the principle behind it is solid: BB might be what some people would call a 'thief,' but he's the oft-portrayed-in-literature-but-never-actually-seen Thief with a Heart of Gold. He really, truly would give you the shirt off his back if you were in need.
    Or the shirt off some other guy's back. It's all the same to BB.

    My cell phone rang as we sat there around the table in the Eternal Rest.
    "Nice ring tone," said Midnight Jane. "That Brahms?"
    "Yeah," I said, not having any real idea if it were Brahms or not. Classical composers and I had met around the time I was two, hung out together until I was twelve, and then spent most of our time not talking after that. Out of the free ring tones on my phone, this was just the tone I disliked least. I suppose it really was good, though, if you liked arpeggios. "You mind if I get this?"
    "You ask that every time," said Tumble Dry. "Just answer it."
    I flipped my phone open. "This is Bradley."
    "Bradley, this is BB. We might have a problem."
    I pulled at my chin. Hearing from BB was never boring. Sometimes I really, really wanted to be bored. "What happened?" I stood up and walked away from the table as I talked. I had a feeling I didn't want to have to explain any of this to my friends. They're good people, but, well, they tend to laugh. Especially Midnight Jane.
    "I borrowed something," said my Chief Acolyte. "Not a big thing, but a thing. I don't think it will be a problem, though. It's only a minor holy artifact, anyway, and this guy wandered into our temple, really sick and all, and he doesn't trust the elder gods, so I helped him out."
    "What did you take, BB?"
    "Come on, Bradley. Don't talk like that. It's not like our temple is the most popular around. We don't have good music or good sermons, and the government stipend barely covers expenses, if that. We've got to do what we can to show the people around here that you're a nice guy, the kind of god you want to go to in distress--and let me tell you, a healing here or there is just the kind of good press a young god needs."
    I could feel a headache coming on, grinding through the brain behind my forehead and settling up against the inside of my skull, content to lurk there, painful and menacing. "You took something important, didn't you."
    "It was important to the guy I helped! He's been really sick for over a year now, but he was dressed all nice, so I figured he had some money to spare, and you do know we can do good things with spare money."
    I started to worry that I was asking the wrong question. If BB was going to this kind of effort to convince me that things were okay, that had to mean that things--things of all kinds and sorts and types--weren't okay at all.
    That's when I saw him advancing across the dining room of the Eternal Rest. Forgotten Zed is a solid six-foot-six with intent, packed with the kind of muscles that take over two-thousand years to develop...and then have run down a little bit, but nobody is going to tell that to Zed's face. Not me, at least. I don't say much of anything to Zed's face. I did, on one occasion, mutter something behind his back, but my heart wasn't in it. Maybe I'm intimidated by his facial hair--white and electric. I've never been able to grow facial hair more than a paltry sandpaper scruff, and Forgotten Zed's beard, like the rest of his body, is filled with dynamic energy.
    But not necessarily a surplus of coordination. He tripped over a chair as he advanced toward me, stumbling, stopping, and glaring at the offending piece of lumber. Then he snapped the back off and dropped it on the floor. It clattered there, then held still, afraid to attract any more attention from the outraged god.
    The next object of Forgotten Zed's attention was me.
    "Are you Bradley?" he called across the dining room, striding towards me again.
    "BB," I said, almost whispering through the phone, "did you steal from who I think you did?"
    "Who do you think I stole from?" asked my Acolyte. "Because I probably didn't. I wouldn't be that dumb. Why, is he there?"
    I closed my phone and tried to force my cheeks and lips into a friendly smile. After all, I'm a god, Forgotten Zed is a god, and that means we have lots in common. We probably use the same toilet paper. And we both like our lives without pain. Well, at least one of us does.
    "I ask you again, sir," said one of the oldest of the elder gods, "are you Bradley?"
    "I am," I squeaked, then cleared my throat. "I am," I tried again in a slightly less embarrassing register. "Can I help you with something?"
    Zed looked down at me from what seemed like a more lofty climb than the five inches difference in our height should have made possible. I didn't think I was slouching--was I? I straightened my back, looked in his eyes, but then slouched a little again, just to be safe. Or feel safer. I also broke eye contact, having read somewhere that eye contact only provokes savage beasts.
    "You can give me back what is mine," said Forgotten Zed.
    I swallowed. "I'm not sure I know what you're talking about," I said, "but I'm sure we can--"
    "And then you can have the acolyte who took it executed."
    I blinked. Time seemed to stretch, like a long pull of saltwater taffy. "Excuse me?"
    "You can have your kleptomaniacal acolyte executed as dictated under the Laws of the Divine Brotherhood, codified and ratified by the entire body of the divine in the year 427."
    "I don't think I've read it," I said, trying to stall for time as my mind raced to catch up with what Forgotten Zed had just said. Executed?
    "It doesn't matter if you've read it or not," said this imposing slab of divinity. "Part of the ratified treaty was that, in order to protect our civilization as we know it and prevent cataclysmic war between divine personages, the laws and strictures would apply to all gods, past and future."
    That didn't sound good. Had they mentioned these laws in the orientation packet the government had given me? It was ringing a bell, but there had been a lot of pages. Stalling still seemed like a good idea. "But isn't that rather sexist? You said it's called 'the Laws of the Divine Brotherhood.' Kind of unfair to women, it seems."
    Forgotten Zed glared from under white and bushy eyebrows. "The Laws were ratified by the United Divine Sisterhood in 632. It applies to all gods. Everywhere. Equally. And the law dictates that any holder of Great Office that is caught in the theft of artifacts of power, whether historical or newly shaped through the faith of worship, must be tried, speedily convicted, and put to death."
    "What if he's innocent?"
    "Your acolyte? I think not.”
    I blinked. He was almost certainly correct on that one. I tried another direction. "Are you sure it's the Great Office holder that needs to be executed?"
    His eyes narrowed. He said nothing.
    I swallowed and went on. "Because, the way you said it, it could have meant that the artifact of power needed to be executed. I've seen a couple of those things, and honestly, if they let themselves get stolen, I would say it probably was their own fault--"
    "Don't be fatuous," he interrupted, and he stared--glared, really, the way an avalanche glares its way down a mountain--and I decided not only to stop being fatuous right then, but to never be fatuous again. Ever. I also made a mental note to find out what 'fatuous' meant. "You know what your Chief Acolyte took, and you will get it back to me. Immediately. In fact, I'm almost ready to believe that you ordered the theft yourself." Forgotten Zed leaned down and in until his beard was almost tickling my chin, and I found myself leaning back and a little more back, my calves tense and burning. "And do you know what happens if I discover that you are the one behind this? Chains. Rocks. Eternally devoured by a great bird of prey."
    I tried to stop my mouth. I often do. My mother has said before that when the angels assembled my brain, they forgot to include any of the usual filters or safety features that keep the stupid words inside and let the smart words out. I expect she was correct.
    "I've read that story before," I said. "Didn't he escape?"
    Forgotten Zed didn't get mad. I had expected him to, but there was no thunder in his hair, no fire in his eyes. In fact, he just smiled. It was a friendly sort of smile, almost like we were on a picnic together, we were the oldest of pals, and he was only looming over and threatening me with immense pain the way the oldest of pals do.
    Then he turned and walked away.

    I remember reading the story of Prometheus as a child. It was a children’s book about celebrities of the Western Hemisphere, and it included a bit about 'Mister Pro' as his publicists call him now. He has a good life, from everything I can see. His marriage has lasted over five-hundred years, his children seem to actually have healthy lives in spite of all the family money, and the way he's posed in the pictures, you can tell that he's the sort of guy you'd like because he'd like you. He likes people. He likes life. He's happy.
    So between Forgotten Zed and Mister Pro, who has the last laugh?
    Of course, there's one number that always stood out to me from the Prometheus story: six-hundred-eighty-three. It's the number of years the god was chained to a rock. I did the math once. That means the guy had his liver eaten out 249,295 times.
    Between Forgotten Zed and Mister Pro, who has the last laugh?

    I walked the long way around the broken chair and joined my friends at the table again. Already some of the very discrete staff of the Eternal Rest were moving to clear away any signs of unpleasantness. Not that there were any, really. Everyone's friends here. I realized I was shaking, just a little.
    "What was that about?" asked Midnight Jane. "You look like you need a pair of clean underwear."
    "I do not," I said, then sat down and discretely checked under the table. Everything was dry--good to go. "And I honestly don't know what that was about." Actually, if I were being completely honest, I did know a little what that was all about, but I didn't need to tell Midnight Jane about it. She had a thing for fires, and for throwing fuel on them. Also, she didn't like Forgotten Zed.
    "Whatever it is you did," she said, "I applaud you. Anything that tweaks the nose of that bit of prehistoric rock is all right with me."
    "'Tweaks the nose?'" said Tumble Dry, snorting. "No one has tweaked anyone's nose for decades."
    Midnight Jane flicked a piece of ice at him. "It's not polite to point out a woman's age. Come on, Bradley. Tell us what it was about."
    "I admit that I'm interested, too," said Harold. "Forgotten Zed is like Mount Everest. I mean, I've always known he existed, but I've never expected to actually see him. This is remarkable!"
    I knew a bit about what Harold meant. Growing up in Northern Lights, I'd known that Zed was in the area, but I never thought I'd meet him. Or be threatened by him.
    I shrugged. "Something to do with BB, but I'm sure it was a misunderstanding."
    Midnight Jane hooted. "A misunderstanding? With BB? Not likely! What did he take this time? Old Zeddie's beard trimmer? His Angry Toga? Good for BB! I'll have to buy him lunch."
    I shifted in my chair. I wanted her to buy ME lunch, not my Chief Acolyte. Hang on. Switch that: I wanted to buy HER lunch. Then I remembered the dismal state of my temple finances and, in my head, switched things back. But either way, I didn't want her spending her time with BB. I know the guy isn't exactly a romantic sort, but he has a way of getting under your skin with how CUTE he is, and I didn't think Midnight Jane went in for 'cute,' but better safe than sorry.
    But that wasn't the point.
    "That's not the point," I said. "If BB DID steal something--and I'm not saying he did--then Forgotten Zed is threatening to execute him."
    "Under the Laws of the Divine Brotherhood?" asked Tumble Dry, leaning back long in his chair. "Those haven't been enforced for centuries. Not the truly draconic parts of them, anyway." He slapped the table and leaned forward. "I know what this is about."
    "You do?" I asked. I was certain I didn't.
    "The competition."
    Midnight Jane's eyes narrowed. "You don't think so, really."
    "I do," said Tumble Dry, leaning back in his chair again. "I do indeed. Forgotten Zed is worried, and he's decided to play dirty. Get Bradley off his game."
    Harold looked side to side, clearly delighted by all of this and not having any idea what was going on.
    Midnight Jane crossed her arms over her breasts. "That bas--"
    "Language, madame," said Mad Hatter Barnes, leaning in to replace the empty pitcher of root beer.
    She flicked her eyes up at him and grunted an apology. "That jerk. We finally get a competition where the elder gods DON'T have an edge of thousands of years of experience, and they immediately step in to start sabotaging our best player. I cry foul."
    "So this is all about some contest?" asked Harold.
    "Yes," said Tumble Dry.
    Midnight Jane nodded. "Definitely," she said with confidence. "They're trying to intimidate Bradley."
    I had looked into Forgotten Zed's eyes, and I wasn't so sure this was just about intimidating me. This was more than that, somehow. However, if it WAS about intimidating me, I knew one thing: it was working.

Accidental God 4.0 -- Section 01

2011-02-23T23:13:00.000-07:00

[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.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 19

2011-01-25T18:13:00.000-07:00

[I started listening to a Terry Pratchett book today. I don't know how it happened, but he got better than his earlier books. Lots better. In fact, it was somewhat distressing how good he is. But, as my wife said, his success doesn't take away from my success.

[It sure is intimidating, though.]

    "Think it will snow?" asked Rae as they walked.
    Luther looked around. "Eventually, yes. Why do you ask?"
    "To make conversation. We haven't said anything for the last block."
    "There was traffic," said Luther.
    "So?"
    "It was loud. Hard to talk over it."
    "No more excuses. You have to talk to me."
    Luther looked over at her. She was younger than he was--most everyone was--but they'd been friends so long it was hard to remember a time when he hadn't known her. So, he supposed, he owed her. And she looked concerned. Sure, she looked cheerful, but there was concern under that, about as well hidden as noodles in lasagna.
    "Okay," he said. "What do we talk about."
    "Anything. Whatever you want to talk about. Just start talking, and I'll answer, and we'll go back and forth. It'll be like a conversation."
    "I've heard about those," said Luther. "Want to talk about shoes?"
    "No."
    "How's your job with the Twins?"
    Rae wrinkled her nose. "Some days I can't figure out how those two ever became goddesses. Honestly, last week they come back from the hair dresser, and--hang on. No. You're not getting me talking. It's your turn to talk."
    "Can't I ask you questions?" asked Luther.
    "Possibly, but not before you say five things about your own life."
    "What would I say?"
    "Nope, you can't ask me that. I'm waiting for those five things."
    Luther smiled. "You're working really hard at this."
    "Yes, I am. You spent so many years listening to me, it's about time I shut up and did some listening. So talk."
    "Okay."
    "Start now."
    "Give me a minute."
    "Fine. Your minute starts now."
    "I didn't mean that literally."
    "Don't care. I'll expect you to be talking in...fifty seconds."
    Luther rubbed at the scruff on his cheek--he'd forgotten to shave--and looked around at the world. Lunch traffic, people walking here and there. Luther noticed their shoes, as he probably always would. Why did women insist on wearing such terrible torture devices? Luther could appreciate attractive calves, but he wasn't sure they were worth the pain some women went through every day. If he'd had his way, Heartbreak Hal's shoe store would never have carried high heels--not for men back in the day, not for women now.
    But Rae had said he couldn't talk about shoes. What else would he talk about? Luther assumed that Forgotten Zed's murder was out of the question. He supposed they could talk about Atty, but no--she'd said he had to talk about himself. What was there to say?
    "Time's up," said Rae. "Talk."
    "I'm not ready."
    "Talk now."
    Her voice was hard, harder than he remembered hearing it, and it surprised him. Luther found his mouth moving.
    "I'm thinking about taking up cooking."
    "Really?"
    "I guess so. I joked about that with Atty, but I think I might actually mean it."
    "You told Atty you're going to cook? Wonderful. Anything in particular?"
    "Scouring pads."
    "Excuse me?"
    "I don't know. I have no idea what I want to cook. Atty had these magazines and books covered in pictures of beautiful food. Do you think all that food is real?"
    "Probably."
    "But I heard somewhere that the food in those pictures is sculpted from other food. Like the ice cream in chocolate syrup commercials."
    "What about it?"
    "I heard they carved it out of potatoes."
    "But wouldn't the potatoes go brown?"
    "Sure, because they're pouring chocolate syrup over them."
    "Come on. The potatoes would start to oxidize, unless they covered them with spray paint or something. Maybe they use white on them. But I bet most of the food is real." Rae tucked some stray hair behind her ear. "Like asparagus. What's the point of trying to carve asparagus? Easier just to cook a dozen batches than to get all those little leaves on there."
    "You have a point," said Luther. "There's the restaurant."
    "Maybe you could cook some Thai food," Rae suggested. "Get some inspiration from our lunch here. Why did you stop walking?"
    Luther hadn’t realized that he had stopped, but he had. He’d been distracted by the cluster of broguts hanging from the restaurant sign. “Up there,” he said, pointing.
    “Ew,” said Rae. “Broguts.”
    “Don’t like them?”
    “Not at all. I think it’s the legs. Anything over five and I get the willies.”
    “Five doesn’t bother you?”
    Rae shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ve never seen anything with five.”
    “I don’t think anything has five legs. So why not just say ‘anything over four?’”
    “I don’t want to be prejudiced.”
    Luther raised his eyebrows. “That’s...generous of you. I think.”
    Rae smiled at him. “It’s how I was raised. Shall we go in?”
    “Hold on a moment,” said Luther. “I’m trying to think. Why would broguts be out? You hardly ever see them, even at night.”
    “Really?” said Rae. “Did we discover your one hobby, Luther? You’re a brogut watcher?”
    The angel shook his head. “I saw a documentary last week. They’re really reclusive creatures, easily spooked. And look at those.” Luther pointed up to the roof. “See the noses sticking out over the edge there? Long-nosed rupplers. Also entropic creatures, and you never see them in cities.”
    Rae scrunched up her face. “Are those the things that look like roadkill? They pretty much just lie around and sniff at stuff, right?”
    Luther nodded.
    “Then I hate those, too,” said Rae, and she grabbed his sleeve, pulling. “Let’s hurry and go inside.”
    “Give me just a minute,” Luther protested. “When did you even get a chance to hate long-nosed rupplers? The camera crews had to hang from tree branches for a month to get shots of them.”
    “A month?”
    “It was a long time. When did you see them?”
    “If we go inside, I’ll tell you.”
    “If you tell me, I’ll go inside.”
    Rae looked at him and sighed. “Fine. You remember when Lorenzo was a brand new god and I got a job with him?”
    “With Lorenzo de Medici? Sure. You looked good in Renaissance clothing.”
    “I did not, but thank you. Back then, he had entropic creatures around him all the time. Broguts, and the long-nosed whatevers, and chickens, and potatoes were growing everywhere, and it was a mess. I hated it.”
    Luther scratched at his neck, and his skin was rough against his fingers. How had he forgotten to shave? “So,” he said, “entropic creatures were hanging around a new god. Of course. That makes sense. New gods haven’t fully bonded with their power, so they shed it everywhere and attract entropic creatures like moths.”
    “Ugh,” said Rae. “You had to remind me. Night was terrible with all the moths. I would’t walk with him. I refused.”
    Luther continued chasing after his train of thought. It seemed important. “But why are they at this restaurant? And why was one following that boy?”
    “What boy?” asked Rae.
    “Boy at the bagel shop this morning. Tall, skinny kid. He said a brogut was following him around town--but he couldn’t be a new god.” Luther stopped as the weight of what he said started to sink in. “Could he?”
    Rae was staring at him. Luther couldn’t quite figure out what he was saying. That boy couldn’t have been a killer. He had been so innocent. Maybe a bit of a schmuck, but that was what kids were supposed to be.
    Rae thought out loud for him. “Zed dies, and suddenly a boy has broguts following him around? Doesn’t seem likely it’s coincidence.”
    “But the boy seemed nice. I don’t think he was the guy.”
    “I can think of one way we might find out,” said Rae. “Let’s go.” She turned and walked purposefully toward the restaurant and Luther hurried to catch up.
    “This might be a bad idea,” he said. “If he is a god killer, confronting him is one of the worse ways I can think of approaching this.”
    Rae glanced at him sideways. “Give me some credit, Luther. Are you going to get the door for me?”
    “Of course.” He jogged ahead and pulled the door open. “After you.”
    “Your courtesy sweeps me off my feet.”
    Then Rae was past him and in the restaurant, looking around. Luther looked, too. No tall, skinny kid. He started breathing again, then realized how silly it was he had been holding his breath. That kid wasn’t the killer. He was sure of it.
    “We’re checking the kitchen,” said Rae, but before they could make it halfway across the room, a young woman in an apron intercepted them.
    “Can I help you?” she asked, smiling. “Table for two?”
    “Probably not,” said Rae. “I mean, probably no table. I’m hoping you actually can help us. We’re looking for a tall young man, skinny. He might be a customer here, or on the kitchen staff.”
    The young woman glanced back at the kitchen, a little nervously, Luther thought. “You might mean Bradley, but he doesn’t work here anymore. What is this for, anyway?”
    Oh dear, thought Luther. He should have had a lie ready for this.
    Rae sailed on without hesitation. “I work at Twin Goddess Art Gallery, and a patron left some things there. We didn’t know how to find him, but he had mentioned this restaurant, so, since I was on the way by, I thought I’d ask. And possible have lunch.”
    “Art gallery?” said the young woman. “That was probably Bradley, then. He was always drawing. What things did he leave?”
    “A sketch book,” said Rae, and the server cocked her head, looking suddenly skeptical.
    “If you can call it that,” said Luther. “A bunch of loose papers, all folded up and tied together.” Was that right? It was a guess, but a good one, he hoped.
    The young woman chuckled. “That sounds like Bradley. I wish I could keep them here for him, but he quit last night.”     “Did something happen?” asked Rae, all friendly curiosity.
    The server glanced back at the kitchen. Was there someone to worry about in there? She hesitated longer, looked at Rae’s smiling-yet-concerned face, then let out her breath. “There was an accident. A patron had an allergic reaction to the food. Peanuts, or something. The chef said it was Bradley’s fault, but I don’t believe it. He was smart. Too smart. He wouldn’t forget to mention something like that.”
    Luther didn’t want to ask the question that came to mind, but he felt he had to. He cleared his throat and the girl looked at him. “Is it possible that,” he cleared his throat again--why did this make him nervous?--“that the young man would have done something like that on purpose?”
    The girl’s mouth tightened and her nose wrinkled, which would have been cute if she hadn’t so clearly been angry. “How dare you,” she said. “How dare you. You should have seen his face. He was white as a ghost, looking at her. You might have thought he was the one who died. How dare you!”
    “I’m sorry,” said Luther, but he had to school his features to keep the smile off his face. He was so glad. The boy wasn’t a god killer. He glanced at the server’s name tag. “I didn’t mean any offense, Denise. I truly am sorry.”
    “Please do forgive my friend,” said Rae, pulling Denise’s eyes back to her. “He means well, but sometimes he walks around with his feet in his mouth.”
    “That was a terrible thing to say,” said Denise, throwing her glare back at Luther. “I wouldn’t even say that about the chef.”
    “Of course not,” said Rae. “I think we should go, then. Maybe I’ll come back later.”
    “Without him,” said Denise. It wasn’t a question.
    “Thank you for your help,” said Rae, and they left the restaurant. They paused on the sidewalk while Rae readjusted her scarf. Luther didn’t bother trying to hide his smile anymore. Bradley, the boy, wasn’t the killer. He wasn’t sure entirely why that made him so happy, but it did. Perhaps it was because he liked the boy, which he did, even after a total of perhaps two minutes together. Bradley had seemed sincere, like he cared about things more than the average person. And perhaps Luther was pleased because his judgment of the kid had been right. It was a frightening thing to doubt your judgment of people after more than a millennium of living. Either way, he smiled.
    “That was tactless,” said Rae, “but probably necessary. So now we know that our killer is the woman who died from a peanut allergy. Should that be possible?”
    Luther shrugged. “If the power hadn’t had a chance to bind to her, then sure, and giving the timing, I can’t imagine any real binding going on. She was almost as vulnerable as a normal human. And now Bradley has all that power.”
    “We need to find him,” said Rae. “I’m going back in.”
    “I think the girl would have mentioned it if she knew his address.”
    “Which is why I’m not going to talk to Denise. I’m going to work the manager, but you stay here. No need to antagonize the poor girl.”
    “I never antagonize anyone,” Luther protested.
    “Except when you think there’s something good that needs to be done. Then you get a little bullish.”
    “I’m gentle as a lamb.”
    “I’m leaving now.”
    “I’ll wait here.”
    “Luther.”
    “Yes?”
    “It’s good to see you smile again.”

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 18

2011-01-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

[This is just a short section. There's more about Rae and Luther written, but it's not done yet and I need to go help bed time along. Anyway, more than six-hundred words are written, but that'll have to happen tomorrow. Sorry for the creeping pace, but I'll try to be steady.]

    Luther’s doorbell rang.
    “It’s open!” he yelled. He felt confident it was Rae. He didn’t remember anyone ever ringing his doorbell in this apartment--Atty had pounded on the door. In fact, he’d forgotten what the bell sounded like. It was bland. A bland bell. Maybe he should get it changed. What did someone have to do to get a new doorbell? Was there a doorbell store out there?
    He looked up from his desk to see Rae standing in the door of his study.
    “Hey, Rae.”
    She looked around the room. “Oh my,” she said.
    “What is it?” asked Luther, looking around. “Is there something wrong?”
    “Your stuff.”
    Luther looked at her questioningly, so she went on.
    “You don’t have anything new in here.”
    “New isn’t always better.”
    “True, but you also don’t have anything old. No antiques, nothing quality. When did you get all this stuff?”
    “The fifties?”
    Rae poked at his recliner and sighed. “Not this. This is screaming at me that it came from the seventies. When we go shopping, we’re also getting you new furniture.”
    “But I just lost my job.”
    “Seriously, Luther? You’re short on money?”
    “Well...no. But it feels wrong to buy stuff when I’m unemployed.”
    “You’ll have to compromise your standards, just this once.” Rae looked at the phone in Luther’s hand. “What are you up to?”
    “Making calls. You heard the news?”
    “Nope. I’m taking a break from the media, trying to catch up on some reading. Some books have been on my list for over three-hundred years, and I decided it was time to get serious. Did something happen?”
    Luther picked up a newspaper and spun it so it landed on his desk, facing Rae. She walked over and put her finger under the headline: Zed is dead.
    “Is this some kind of joke?”
    Luther shrugged one shoulder. “Seems like it should be, doesn’t it. Some assassin got him in his home. Forgotten Zed is done.”
    “That’s insane.”
    Luther nodded.
    “Also insensitive.”
    Luther snorted. “Yeah, killing someone has to be the pinnacle of insensitivity.”
    Rae rolled her eyes. “I meant the headline.”
    “Oh. Yeah, that, too. But it was probably inevitable. I mean, it does rhyme.”
    Rae was ignoring him, skimming over the article with her finger. He waited while she finished, then they just looked at each other.
    “Wow,” she said, finally.
    “Yep.”
    “So you’ve been calling people?”
    “Yeah. Reaching out to some old friends, trying to find out what’s going on.”
    “You think this is the start of a divine war?”
    Luther shook his head. “None of my friends have heard anything, and another article in the paper says TCD doesn’t think so, either. They think it’s an isolated thing.”
    Rae walked backwards and sat down in the recliner. “That’s a relief. Last thing we need is another World War.”
    Luther leaned back in his chair. “Absolutely not. I’ve got a few more people I can call to make sure. Should we skip lunch today?”
    “No!” Rae almost jumped to her feet. “We are going to lunch. We didn’t get you this far just to let you slip back again. Stand up.”
    “Hang on,” said Luther. “‘We?’ What do you mean by ‘we didn’t get you this far?’”
    Rae walked around Luther’s desk and grabbed his arm, pulling him to his feet. “I mean Atty and me, of course. Didn’t I tell you? You’re all that we talk about.”
    “Stop that.”
    “Get up, get up.”
    “I don’t have shoes on.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t wear them at home. I prefer stocking feet.”
    “That’s weird.”
    “Why is that?”
    “You’ve only been making shoes for the last thousand years.”
    “Eight-hundred.”
    “And you go around in socks when you have the chance.”
    “All right, I guess that is a little weird. Maybe I am in denial about shoes.”
    “Among other things,” said Rae. “Get yours on.”

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 17

2011-01-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

[I had it backwards in yesterdays comments. That was mostly old with a little new. Today's is all new, though. Oddly humorous, too. Sunshine was conceived as just a bit part, but I like him--in a slightly repulsed kind of way. See, I know what he's like when he's not being charming.]

    Will Mako had to pound for a solid five minutes before Sunshine opened the little window in the door.
    “Mako,” said the man, glaring through the little bars. “Go away. My bar is closed. And you woke me up. I hate you.”
    The sergeant held up a stack of twenties in front of the bartender’s face.
    “Mako,” said the man again, “why don’t you come in? My bar is always open to you, and you’re like a brother to me.”
    Will chuckled and stepped back as the two deadbolts slid open and the thick steel door swung into the alley. Sunshine’s wasn’t a gentle kind of bar, and it showed in the furnishings: solid and all bolted to the floor. It showed in the owner, too. Sunshine had a strangely unattractive combination of thick muscles and thick scars, and he had never bothered to hire a bouncer. He took care of that work on his own, and from what Will had seen of the man, Sunshine enjoyed it.
    “What can I get you, Sergeant Mako? You on the clock? Or does that even matter?”
    Will smiled. “Sure it matters. Drink on the clock and I might get caught, and right now I’m on the clock.”
    “So,” said Sunshine, looking as thoughtful as he ever looked as he considered, “scotch then?”
    “You read my mind,” said Will.
    As Sunshine stepped behind the bar, he looked sideways at the police sergeant. “It bothers me,” he said.
    “What does?” Will sat on a stool, set down the stack of twenties, and rested his elbows on the bar.
    “When you look like that. Times like these, your smile really does look like a shark.”
    Will cocked his head. “What do you mean, like a shark?”
    “I mean you look like a shark.”
    “What does that have to do with anything?”
    “Your name,” said the bartender, pulling a block of ice out of a little freezer. “Mako. It’s like the shark, right?”
    “I don’t think so,” said Will. “Is it? I thought it was spelled differently.”
    “So what? You still say them the same, right?”
    “Yeah, but I think mine comes from Japanese or something like that.”
    “No kidding,” said Sunshine. “Is the shark Japanese?”
    “Why would a shark be Japanese? Animals aren’t anything. They’re just animals.”
    “But pandas are Chinese, right? I mean, we have to give the Chinese a statue of gold every time we want a panda for our zoos, so I figure that means pandas are definitely Chinese.”
    Will stared while Sunshine started chipping at the block of ice with a pick.
    “I hesitate to say this while you’re holding a weapon, Sunshine, but you are an idiot.”
    “I am not.”
    “No, sometimes you are. We never gave anybody a gold statue for anything. What would America be doing with gold statues?”
    “Then tell me how they got a panda in the zoo down at DC? ‘Cause they’ve got one.”
    “I don’t know how they got a panda, but it wasn’t with any golden statues.”
    “Had a baby, too,” said Sunshine.
    “Who did?”
    “The panda.”
    “Why are we talking about pandas?”
    The bartender shrugged and grabbed a bottle from the shelf behind him. “How should I know? You brought it up.”
    Will rubbed at his face, wishing he’d had an hour or two more of sleep. “Pandas are not why I came.”
    “Figured as much.” Sunshine poured and set the drink in front of the sergeant. “You here about the drug deal on the south side?”
    “What? No.”
    “Then the Lewiston burglary.”
    “There was a burglary?”
    “You didn’t hear about that?”
    “When did it happen?”
    Sunshine shrugged. “They were going to do it this morning. You’re not here about that?”
    “I don’t think anyone on the force knows about that.” Will laughed. “Heck, I bet the Lewiston’s don’t even know about it yet. Don’t they have good security?”
    The bartender sniffed. “I hear it’s fair. Not much against these guys, though. This money isn’t for that?”
    “Not even a little. I’m in homicide now.”
    “Never mind, then. I don’t know a thing about the burglary. What are you here about?”
    “Bjorn Baernson.”
    “The Bear killed someone? Oh, right. I heard somebody else got him last night. What about it?”
    Will picked up the stack of money, bound with rubber bands, and tossed it closer to Sunshine. “He got killed, but thing is, he killed someone else first. It was a job, and I need to find out who hired him.”
    “What about the person who killed him?”
    “I need to know that, too.” Will stopped and thought. “Actually, that’s even more important, but I’m thinking that the person who hired him is the person who killed him.”
    “Sounds nasty,” said Sunshine.
    “Tell me about it. Also, I need to find this guy fast.”
    “You sure it’s a guy?”
    “Why do you say that? You think it’s a woman?”
    Sunshine shrugged again. “Not particularly.”
    “Then why did you bring it up?”
    “I’ve just noticed that you’re a bit of a masochist.”
    “I am not.”
    “Sure you are. You look down on women.”
    “That’s not being a masochist. That’s a misogynist.”
    “I thought that was when a black guy married a white woman.”
    Will shook his head. “I have no idea what they call that, but that’s not misogyny. Misogyny is when you hate women.”
    “Okay then.”
    “Okay then what?”
    “You’re a misogynist.”
    “I am not--forget it. Take that stack. Use what you need to find out about Bjorn, the rest is yours to keep.”
    “Thanks. What’s the stack in your pocket for?”
    The sergeant chuckled and reached into his coat pocket, pulling out another, larger stack of twenties. “This is for another little job I’ve got for you. You know my employers?”
    “The NLPD?”
    “No. Different employers.”
    “You quit your job?”
    “This is an extra job.”
    “The best kind,” said Sunshine, putting on his wise face. It wasn’t very.
    “Whatever,” said Will. “Thing is, there are two people in town who have me doing a bit of something on the side and on the low-down, if you know what I mean. Never mind. Don’t answer that. The point is that I’m thinking it might be smart to get a little insurance on these two. See, I’m starting to think they may think of me as usable and disposable.”
    “Like a Kleenex,” said Sunshine.
    “Sure, I guess. Like a Kleenex.”
    “Or one of those cleaning wipes.”
    “So,” said Will, talking over the bartender, “I’m thinking it might be smart to find out a little more about my employers.”
    Sunshine’s eyes narrowed. “So this is dangerous?”
    Will remembered the two, standing in his room, and he shivered. Actually shivered. He’d heard about people doing that--I mean people say that something made them shiver, but he’d never actually experienced it before--but now, there it was. Will had shivered, and it was because of those two.
    “Yeah, I’d say it’s definitely dangerous.”
    “Ergo, the bigger stack.”
    Will stared.
    “What?” asked Sunshine.
    “Did you just pull out Greek on me?”
    “Why would I know Greek?”
    “You were just using it.”
    “What? ‘Ergo?’ That’s not Greek. That’s like, French, or something.”
    “It’s not French.”
    “How do you know? Do you speak French?”
    Will took a swallow. “I don’t have to speak French to know if something isn’t French. Maybe it’s Latin.”
    “Can’t be Latin.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t speak Latin.”
    “You don’t speak French either.”
    “Sure I do. Ergo. See? I’m French, like Francois Truffaut and that skunk on Looney Tunes.”
    “You’re a nut.”
    “Does a nut know about French New Wave film?”
    Will looked at Sunshine. “Yes,” he said finally.
    The bartender rolled his eyes. “You’re right. This girl keeps making me watch the stuff. It’s like they filmed a good movie, then cut it into lots of tiny pieces, then taped it all back together into the longest waste of time ever invented.”
    “That was almost poetic of you,” said Will. “I’m impressed.”
    “Probably because I’ve said that exact same thing to this girl more than twenty times.”
    “Really?”
    “In my head.”
    “Sunshine, you need a new girl.”
    “No I don’t.”
    “Sure you do.”
    “Mako, have you seen her?”
    “Which one is she?”
    “Jackie.”
    “Skinny Jackie?”
    Sunshine jerked back, wrinkling his nose. “Don’t say that, Sergeant. Not even nice to think about.”
    Will thought for a second. “Oh! You mean the Jackie with the--”
    “Yep.”
    “That’s the Jackie who--”
    “That’s the one.”
    “Whoa.” Will took another drink. “Okay, she might be worth a French film or two.”
    The two sat in silence for a moment out of respect for high art--Jackie, of course. Will hated foreign films.
    “So you’ll take it?” he asked after an appropriate time had passed.
    “Dangerous,” said Sunshine.
    “Yep.”
    “Big stack, though.”
    “Yep.”
    “What else do you know about them?”
    “I think they might be demons.”
    Sunshine bent one eyebrow down. “Two demons, new in town, man and woman? I think I might have heard something. But why aren’t you looking into this yourself?”
    “Not a chance,” said Will. “I can guarantee you, they hear I’m poking around, I won’t last the day. I need to get this information on the sly.”
    “Ergo, you’re giving it to me.”
    “Would you cut that out?”
    “Ask me nicely.”
    “Please?”
    “Ask me in French.”
    “I’m out of here.” Will stood up. “You’ll do the jobs?”
    Sunshine shrugged again. “I don’t see why not. Which one is more important?”
    “Definitely Bjorn. Wait. Hang on. The demons.” Will took a deep breath and let it out. “Both. They’re both important.”

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 16

2011-01-13T20:19:00.000-07:00

[A little old, quite a bit of new. Trying to write when I can, but a job is a job is a job. Anyway, I'm pretty pleased with the old stuff, and I think it fits in right here in the story. Enjoy.]

    As Bradley walked out of the bagel shop, he looked up. Yep, there it was, clinging to a tree branch, that little brogut. It looked at him with wide, lizard eyes and its tongue flickered out. Bradley couldn't decide if it was disturbing or cute.
    Speaking of disturbing and cute, what was it about that girl in the bagel shop? She wasn't the kind of woman Bradley usually thought of when he thought 'beautiful'--she was a little too skinny, not that Bradley was one to talk--but she was sticking in his head. Yep, there she was in his head, standing and smiling. She was doing a lot of smiling. Bradley put in his earbuds and walked and thought.
    Happiness, he decided. That girl looked like she actually enjoyed life. How strange. Not to say that Bradley didn't like his life, but he also wasn't starting any parades in honor of how great the world was. The world WAS great. It just didn't always feel that great. But he liked it. Just not all the time.
    Bradley shook his heads, realizing that he was thinking in circles, and all those circles were around that smiling girl. Should he have asked her name? But he had Olivia. Sort of. So he actually hadn't ever asked Olivia out, but he was going to. Soon. Whenever it felt right. He didn't want to rush things, because then she might think he was coming on too strong. And that's not what he wanted. And besides, that girl from the bagel shop was smiling at him. She probably smiled at everyone, though. She was a smiley kind of girl, and then she'd looked disappointed somehow when he'd picked the multigrain bagel. He'd asked for cream cheese to try to make up for it--he wasn't sure if it would--and it hadn't looked like it had done any good. Why was he still thinking about this?
    And where was he going? Bradley still felt lost in the morning, with the sunlight slanting across the world so low it looked like it would trip over something. He knew where to go in the evening and at night, but morning was a foreign country.
    Bradley wandered. It wasn’t a new feeling—it was kind of a default activity, something to do after losing a job or a girlfriend or a sense of purpose. In fact, a lost sense of purpose was probably the one he was most familiar with. He made his way toward his usual wandering spots, but none of them appealed. The D’Arte Board Gallery, always a good place to kill an hour (or at least maim a few minutes), was surprisingly unappealing--and closed--and Fifth City Park was too far.
    That was when Bradley realized he hadn’t, in fact, lost a sense of purpose. Inexplicably, he was walking somewhere with a hint of determination. More than a hint. He had the full-on flavor of determination in his mouth, the scent of usefulness leading him onward.
    Fifteen minutes and a few turns later, and Bradley was in front of the apartment building that held his sister, her husband, and their two children. On second thought, probably not the husband, since he had a job with early hours, but Clara was almost certainly there. And, from the faint sound of screaming coming through the ground floor windows, at least the smaller of the children definitely was there.
    And not sounding good. Bradley walked faster, jogged up the five steps to the front door, and buzzed. It was a few seconds before his sister’s voice crackled through the speaker—along with a heavy dose of crying baby.
    “Yes?”
    “It’s Bradley.”
    “Thank goodness! Get in here.”
    There was an angry buzz at the door, and Bradley bumped it open with his hip. By the time he was in the hall, the door to Clara’s apartment was already opening, letting out the crying and a hefty dose of three-year-old shouting as well.
    Clara was dressed for the day, but her brown hair had been abandoned somewhere between shower and brush. JoBeth, the ten-month-old, was clinging to her shoulder, and the t-shirt that must have been clean when she started wearing it was now smeared with baby-snot and some variety of pureed food. Bradley’s sister looked frazzled.
    “Poopy diaper or crying baby?” she asked.
    “Do I have to choose?”
    “Please, Bradley?”
    That purpose inside Bradley swelled up, moved his mouth, and made the decision for him. “Crying baby.”
    “Really?” said his sister. “Thank you! As bad as she is right now, when I tried to put her down to change Erica, JoBeth freaked.”
    “Worse than this?”
    “Way worse. I don’t know what’s wrong. After I get this diaper changed, we’re calling the doctor. Please take her? Maybe a change of scenery will help her.”
    “So I’m scenery now?”
    “The best kind of scenery. Scenery that loves her.” Clara leaned her side toward Bradley. “Here, JB. It’s Uncle Brad. You like Uncle Brad.”
    Bradley held out his hands to take his niece, and the purpose that had been building in him shot down his arms like a cat after yarn, not that Bradley had ever owned a cat. Down his arms, through his hands, and through the air to JoBeth. By the time Bradley’s hands took her weight under the arm, she had stopped crying. Before he had his niece against his shoulder, she was asleep.
    Except for the whir of the stove fan in the kitchen, everything was quiet. Erica had stopped shouting and was staring up at Bradley. Clara’s mouth was open. Somewhere upstairs a dog barked.
    Bradley tucked his chin and looked down at the sleeping baby.
    “Guess I make for good scenery,” he said.
    “Guess so,” agreed Clara. “Want to come in? Not much else is clean, but there’s enough empty couch to sit on.”
    “You always do that,” said Bradley.
    “Do what?”
    “Say your place is messy, when it’s practically clean enough for a furniture photo-op.” He walked in, past the kitchen, and looked at the living room. “Oh.”
    “I told you it was messy,” said Clara. “I didn’t finish laundry day, we still haven’t weeded out all the unnecessary toys Mom gave Erica for Christmas, and Ted has decided to start doing weight lifting.”
    “So those free weights in the corner are his?”
    “‘Free weights.’ Why do men call them ‘free weights?’ They cost enough, and they certainly don’t free up any space in the apartment.”
    “Come on,” said Bradley, sitting on the one corner of the couch that wasn’t covered in unfolded—yet fresh scented—clothing. “You know you’ll like how he looks after a month or two with those.”
    “I like how my husband looks just fine right now,” said Clara, grabbing an unusually silent Erica and laying her down on a diaper changing pad. “Besides, the last thing I need right now is the temptation to get another one of these. I don’t know how people handle three children at once. Sure, it’s a fair fight for the moment, but as soon as they outnumber us, I think the battle will be over.”
    “Didn’t you want more kids?”
    “Absolutely. Just not yet. Quit moving your legs, squirt—don’t touch! Yucky. This is a two wiper, at least. It’s dried on.”
    “Ah, family,” said Bradley. “It’s all about sharing.” JoBeth was warm against his chest, and he could feel something…off inside her. Wrong. If she were a rose, her thorns would be too large—but they were shrinking. The wrong inside her was fading, and she felt peaceful against his shoulder. “Looks like this one is doing better.”
    “I don’t know what you did,” said Clara, strapping on the new diaper and sealing up the old one with a grimace. “Whatever it was, thank you.”
    “Not sure I did anything. She’s just a good kid.”
    “She is,” agreed his sister, picking up her older child and setting her on her feet. “Go find Boobles, squirt.”
    “Oh!” said Erica, her eyes bright. “I put Boobles in the big little blanket.” Then she was gone, her diaper waggling behind her.
    “That’s a good kid, too,” said Bradley.
    “She is. Easier to think that when they’re not shouting at me, though, I’ll admit that. Seriously, thanks for coming Brad. I don’t know how you knew, but thank you.”
    Bradley shrugged but then froze when JoBeth stirred on his shoulder. “It just seemed,” he said in a quieter voice, “just seemed like I needed to be here.”
    Clara smiled at him. “Mom never understood that about you. She keeps wanting you to be Dad, but Dad never listens to his heart the way you do.”
    “He does, too.”
    “When?”
    “That time with the thing, when we were at that place.”
    Clara laughed. “Exactly.”
    “Of course, Dad has had a lot more steady jobs than I’ve ever had.”
    Clara raised her eyebrows and nodded in agreement. “If by ‘a lot more’ you mean ‘one job that he'll have until he dies,’ then yes, he did. Can't keep a man away from his archives. And now I’m off to seal this thing in five layers of plastic before I send it to a landfill to store its stink for future generations.”
    “That is a powerful one,” Bradley agreed.
    Clara walked into the kitchen. “You see the phone?” she called back. “I think it’s on the couch somewhere. I’d rather not use any cell minutes wading my way through the doctor’s automated menu just so they can send me to urgent care.”
    Bradley glanced down at JoBeth again. The wrong was almost entirely faded. “Not sure you need to,” he called back. “I think she’s doing better.”
    “Here it is,” said Clara, showing up at the door to the living room, phone in hand. “You think so? I should probably check in just to be sure. How’s her forehead?”
    Bradley felt it with the inside of his wrist. “Warm.”
    “How warm?”
    “Normal warm. Babies are a little hotter than grownups, right?”
    His sister walked over and felt with her own wrist. “No fever.”
    “Nice,” said Bradley. Then he noticed Clara was staring at him. “What’s up?” he asked.
    “I think that’s my question. You look different.”
    “It’s because I lost my job.”
    “That’s not it, though I find that slightly amusing. What happened?”
    “I fed peanuts to a lady with a peanut allergy.”
    “Really?”
    “Not exactly, but that’s how it ended up. Anaphylactic shock isn’t pretty.”
    “She okay?”
    “No idea. Off to the hospital she went, but she didn’t look good.”
    “Eek.” Clara sat down on the floor and started folding clothes. “But that’s not it. That’s not why you look different.”
    “I had a bagel this morning. Never underestimate the power of a good bagel.”
    “Oh, believe me, I don’t, but that’s still not it either.”
    “You sure?”
    “I’m sure.”
    “Maybe I’m in love.”
    “Are you?”
    “No. Well, maybe. No.” Olivia, he thought. Bagel girl, he thought back.
    Clara wrinkled her nose. “Darn it. It would be good for you.”
    Erica ran back into the room holding a stuffed dog tightly by the neck. “Boobles wants food,” she said, leaning in earnestly to announce this two inches from her mother’s face.
    “What kind of food does Boobles want?” asked Clara with weighted tones.
    “Chocolate.”
    “Not chocolate.”
    “Cereal.”
    “What kind of cereal?”
    “Ummm…red.”
    “Red cereal?”
    “Red cereal.”
    “Did you mean oatmeal with raspberries?”
    Erica nodded solemnly.
    “We’re out of raspberries,” said Clara. “What about blue cereal? With blueberries?”
    The three-year-old’s eyes got wide and she nodded even wider.
    Clara pushed up to her feet, leaving a small pile of folded laundry and an even larger pile of the unfolded variety. “I’ll make that right away. You want any?” she asked, looking at Bradley.
    “I had a bagel.”
    “Of course,” said his sister. “This is me, not underestimating its power. Heck, you probably won’t even be hungry by tomorrow, which is good, because Ted doesn’t like to share my lasagna.”
    “Were you going to invite me?” asked Bradley.
    “Momma’s making zanya!” said Erica, excited.
    “We were,” said Clara.
    “Keep in mind,” said Bradley, “even bagels have their limits. What time?”
    “Ted thinks he’ll be back by six, so any time after five-thirty would be perfect. Earlier and you can help cook, later and I yell at you for not setting the table.”
    “Got it. Five-thirty.”
    Clara disappeared into the kitchen again, leaving Erica staring intently at her uncle.
    “What’s up, Eri-berry?”
    “You look funny.”
    “Is that what Boobles thinks?”
    Erica and Boobles nodded together.
    “Maybe you’ve just never seen me in the morning before.”
    She looked puzzled. “What?” she asked, her voice rising to a squeak.
    “Morning light is different than evening light.”
    “What?”
    Bradley tried a different approach. “Do you like Boobles?”
    That got a nod.
    “Does he eat his own vomit?”
    “Bradley!” Clara’s voice prodded at him from the kitchen.
    “What’s a vomit?” asked his niece.
    “Ask your mother.”
    A blueberry flew out of the kitchen and smacked Bradley on the cheek. He picked it up off the dish towel where it landed and popped it into his mouth. “It’s a kind of dog food. Very nutritious.”
    “Come to the table!” called Clara. Boobles and Erica scampered away, and Bradley settled back into the couch, resting. Not that he was tired. He wasn’t, even waking up when he did. He just felt…content. This was a good home.
    “Someday,” he sighed to himself and looked out the windows. Sunlight painted a pile of sheets with squares of light so bright they hurt to look at. JoBeth, dense and warm on his shoulder, made him think of sleep. The wrong inside her was entirely gone, leaving a rich red of rose petals. Clara and Erica talked in the kitchen, and for a moment Bradley could feel the world spinning beneath him.
    It was perfect.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 15

2011-01-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

[Work makes me tired. But I think the new job is a good thing. I'm sure it's a good thing, but it's making me fit writing in around the edges, and it's making me tired. Maybe I'm tired right now. That could be why I'm talking about tired. Anyway, small section today, more as I can get it out to you. Or out of me. Or both.]

    "This is Proust, and you better have a fabulous reason for waking me up, or I'm crawling through this phone, down your throat, and pulling your pancreas out to throw at the paper boy."
    "Good morning to you, too, Proust," said Tuck.
    "You got him?" asked Paul. "Put him on speaker phone."
    Tuck nodded. "Hey, Proust? I'm putting you on speaker."
    "And I'm putting you on 'hang up' unless you tell me who this is in five seconds."
    Tuck pushed the 'Speaker' button and set down the headset. "It's Tuck, in Northern Lights."
    "And Paul," chimed in his partner.
    There was silence on the other end, then a grunt. "Okay, so I'm not going to kill you. But only for old-time's sake, and after this you owe me."
    "Actually," said Tuck, "if you can answer my questions, I'll owe you double. Why were you asleep, anyway? I thought you were always up at five?"
    "Not today. Hamurabi had me out until the ungodly hour of one investigating an illegal creature breeding operation."
    "Entropic or preservative creatures?"
    "Preservative. Cute ones, too, so they're making good money. They're also messing around with local ecology. Too much divine energy in one place, and it's all out of balance."
    "You get the guys?"
    "Not yet, but that's not why you called me. Thanks for asking, though."
    "No problem."
    Silence.
    "So why did you call me?"
    "Forgotten Zed is dead."
    Paul snorted. "It kills me how that rhymes. 'Zed is dead.' There's a limerick in there somewhere."
    "Shut up, Paul," said Tuck and Proust together. Paul zipped his lips.
    "How'd it happen?" asked Proust.
    "Professional job. One shot, long range. They guy was a genius, or a psychopath."
    "Not mutually exclusive," said Paul, then zipped his mouth again as Tuck glared.
    "I assume you're calling because there's more to the story than this."
    "There is. The guy is dead."
    "You know who killed him?"
    "We think so. She's dead, too. Or he. We don't know the order."
    Proust sighed through the phone. "This is sounding familiar. Let me tell you the rest: after the second body, the trail goes dead, and you've got nothing. Am I right?"
    Tuck and Paul looked at each other. "Not quite," said Tuck. "We've got another body."
    "Hello!" said Proust, energy in his voice for the first time. "That's new. The body count usually stops at two. Well, three, including the unfortunate god. A third body...is interesting."
    "But," said Tuck, "other than that, this matches a pattern you've seen before, right?"
    "Definitely. It's like the killings at the Olympics, and the K Street shooting before that, and the Prohibition Killings, and the Suffragette Bombing, and three others that I can think of stretching back two- or three-hundred years. Killer does the job, is bumped off, and the bumper turns up a day or two later. Dead, of course. But I hadn't heard about Zed going down. This is recent?"
    "Last night," said Paul. "So are we seeing the same process on fast forward?"
    "Seems like it," said Proust. "Sounds like you're getting a few bonuses, too."
    Tuck spoke up again, leaning in toward the phone. "Proust, did you ever get anywhere on the Olympic Killings?"
    "Suspects, sure. Possibilities, but Tuck, they were all the longest of long shots. I couldn't find any connection between those people and any of the other assassinations we have records for."
    "Could you send me what you've got anyway?"
    "Sure, sure, of course. Let me get into the office, and I'll email you everything. I've got the stuff from K Street and Prohibition, too, if you want it."
    "Anything you've got would be great. We're flying blind, here, but you may have just given us radar."
    There was silence. "That's a lousy metaphor," said Proust finally.
    "I'd say it's average," said Paul. "Not exactly original, but not the worst he's ever come up with."
    "We should be careful teasing Tuck, though," said Proust. "After all, he is a demon."
    "But I carry more guns," said Paul. "And bigger ones."
    "You a gun buff, Paul? I didn't know that."
    "If it goes bang, it's my friend."
    "But you're an angel."
    "What's your point?"
    "Nothing, I guess. You need anything else from me, or do I go shower in coffee and get you your files?"
    Tuck opened his mouth, closed it again, then finally spoke. "Can I answer without the two of you mocking me?"
    "Maybe," said Proust.
    "Definitely not," said Paul.
    "Fine. Whatever. Please send it as soon as possible and now I'm hanging up. Later, Proust."
    "Love to the missus, Tuck."
    Tuck cut the connection and Paul stared at him.
    "What is it?"
    "You're married?"
    "No."
    "Then what's with the 'love to the missus?'"
    "Old joke. Before your time."
    "That again? You're only what, sixty years older than I am?"
    "Sure, but I'm a demon. That means my years are like dog years. They count for more."
    Paul snorted. "Right. Demons are such fleeting things. Your life is but a moment--a THOUSAND YEAR LONG moment."
    "Will you come to my funeral, Paul?"
    "Can it, Tuck. I'm going to see if Alice conned Draper into bringing in doughnuts."
    His partner left, and Tuck smiled. Driving Paul away was a small moment and a small victory, but he enjoyed it anyway.

    Damastes waited as the phone rang. A perky and obscenely young voice answered and identified herself as the university travel office.
    “This is Professor Troy.”
    “Of course, Dr. Troy. What can I help you with?”
    “I won’t be able to make my flight today.”
    “Are you ill?”
    “No.”
    “Did something happen?”
    “Not particularly.”
    “It’s just...I mean, I can look up your travel information--I mean that I have your travel information, and I can call the airline, but I’ll need to list why you were unable to--I’m sorry, but isn’t your flight in just an hour or two?”
    “Correct,” said Damastes, wondering if he had ever had patience for humans this young. He couldn’t remember a time.
    “If you had called earlier we might have been able to arrange something. I’m sure the airlines aren’t going to--”
    “Young lady,” interrupted the angel, “I called you the first moment your office opened, and now I have something for you to do: cancel my flight. I will make my own arrangements for returning home. That is all.”
    He hung up over whatever pathetic attempt at intelligence her small brain could muster, and he took a deep breath. She didn’t deserve his anger. He would save that for the worm of a police sergeant if he didn’t turn up some useful information soon. He would save it for whoever had interfered with his planning. He would save it for the people who were keeping him from making the world better.
    Then he would destroy them.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 14

2011-01-07T16:48:00.000-07:00

[On the good news front, I just accepted a job at a disability law firm across the valley. It means a small commute every day, but it also means health benefits. Go, disabilities! ...is something that Atty would cheer. But not me. I would never give a cheer like that.]

    Stacy Longmore took great pride in the fact that she had never had a multigrain bagel. She knew, as far as lifetime accomplishments went, this was a very small one, but she didn’t let that bother her. Even the little things add up to something big, she figured.
    “Never?” asked Beau. He looked down at her, black and massive and slightly ridiculous in the undersized apron he had somehow tied around his waist.
    “Tell me again how you forgot your apron,” said Stacy, grinning. “I like this story.”
    “There is no story,” said Beau, “I just forgot it, and stop changing the subject. You’ve never tried one of our multigrain bagels?”
    “So your apron is at home.”
    “Cut that out.”
    “And you’re wearing Tamara’s.”
    “I said stop it. This is serious.”
    “And Tamara is about the size of your left bicep.”
    “I mean it, Stacy. You need to eat a multigrain bagel.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s...it’s because…” Beau blinked furiously. “It’s tradition. Bagels are a pinnacle of health-food consciousness. Kinda. I bet you the very first bagel was multigrain. See that? So if you don’t eat one, it’s like you’re spitting on the tradition of bagels.”
    “Not true,” said Stacy.
    “How do you know?”
    “I looked it up. Bagels were invented in the late 1500’s in Poland. Are you saying the Poles of sixteenth-century Europe were four-hundred years ahead of the health food craze?”
    “Huh,” said Beau. “I thought Jews invented them. In New York.”
    “They are traditionally Jewish,” said Stacy, pulling another tray of bagels out of the oven and sliding them off into a basket, ready to go out front. “Jews lived in Poland.”
    “Jews have lived everywhere,” said Beau, turning to wash his hands. “Even Africa. I have Jewish ancestors.”
    “You’re Jewish?”
    “Something like one-twenty-fifth. Not much of me.”
    “That’s impossible,” said Stacy, picking up the basket and walking out of the kitchen. It was five minutes to open, and one of the regulars was already outside, stamping his feet. She always thought of him as Ernest Borgnine, even though his name was Gustavo and he didn’t look anything like the actor. Stacy just liked the name ‘Ernest Borgnine,’ and she figured everyone ought to have one of those in her life. Gustavo happened to be her Ernest Borgnine, that was all.
    Beau followed her out front. “Why do you say it’s impossible? You don’t think a black guy can be Jewish? I’ll find my family history and show it to you.”
    Stacy dropped the basket into its slot. “‘Sun-dried tomato,’” she read out loud. “What’s so special about drying something in the sun? Might as well call them ‘tomatoes someone accidentally left out, but we’re using them anyway.’ I believe a black guy can be Jewish, Beau. I just don’t believe that you’re one-twenty-fifth Jewish. It has to come in doubles.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know: one-half, one-fourth, one-eighth, one-sixteenth. Like that. Doubles.”
    “So maybe I’m one-thirty-second Jewish.”
    “I’ll take that,” said Stacy, smiling and typing her code into the register. “But for a Jew, you know bupkis about bagels.”
    “Don’t pull out your Yiddish on me, you putz. I know bagels have been to space. Some Canadian guy took a bunch of sesame seed bagels up to the International Space Station.”
    “Was he Jewish?”
    “Pretty sure he was.”
    “Then you’re right,” said Stacy. “Those Jews really are everywhere. You going to open up the door and let Mr. Borgnine in? He looks cold.”
    “I still don’t get why you call him that,” said Beau, making his way around the counter.
    Stacy just smiled. Gustavo didn’t mind being her Ernest. He was old and had a wrinkly smile and he seemed to understand: everyone needs an Ernest Borgnine in her life.
    She had sold a half-dozen of the multigrain--not to mention several coffees, a mixed bucket, seven cinnamon-raisin, and a poor, sad, sun-dried tomato--before the skinny guy walked in.
    "Check him out, Stacy," said Beau, leaning in behind her. "He's just your type."
    "Go be Jewish somewhere else, Beau. I am not going to meet my new boyfriend at work."
    "Why not?"
    "I could never be with someone who would eat a multigrain bagel. Now go away. Good morning. What can I get you?"
    The skinny guy shrugged in his jacket, looking cold. His knit cap was pulled down over his ears, but it didn't look like it was doing its job very well.
    "What's good?" he asked, his voice shaking slightly.
    "The multigrain," called Beau as he stepped back into the kitchen.
    "Ignore him," said Stacy. "Chilly, isn't it."
    "Sorry?"
    "The weather. It's cold out."
    "Yeah, no kidding. I thought my jacket would be enough. Guess I'm just not used to the mornings. I usually work nights."
    "Isn't it cold at night?" asked Stacy.
    The skinny guy blinked and smiled. "It is. Can you believe that? I somehow assumed it would be warmer in the morning than it is at night. I've always thought that. It's not true at all, is it?"
    Stacy smiled back. "Don't think so. So coffee to warm you up?"
    The skinny guy shuddered, and it took Stacy a second to realize it wasn't from the cold.     "The only kind of coffee I've ever liked was the kind that doesn't actually have any coffee in it. Aren't there coffees like that?"
    "We have hot chocolate."
    "I'll take that. And a bagel."
    "Any particular kind?"
    The skinny guy glanced over the baskets holding five more kinds of bagels than should exist in the world, at least by Stacy's count. "I have no idea," he said. "I'm terrible at decisions like this."
    "Like what food you should eat?"
    "Kinda. Yeah. That makes me sound completely pathetic, doesn't it?"
    Stacy laughed. "Just slightly. But that's okay. I'm sure there are other things you're good at."
    The guy shrugged. "Maybe." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, folded into quarters. "I drew this on the way over. The thing followed me. You ever seen anything like it? I don't think it's a bird."
    Stacy leaned over to see it. The sketch was quick, rough, but the lines were clear and he'd put in enough detail at the right places that the creature looked alive to her. Real.
    "I have no idea what it is," she said, and she didn't. "Does it have six legs? Is it one of those chaotic creatures?"
    "Not chaotic," said a baritone voice. "Entropic. Good morning, Stacy."
    "Luther! I didn't notice you come in. How are you?"
    "Unemployed," said the angel. "I have come to you for consolation. Your bagels are the only thing standing between me and despair."
    Stacy cocked her head, not sure whether he was joking or not. Luther was smiling, but there was an edge under it, rough like cracked concrete. The angel had already turned back to the picture.
    "Where did you see that creature, young man? They don't usually come out in the daylight. Well," he glanced outside, "in the almost daylight. We're definitely into the Fall, aren't we? So he followed you here?"
    The skinny guy looked down at the angel--skinny was pretty tall, wasn't he? Stacy did like tall men--and nodded. "I kept seeing it skitter along the walls, so I drew it. It's entropic? Like demons are?"
    Luther nodded. "Exactly. Well, not entirely exactly, but close enough. It's called a 'brogut,' and it's one of the creatures in the world that devours divine energy, breaking it down from perfect preservation into chaos and change. Part of the balance." Luther smiled. "But I'm getting pedantic. You're right. The same way that angels and owls and portellains are naturally sensitive to the energy of preservation, demons and broguts and chickens are sensitive to entropy and destruction."
    "Chickens are?" asked Stacy.
    "Absolutely," said Luther.
    "That's weird."
    "I've never liked eggs," said the angel.
    "Huh," said skinny. "So they don't come out much?"
    "Not much at all. I wonder what brought him out of his nest?"
    "Could be the god that was killed," called Beau from the back.
    "Eavesdropping is rude," yelled Stacy.
    "And hereditary," yelled the big man. "Blame my mother."
    "I've met your mother. I'm not blaming her for anything."
    "That makes you a smart girl," called Beau. "I'm going out for a smoke."
    "Already? That stuff will kill you."
    "Yes, it will, but I'm not giving it up until Lent."
    "I thought you were Jewish."
    "Then I'll give it up for Rosh Hashanah."
    "Isn't that over already?"
    "That's okay. I'm not in a rush." The back door banged open and closed again, and Stacy sighed. Then she looked at Luther. The angel looked pale. "Didn't you know about the god?" she asked.
    "Which one was it?"
    "Forgotten...something...I think."
    "Zed?"
    "Yeah. Him. Oh dear. Did you work for him? You said you lost your job--no, you didn't know, so it wasn't him, was it? I mean, the god you worked for."
    Luther shook his head. "No, I didn't work for Zed. I'm...just surprised. Shocked. You don't expect that someone like Forgotten Zed would ever die."
    "Who killed him?" asked skinny.
    "News said they didn't know. It was murder, though. Bullet through the window."
    "Crazy. I thought only gods could kill other gods. Had to be wars, like Ragnarok and World War II."
    Luther nodded. "Usually. That's usually the case. I think I may have to skip my bagel this morning, Stacy. I'm not sure I'm hungry anymore."
    "No problem, Luther. Take care." The angel left and Stacy watched him go. "You know," she said, "I couldn't tell if he was joking or not."
    "About what?" asked skinny.
    "About losing his job."
    "Nope," said skinny. "He wasn't joking."
    "How can you tell?"
    Skinny pulled his hat off and scratched at his head. "You can tell. I'll take a multigrain."

A small correction

2011-01-07T15:20:00.000-07:00

It was pointed out to me by Liz that there's a character already in play that I'd forgotten to mention. It was so clear in my head that, while Ninny and Damastes were talking, Hugh was in other room watching TV. See, Hugh is Ninny's partner. They do everything together. So imagine that at the end of Section 07, the story goes something like this:

"He heard Ninny's quiet footsteps and the sound of the door closing. She said something to Hugh, her partner, and Hugh laughed. It didn’t matter. Damastes sat without opening his eyes, just breathing. Death was not what Forgotten Zed deserved, but it would have to do."

And then, at our corrupt detective's home, it's Hugh and Ninny paying him a visit. Also, bonus points to anyone who figures out where the names 'Hugh' and 'Ninny' come from, but you probably won't. It's obscure, fits with my love of mythology, and honestly, you have no clues to work from yet. So...lots of bonus points.

I hear my watch ticking.

2011-01-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

And the ticking of my watch indicates to me that I actually have one. It was a gift from my sister via my brother-in-law. It's a Mickey Mouse watch--classic, 'Steamboat Willie' Mickey--before he became the symbol of copyright law gone awry--which may be why I like him so much. My brother-in-law had it in his drawer for a year, unopened, so my sister asked if she could re-gift it to me. I'm not offended. I'm delighted.

I also have on contacts. This means that I blink almost as often as my watch ticks. It's my first time ever wearing contacts, and I dread the moment tonight when I have to grab my eyes and pull these lenses off of them. Perhaps I'll just lie backwards over a bucket and pour another bucket of water over my face. Then I'll carefully fish around in the first bucket until I find them...and I'll hope I get them back in the correct eyes in the morning. I think it's a pretty bad plan, but it sounds better than the alternative.

In the third bit of news, I just met two new characters. Only one of them is major, but yes, I just met another major character in this book. I like her. She is a voice to my ridiculous and optimistic observations. I have plenty of other characters to speak for my general depression and malaise, but Stacy is happy. It's nice to find her inside me.

So why am I telling you and not posting? Because I'm out of time to write today, and the section she's in has barely started. She has many bagels to sell and a few familiar characters to meet before I can put her on the blog. Sorry. If it's any consolation, I'll be weeping before the night is done. Trying desperately to pull these flimsy pieces of something out of my eyes.

While my watch ticks on.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 13

2010-12-29T16:33:00.000-07:00

[It's something. Writing still isn't as fluid as I'd like it to be, but it's fun again. Problem is, there are so many pieces to this story, it's hard to keep them all together. Hint at this here, show a bit of that there, and--doh! I left something out!

[Ah, well. You get what you pay for.]

    Vera Mason woke up with dry lips. In fact, her whole body felt dry, and her chest was stuffed with quilt batting. She opened her eyes and the room was black. Then she realized her eyes were still closed. That was strange. She was sure she’d opened them. She tried again. Still dark. She blinked, and the room came into focus. It wasn’t dark, just dim. Something clear was hanging above her head, like a floating blister. Ah, an IV bag, or whatever it was called. Who was it hooked up to?
    The pieces fell into place: the Thai restaurant, the panicked feeling as breathing became harder and harder, and then impossible. That toothpick of a waiter, hadn’t she told him about peanuts? She was sure she had, and his face had been quick, intelligent. He wouldn’t have forgotten. Maybe she’d misjudged him?
    She blinked again and tried to swallow. It ached, like her throat was bruised from the inside. What did they do to treat anaphylactic shock? Whatever they’d done, it had worked, apparently. So why didn’t she feel better? She should be feeling better. She’d inherited the power of a god.
    Where was it?
    “Are you awake, Senora Mason?”
    Vera rolled her head sideways. They were there together, the Spanish husband and wife, like they usually were. Jose was standing behind the chair, his posture gently erect under his white hair, and Maria Teresa sat, her knees together, her hands folded on her lap. It was as if the elderly couple were posing for a portrait that would be hung at one of the several universities they’d sponsored over the years. The small table next to them was covered in a surprisingly large yet somehow tasteful floral arrangement.
    Vera licked her lips again. “What time is it?” she whispered.
    “Slightly after six in the morning,” said Jose.
    “Then how?” Vera had to stop to swallow.
    “How what, Senora?”
    “How did you get flowers?”
    Jose’s eyebrows came down--he found Vera’s sense of humor perplexing--but Maria Teresa smiled. “Money is good for very few things,” she said. “Flowers at six in the morning is one of those few. But I suspect that what you’re truly wondering is how we found you at the hospital.”
    Vera had been wondering exactly that, and she had come up with only one possible answer. “Followed,” she croaked, and realized that her heart rate was up. She took a breath and tried to slow her breathing.
    “Yes, treasure, we had you followed.” Maria Teresa’s voice was soothing, or at least it was intended to be. Vera wasn’t sure yet whether she’d let it be calming or not. The elderly woman went on. “We always said we would let you do this, but we would never leave you without support. We had you followed, but he stayed well away. We wouldn’t do anything to confuse the link between yourself and that unfortunate Mr. Baernson. The transfer of power to you was as complete as possible.”
    Vera felt herself deflate. “Not complete,” she whispered. “It’s gone.”
    Jose sniffed. Vera knew him well enough by now to know that counted as an expression of deep concern--the man was practically shouting--but she didn’t have any better news to offer them. She didn’t know how it had happened, but the power that had poured into her, slowly at first, then in a rush as she waited for her food--all that was gone. She couldn’t feel that flood anymore. Absent. Empty. Nothing.
    “Are you certain?” asked Maria Teresa, her voice quiet. “I think it’s possible that the power might not have departed you entirely.”
    Vera took a quick assessment of her situation. Chest, aching like a small child was jumping on her. Head, aching like the first child had an older brother. Throat, dry; legs, stiff: nose, slightly clogged. She felt like an overused cloth handkerchief.
    “Pretty sure it’s gone,” she whispered, or tried to. Gone was the only word that came out clearly.
    “Perhaps not,” said Maria Teresa. “Consider for a moment what you’ve been through. According to your very pleasant nurse, who seemed to know his business, you were dead for nearly ten minutes. That means more than five minutes without oxygen reaching your brain, a condition that almost inevitably results in brain damage, comas, and other unpleasant things.” The elderly woman smiled. “And yet, here you are, awake and questioning not only our choice to have you followed, but our decisions on floral arrangements. These are not the normal reactions of a person who should be in a coma. So I ask you again, Vera, are you certain the power is gone?”
    Dead, thought Vera. She had been dead. Her mind had heard the rest of what Maria Teresa had said, but what caught in her mind was that one word: dead. So close. So close to being with Steven again--but they had brought her back. She took a deep breath--as deep as she could--and let it go. Not yet, she supposed. Still something to do, something to take care of.
    Vera forced herself to consider the rest of what Maria Teresa had said. Ten minutes without oxygen to her brain should have caused brain damage. How would a person tell if she were brain damaged? Not having any way to judge, Vera supposed that she’d have to go based on how she felt, and aside from feeling terrible, she felt fine. She knew who she was, where she was, and why she was there. And, practically speaking, if she were brain damaged, would it make any difference? She’d just have to go on with what she had and make do.
    But if she should be comatose, and she wasn’t--which she wasn’t--then it was a distinct possibility that Maria Teresa was right: the power wasn’t gone. But if she still had it, why was it so weak? With the power Forgotten Zed had stored up, she should be ready to run a marathon, lift a car, or both at the same time.
    Vera breathed in sharply and started coughing. She could see the elderly couple watching her, leaning forward in concern, but she had enough energy to wave them back with the hand not attached to an IV. I’m okay, she wanted to say, but she wasn’t. For the first time she was facing the possibility that she may have done everything right, but would still fail. What if this was all the power that Forgotten Zed had? What if he had squandered it, his violent inheritance from his father, daughters, sons, wife? She could imagine the old man, cut off from his faithful, from anyone to be faithful to, saving only enough power to keep himself past any use or usefulness. And then, in a final betrayal that the ancient god couldn’t even know he was committing, he would die and leave Vera with just enough power to fail, so close to her goal.
    She blinked at tears. She closed her eyes. She wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t, because this was her only chance. The Three might not show themselves again for another ten, twenty, fifty years, and the odds that Jose and Maria Teresa could guess the next target accurately were impossibly slim. Maria Teresa had explained one night over a cup of tea, calmly discussing the millions they had spent, the years they had dedicated to finding these god-killers, finding who they were, what they wanted, what their weaknesses might be.
    Finally they had hit on two critical pieces of information: the leader of the Three hated Forgotten Zed, and, for the first time in centuries, Forgotten Zed was in the news again. It was a chance, and perhaps the only chance in any of their lifetimes. They would go to Northern Lights, Wisconsin, and they would do what they had to. The Three wouldn’t hurt any more innocents.
    So there was no stopping now. Vera left the tears to dry on her cheeks and turned back to the Spanish couple. “Water,” she said, and Jose stepped forward to give her a drink from the bottle waiting on her table. He leaned over her as she drank, helping her take a sip, then two, then gently pulled the bottle away. He was looking down at her, and Vera met his gaze. Jose grunted and smiled, turning back to Maria Teresa and saying something in Spanish. He pressed the bottle back into Vera’s hand and stepped back behind his wife.
    “What did he say?” asked Vera.
    “He said that you’re back.”
    Vera smiled. Jose was right. She was back, and it was time to get moving.
    “Do we know who got the rest of the power?” she asked.
    “We assume it was the waiter or the chef,” said Maria Teresa. “We’re having them both followed. When you’re ready, you can go have a talk with them.”
    When she was ready. That wasn’t soon enough for Vera, but it would have to be. Patience. With the power of a god in her--even just a fraction of that power--she should be mobile again quickly. And if the Three were as clever as she knew they were, going against them at less than one-hundred percent was suicide. Vera didn’t believe in suicide.
    She believed in revenge.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Our story so far.

2010-12-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

At the request of Liz, here's a google doc of the entire story so far. I hope you enjoy it, and I can promise there's more on the way soon.

Accidental God 2.0 Google Doc

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 12

2010-12-07T18:06:00.000-07:00

[This wasn't the hardest thing I've ever written. (No, that's always the next section.) But it was hard figuring out that it had to be written. I was trying to bring over a scene from my first attempt at this novel, and it wasn't working. I finally figured out why: the scene no longer had a purpose in the story.

[So I'm setting that aside and moving on to something else, which, to my surprise, is a new character and an entirely new plot thread.

[Yay.]

    Sergeant Williston Mako of the Northern Lights Police Department had been shot twice while on duty, once when in uniform and once undercover. The first was a bank robbery gone bad, but at his wife’s insistence he’d had his vest on and he walked away with only bruising. The second time had involved a laundromat and a surprisingly valuable whites cycle--and had put him in the hospital for nearly a month. Will had always assumed that being shot would bother him, cause emotional trauma, make him seek out a new line of work.
    Instead, Will made a decision: he was going to get every penny he could from his job, even if that meant living in what his (now ex-) wife called ‘the twilight of moral ambiguity.’ Also, interestingly enough, being shot had cured Will of his insomnia. He slept the restful sleep of a man who knew he had gone too far and had no interest in coming back.
    So it wasn’t too surprising that the man had to almost shout at Will to wake him up.
    “Sergeant Mako,” said the man again. Will blinked at him in the light that slanted out through the bathroom door--he slept with it on, since he hated bumping into things in the dark and he hand’t cleaned too often since his wife left.
    “You’re in my house,” said Will.
    “We thought it would be the best place to find you,” said the woman. She sounded amused. They always came together, the man and the woman, and always in the dark. Will had never seen their faces clearly, though the woman sounded like she must be beautiful. He’d been tempted to turn on a light a time or two, but not after he opened the first bag they brought him. That bag had turned into a weekend in Vegas, and while he was never going there again (such a waste of his money!) he wasn’t about to risk interfering with any more bags coming his way. So Will left the lights out and smiled. He’d done what he’d promised, so the man and woman couldn’t have any complaints. What that meant was another job, and another bag, and Will liked bags.
    “What can I do for you good people?” he asked, blinking at the sand in his eyes. Clearly he hadn’t slept enough, but the man and woman were worth waking up for.
    “Things didn’t go as we expected,” said the man. His voice was calm and even, but that didn’t tell Will much. The man had been calm and even when he’d calmly and evenly said that they were going to kill a god. Will felt his heart rate pick up. He wasn’t scared of these two, or at least he didn’t have any reason to be scared, except that there was something about them, like a gun waiting to be fired or a knife hidden in the hand.
    “Did I miss something?” he asked. “We found the bodies and staked our claim. Like you said, we couldn’t keep the TCD away from Forgotten Zed’s place, but they didn’t even come after the other corpses. Maybe they’re not as good as you thought, since this is just a little branch out here. What do they have, five people?”
    The woman laughed. Then they stood in silence. Will swallowed.
    “Even if they do come around,” he said, “they won’t get anywhere. At least not very fast. I’ve made it clear that these are my cases, and I’m not letting go. Besides, the captain isn’t a fan of the TCD, so they’re going to have to go so far over my head, they’ll get a nosebleed before they get access to these bodies.”
    There was silence again.
    “Is that why you’re here?” asked Will.
    “No,” said the man. “You remember that we asked you to find the two bodies.”
    “Sure. The man and the woman.”
    “We heard there was a third.”
    Will sat up in his bed and nodded. “Sure, Baernson. We found the big guy, too--first, actually--and figured he was part of the mess, so I locked it all down. This case isn’t going to get me any promotions, but I can guarantee you that nobody’s finding out who killed all these people.”
    “That’s unfortunate,” said the man.
    Will blinked. “What?”
    “He said that it’s unfortunate,” said the woman.
    “That’s what I thought,” said Will. “Why?”
    “Because the last man wasn’t part of our plan. As I said, things didn’t go as we expected.”
    Will started to relax again. He really hadn’t done anything wrong, and it was looking more and more like these two actually did have another job for him. “I suppose there’s something you’d like me to do?”
    “Find out who killed the extra man.”
    The woman laughed again. “We want you to actually do your job, Sergeant Mako.”
    “But,” Will coughed, “I assume you want to be the first ones to know what I find.”
    “The only ones,” said the man.
    “Interesting,” said Will. “Thing is, I’ve already done what you paid me for, and I know that the city already gives me a salary to do what you’re asking, but still--”
    A brown paper bag landed on the blanket between Will’s knees.
    “There’s a phone in there as well,” said the man. “It only has one number in the memory. Call us when you have something useful.”
    Will looked at the bag and licked his lips. He felt stupid, licking his lips like that, but money did that to him. He liked having it. He liked spending it, even on the smallest things. A pack of mints on the way home. Even paying a library fine. He kept books out too long intentionally, just for the feeling of spending money. In fact, it never hurt to ask for more. The man and woman clearly had enough.
    “Will there be any kind of bonus if I find her quickly?” asked Will, looking up, but his room was empty. He hated it when they did that.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 11

2010-12-01T20:13:00.000-07:00

[I ground every word of this section out of a chunk of solid granite, using nothing more than my fingernails and a grim determination.

[In other words, writing this section was unbelievably hard. I'm not sure why, but it was, and then some. Ah, well. Plan on more pain and suffering and writing joy tomorrow.]

When Bradley woke up, he felt good. He narrowed his eyes and looked at the dark ceiling. He never felt good when he woke up. He hadn't done any official sleep studies, but he was suspicious that he had some kind of skinny-guy sleep apnea, and that he'd stop breathing in the middle of the night. He was at least positive that he snored, and that he woke up every morning with a stuffy nose. No 'blissfully arising into the lovely morning' for him. Was that part of a poem? He was probably making it up. He supposed that was what people did when they felt good, waking up spouting poetry.
    What time was it, anyway? It was still dark out, which was unnerving enough. He'd certainly dabbled in waking up early, but it wasn't something he'd ever stuck with for very long. He glanced at his alarm clock, with its alarm that he had never set. He hadn't made the purchase--his mother had, more out of a sense that she ought to buy it for him and not with any genuine hope that Bradley would use the alarm portion.
    Five-thirty. Now it was five-thirty one. Bradley blinked at the clock through surprisingly un-bleary eyes. He distinctly remembered falling asleep not much more than five hours ago. How could he possibly feel this good? How could he be awake at all?
    Bradley closed his eyes out of a sense of duty. Then he opened them. Then he rolled out of bed and walked to the closet. Sleep was not happening. Was it stress? He didn't feel stressed. Worried, maybe, but not much. At least, not as worried as he'd been last night, and that was just worrying about the lady with the peanut allergy. It hadn't even occurred to him to worry about how he was going to pay rent on this shag carpeting. See? There was another thing he ought to be stressed about, and he simply wasn't feeling it. He felt great. He felt like thinking about some kind of physical exercise. Maybe he'd go look at an advertisement at the YMCA for some sport he'd never actually participate in.
    But what to do now? Even on days when he had a job, Bradley's plans for the day didn't start until at least nine in the morning. Three-and-a-half hours of limbo. He'd start with a shower.

    Bradley showered.

    Three hours and seventeen minutes of limbo. What could he do? Reading a book was always an option, but he found himself bouncing on his toes. Apparently his body wanted to go someplace. Did he need a jacket? He'd take one, and a hat, too. He considered something with ear flaps and discarded the idea. He'd just pull on a knitted cap and, if necessary, stretch it down. (You never knew who you might meet, especially at around six in the morning.)
    Bradley found himself at his door, his keys in his pocket, ready to go but with no idea where he was going. Breakfast? Why not? Losing his job was the perfect time to celebrate--but nothing too extravagant. Maybe the bagel place on the corner. He locked the door behind him and took the steps two at a time.
    And almost ran into Olivia.
    "Oh. Hey. Sorry." Bradley grimaced, then wiped that off and replaced it with a smile while trying to hide how distressed he was that, in one phrase, he'd summarized his life to this point: Oh. Hey. Sorry.
    "Bradley?" She looked shocked. Shocked and beautiful, in a curvy, well-fed way.
    "Yes. Present. What's up? Been jogging?" An incomprehensible activity, jogging. It was like playing ultimate frisbee, but without the frisbee. Or the fun.
    She smiled, still looking puzzled. "What was your first clue?" she asked.
    "Well, you know," Bradley gestured from her lightweight running jacket down to her running tights--nice legs, but don't stare, don't even linger--then back to her braided hair, "You look the part. Do it often? Jogging? And looking like you jog?"
    Olivia laughed. "Both, actually." Then she stopped talking and just looked at him. Bradley resisted the urge to check behind him to see if there were someone significantly better looking back there. He swallowed.
    Olivia finally broke the silence--that interminable, five second silence. "Bradley?"
    "Yes?"
    "Did something happen?"
    How could she know? Did he look different? He knew he felt different, but he didn't think Olivia had ever paid enough attention to him to notice any subtle changes. Was there something obvious? Did he cut himself shaving? No, he used an electric razor, and, come to think of it, hadn't actually shaved that morning.
    He stalled for time. "Why do you ask?"
    She raised her eyebrows and glanced at her watch. "It's not even six yet."
    "Does that matter?"
    "I've never heard you awake before eight, usually later."
    Was that a problem? Did she only like early risers? "I guess I usually have work late at night. And stuff. Or I'm just a night person. Night owl. That seems like a redundant phrase, doesn't it? Night owl, I mean. But, actually, some owls, like the burrowing owl, are diurnal. Which is the opposite of nocturnal." Bradley stopped talking. Then, in spite of himself, started again. "Do you like owls?"
    "Owls?"
    "Owls."
    Olivia looked amused and confused at the same time. "I guess."
    "There are even some pretty freaky ones," said Bradley. "Like the Southern White-faced Owl. It goes from cute to psychotic in a heartbeat. Pretty awesome, actually. It's on the internet. Also, not everyone knows this, but owls are creatures that are naturally sensitive to divine power. Like angels. Which is why owls live so long. And angels."
    "Fascinating," said Olivia.
    "I'm talking too much," said Bradley.
    Olivia shrugged. What did that mean? Was she agreeing that he talked too much? That was probably it. Or she didn't care. Either one was equally bad. Either one was equally expected.
    "I'm off then," said Bradley. "Getting breakfast."
    "Have fun," said Olivia, turning back to her door. Then she was gone and the door was closed and Bradley was alone in the stairwell.
    "I like your hair," whispered Bradley. "Also, you listen to cool music. Unless that's your roommate, but either way, it's still cool. And did I mention that you're probably perfect?"
    He turned and walked down the stairs and out into the chilly morning.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 10

2010-11-26T23:11:00.000-07:00

[End of day one. Tomorrow we get to visit the bagel shop, have a phone call with Proust, stop off in a hospital, and go on a lunch date. But that's for another day.]

    Alone in his apartment on the third floor, in an unremarkable building near the corner of Washington and Third Avenue--not Third Street, which was one block over--Bradley brushed his teeth. As he brushed, he thought about the woman in the oversized coat, lying on the floor of the restaurant. He thought about how still she’d been.
    Then he walked down the hall, climbed under his covers, and fell asleep.

    “I wish we could schedule all crime between the hours of ten and seven,” said Paul, starting the car and pulling out onto the mostly empty road. “This is ridiculously late for me to be working.”
    “When was the last time you went to bed before midnight?” asked Tuck.
    “I didn’t say it was too late to be awake. Just too late for me to be working. Also, it’s getting cold. You have a bearing on the violence residue from here?”
    Tuck looked around the city. Traffic was thinning out, with just the occasional cab, a few late-night shoppers, and the flashing lights of police cars three blocks down.
    “Hello,” he said. “What’s that?”
    “That the right direction?” asked Paul.
    “It is, mostly. Not exactly right, but...I think we should check it out.”
    “Already on it,” said Paul, speeding up.
    Less than a minute more and they were parked and walking up to the police tape, identification in hand.
    “Uh-oh,” said the uniformed officer waiting by the tape, his unusually heavy eyebrows pulled down over his eyes.
    “Something the matter?” asked Paul.
    “Other than the dead guy in the alley? Yeah, Theological Crimes Division just showed up, and that means the sergeant is going to be pissed.”
    Tuck and Paul glanced at each other. “We’re not here to step on anyone’s toes,” said Paul. “We’re just following a lead on another case, and it lead us this direction. Might not have anything to do with your guy.”
    “You two working the Forgotten Zed murder?” asked the officer.
    Tuck sighed. It would have been nice to keep a lid on the whole thing a little longer, but if someone had already tipped off the media--and they had--then there was no way the news wasn’t everywhere in Northern Lights.
    “Yeah, that’s us.”
    “Then I’m afraid you may have found your man.”
    “The killer?”
    “Yeah. I might as well tell you, since the sergeant is going to go all jurisdictional on your behinds and give you a big fight before he gives you anything useful: the guy down there is a hit man. Local, suspected in a lot of things, but nothing ever pinned on him.”
    Tuck looked down the alley toward the flash of cameras as the CSI unit documented the scene. “The local guy have a name?”
    “Sure does. Bjorn Baernson.”
    “Bjorn’s dead?” asked Paul, clearly shocked.
    “You know him?” asked Tuck.
    “Sure do. The guy’s something like a quarter demon, so he showed up on my radar a couple years back. Big man. Very big.”
    The officer nodded. “Yeah, that’s the guy.”
    Paul was shaking his head. “But he couldn’t have done that shot. He wasn’t a finesse man. Up close stuff, not the kind of long-range accuracy that did it for Zed.”
    Tuck covered his mouth with his hand and tugged at his lips.
    “Uh-oh,” said Paul.
    “What’s up?” asked the officer. “What’s he doing?”
    “That’s his thinking face. He’s onto something.”
    Tuck nodded. “I am. Maybe. It seems like I’ve heard about something like this before.”
    “With another murder? Do we have a serial killer?”
    “Not just any murder. The death of another god. We need to make a phone call, but first I think I need a couple minutes with the body.”
    The officer’s radio crackled and they paused while he listened. Tuck couldn’t make out what was said--not for certain, at least--but he had his suspicions.
    “Another body?” he asked.
    “Two,” said the officer. “Two different dumpsters.”
    “Aha,” said Tuck. “Time for bed, Paul.”
    “What? Are you serious?”
    Tuck turned and started walking to their car. Paul thanked the officer and hurried to catch up.
    “That’s it? I thought you said you needed time with the body.”
    Tuck shook his head. “No point. So many deaths, almost certainly all connected, I won’t get anything useful. By the time I figure out which killer leads where, the only one left alive will be halfway across the world. No, it’s time for some sleep.”
    “What if the deaths are unconnected?”
    Tuck pressed his lips together. “I don’t think they are.”
    “Because of that thing you remembered--the other death of a god that you were talking about?”
    “Exactly. I need to call Proust, and nothing is waking him up at this hour short of a fog horn on his bedside table. So we get some sleep and hit this in the morning fresh.”
    Paul shrugged. “Fine by me. Did Proust catch the killer on his case?”
    “Yes.”
    “There’s hope, then.”
    “Not exactly. The killer was dead.”
    Paul blinked. “What about the person who killed the killer?”
    “Also dead.”
    “How long did that go on for?”
    “I can’t remember, which is why we make a phone call, but I can tell you this: they never did figure out where the god’s power went. The case is still open.”
    Paul laughed. “It’s like opening up one of those Russian dolls, and there’s another doll inside, and another, and another.”
    “Yep,” agreed Tuck. “And then one of those little dolls becomes a crazy god and destroys your city.”
    “I never did like those dolls,” said Paul.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 09

2010-11-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

[We're almost to the end of day one. We'll be coming back to Bradley in the next section, I think. Also, in response to Ammie's comment on the last section, I'm afraid that I don't know what pancakes have to do with murder.]

    “Home, sweet you-know-the-rest,” said Atty, pushing into his apartment with his back and carrying the groceries into the kitchen. Luther wasn’t sure why he was there, but sometime in the walk back to his own apartment it had changed into a walk to Atty’s apartment, and now he was there.
    “I do have my own you-know-the-rest,” he said, closing the front door behind him.
    “Been over this,” called Atty over the sound of the opening fridge. “Your place is a pit.”
    “But it’s my pit.”
    “Never admit that in public, buddy. Besides,” something glass clanked in the kitchen, “the way you were looking in the store, no way I was letting you go home alone. I may have the observational skills of Hellen Keller, but even I could tell you’re not in a good place.”
    Luther walked into the kitchen and stared.
    “What?” asked Atty.
    “Did you actually just make that joke?”
    “Which?”
    “You don’t know which one?”
    “The one about Hellen Keller? There, I just proved my own point. I have the sensitivity of a--hang on, can’t use that one...or that one. Fine. I have the sensitivity of a very insensitive person, but I could still tell that you’re feeling terrible, so I stand by my decision. You’re sleeping on my couch tonight.”
    Luther sighed and walked down the short hall into Atty’s living room. It was...angelic. Lived in but clean, orderly but not intimidating. Even magazines on the coffee table. Martha Stewart? What bachelor read Martha Stewart? He sighed again and sat on the couch, laying his head back.
    “I’m making you soup,” Atty shouted.
    “Don’t want soup.”
    “Yes you do.”
    It wasn’t worth fighting. That was the way things went so often with Atty: they went Atty’s way. Not that Luther wouldn’t stand firm for what mattered. It was just that he wasn’t so sure what those things were anymore. Turned out that soup wasn’t one of them.
    “Fine,” he called. “Just microwave whatever.”
    “Are you kidding?” said Atty, showing up in the doorway. “That’s no way to prepare soup. Stove top or nothing. Well, crock pot is an option, as is Dutch oven.”
    “What’s a Dutch oven?”
    “Never mind. Oh, also pressure cooker. But the point is, no microwave.”
    “It is from a can, though, right? Doesn’t that make a microwave mandatory?”
    “Irrelevant. Soup goes on the stove, whether it was made by machine or by Tibetan monks. Warm milk?”
    “Just water, thank you.”
    Atty nodded and disappeared, leaving Luther with time to think. He wasn’t sure he liked it. He looked forward at his day tomorrow, and it was distressingly empty. A morning of nothing filled with nothing in particular for lunch, and all of that chased down by a nice evening of nothing else. He knew he needed to fill his life with more than that, but even making the decision to do it didn’t mean that he understood how it was accomplished. He had stopped, and he didn’t know how to get started again.
    “So who are you going to call?” asked Atty, standing in the doorway again. He was leaned against the doorframe with a casual charisma that movie stars attempt but usually only accomplish with a great deal of makeup, lighting, and carefully selected music.
    “About what?”
    “About your life. You said you’d call someone.”
    “Right.” Maybe that was how to get started again. “I’ll call Rae.”
    “That’s a good start.”
    “Just a start?”
    “Yes, just a start. You should try hanging out with people who aren’t angels and demons every once-in-a-while.”
    “I hang out with humans all the time.”
    “No, you serve humans all the time. Dispensing miracles for a god and hanging out are two very different things.”
    “Do you hang out with humans?”
    “All the time. Once a week, at least.”
    “Where?”
    “Little cafe called 26 Letters. Great place. You should come.”
    “Is it artsy and pretentious and run by a small man named Maurice?”
    “Yes. He speaks with a French accent, wears a pathetic goatee, and his entire wardrobe is turtle-necked black jumpsuits.”
    “Really?”
    “No. Owned by a big guy named Bruce. Come on, Luther. You’d enjoy it. Very low stress.”
    “Maybe.”
    “I’ll be there tomorrow night.”
    “Maybe.”
    “So when are you calling Rae.”
    “Tomorrow.”
    “Why not right now?”
    “Don’t you have soup on the stove?”
    “Low heat. It’s fine. Why not right now?”
    “Because she’s probably asleep.”
    “It’s not even midnight,” said Atty, checking his watch.
    “Don’t people usually sleep at this hour?”
    “Only you. And old people. And small children. But not Rae. She’s usually up reading.”
    “How do you know this?”
    “We talk.”
    “About what?”
    “Only about you, Luther. About our concern for you, our never ending obsession with you, about how to make you into the grand angel that God intends you to be. And about her bedtime.”
    “You’re mocking me,” said Luther.
    “Yes, I am. I told you I was insensitive.”
    “Will you stop if I call Rae?”
    Atty sniffed the air. “I think I should go stir the soup.”
    “You do that.”
    Atty stepped away, then poked his head back in. “If you don’t have your cell with you, my phone is on the table to your left.”
    “Thank you, Atty. I can see it there.”
    “You remember how to use a telephone? Because you haven’t been returning my calls recently. I had to go to your place to get you out, so I figured you’d just forgotten how to--”
    “Thank you, Atty. I remember.”
    “You could also hop on my computer. Pretty sure she’s got Skype.”
    “If I started dialing, would you leave me alone?”
    “Probably.”
    Luther pulled out his phone, scrolled through his contacts to the letter ‘R,’ and pushed the call button. It didn’t take very long to scroll through most of the alphabet, and Rae was the only ‘R’ in there. He chose to not think about what that said about his life.
    “It’s ringing,” he said.
    “Then I’m stirring,” said Atty, walking away.
    The ringing stopped. “Luther?” It was Rae’s voice.
    “Hi, Rae. You’re not asleep?”
    “Just about to go to bed. Why aren’t YOU asleep? Aren’t you usually a nine-to-five guy?”
    “No. Not anymore. Got fired, if you remember.”
    Silence for a second. “I knew that, Luther. I meant your sleep habits. Bed at nine, up at five.”
    Of course that was what she’d meant. “Atty took me out tonight. We had some fun.” Why had he said that? Was fun what they’d actually had? What if she asked him about it?
    “Really,” said Rae, her voice amused. “What did you do? Hit the library?”
    “The library is fun,” he said.
    “Is it what you did?”
    “No.”
    “What, then?”
    “Are you going to let this go?”
    “No.”
    “Grocery store.”
    She laughed, low soprano and rich. Rae didn’t have a pretty face--nice enough looking, much more average than astonishing--but she made up for it with her voice. “Good job, Atty. Get anything good?”
    “Sports drinks. Cannelloni. Something made from corn.”
    “You let Atty tell you what to buy.”
    “It seemed...inevitable at the time.”
    “Soon, Luther, you and I are going to sit down and plan out a menu. We’ll figure out what you like to eat, what you’ll actually cook, and what it takes to make it. Then we’ll go shopping, and we’ll do it without Atty. Deal?”
    “Sounds like a plan,” said Luther. He swallowed. “What about tomorrow?”
    Silence again.
    “Is tomorrow a problem? We don’t have to.” He shut his mouth and shut up.
    Rae cleared her throat. “Tomorrow’s fine. I was just thinking how glad I am.”
    “About what?”
    “That you asked. You’re starting to wake up again.”
    “Yeah.” Luther looked up at the ceiling. “I guess it’s been a rough couple of months.”
    “No,” said Rae. “It’s been a rough decade. What time? Lunch? Let’s do lunch, then go shopping. It’s not a good idea to go shopping on an empty stomach. You end up buying all junk food.”
    “Okay then. Lunch. Where?”
    “You have someplace you like?”
    Luther blinked, thinking. “Not really.”
    “Thai food, then. There’s a little place I know close to your apartment. You like Thai?”
    “Not sure. I’ve mostly lived in the West.”
    “This will be an adventure for you, then. I’ll meet you at your place at eleven thirty?”
    “My place is fine.”
    “No it’s not,” said Atty, walking in with a bowl of something steaming. “You’re staying here.”
    “But I have to go home to clean up.”
    Atty considered. “That’s fine, then.”
    “Is that Atty?” asked Rae.
    “Yes.”
    “Hand me to him for a second?”
    Luther held the phone out. Atty set down the bowl of soup on a magazine with a picture of a bowl of soup and took the phone.
    “Hey, Rae.” Pause. “Yes.” Pause. “Sure.” Pause, pause, and a smile. “You know it. Here’s Luther again. ‘Night, Rae.”
    “What was that about?” whispered Luther, taking the phone.
    Atty shrugged and walked out, and Luther put the phone to his ear.
    “What was that about?” he asked.
    “It was about you, Luther. That’s all we talk about is you.”
    “Ha-ha. Atty made the same joke.”
    “Then it must be funny. See you tomorrow, Luther. Thanks for calling.”
    “No problem. I mean, thank you.”
    Rae laughed and hung up. Luther dropped his phone on the couch and looked at the soup. It had noodles in it.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 08

2010-11-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

[We're making progress again.]

    "What a mess," said Paul, looking around the room.
    Tuck knew exactly what he meant. Hardly any furniture--just a table and a couple chairs, rug on the floor--with a kettle on the stove and a few dishes that had wandered away from their families. Other than that, the room was perfectly clean. Empty.
    "You sure this is the place?" asked his partner. "They haven't left us anything to work with. At least nothing obvious."
    Tuck nodded. The residue of violence was strong, like the taste of liver in his nose. He'd only tried liver once, but the meat hadn't left a favorable impression. Meat? Was liver even meat? Tuck wished he could spit out the feeling of violence as easily as he had the liver.
    "This is the place, but it's...strange, somehow. It's stronger than it seems like it should be."
    "The residue?"
    "Exactly."
    Paul looked around at the immaculate room. "Maybe a dead god leaves a stronger residue. You ever seen a dead god before?"
    "Of course I haven't. No one has."
    "That's not true," said Paul.
    "No, you're right. But how many have, really? A dozen?"
    Paul blinked, scrunching up his eyes. "Didn't Proust work some of the god deaths from the Olympics in eighty? Yeah, I'm pretty sure he did. Should we call him up?"
    Tuck walked across the room toward the window and stopped, standing on the rug. It had a floral pattern with leaves in some odd magenta color. Why make realistic looking flowers with magenta leaves? Maybe they were from a plant he'd never heard of. He pushed the thought out of his mind and concentrated on why he was there, as distasteful as it was.
    "No," he said. "This is different. The residue of destruction definitely clings to the perpetrator, but not the way it does to the actual location. There was more death here."
    "Seriously?" said Paul. "Someone killed our killer?"
    "Or the killer killed twice. Whatever happened, the people here didn't get along so well."
    There was a knock on the open door and Jaimie Lawrence, the crime scene investigator, poked her head in. "Hey, guys."
    Tuck smiled. "Hi, Jamie." She was nice in the way that very few people are. Tuck wasn't sure how she could approach scenes of violence and horror with the cheerful innocence of a bouncy-ball, but she managed.
    "You almost ready for me?"
    "I wish," said Paul. "We've got nothing."
    "You sure this is the place?"
    "He's sure."
    Tuck nodded. "I'm sure."
    "You want us to take a look around? Just a once over? Maybe we can find something that will give your guts some direction to follow."
    "Is that standard procedure?" asked Tuck.
    "No, but I'm assuming time is important here, and we're not especially concerned about proving anything in court."
    "Time is very important," said Paul, "and court is the last thing on my list of worries at the moment."
    "No, it's not," said Tuck.
    "Yes, it is."
    "Court matters."
    "Saving lives matters."
    "That, too, but--"
    "Get in here, Jamie," said Paul.
    "Great. Come on, boys!" Jamie stepped in, followed by the members of her team. With a few gestures and quite a few words, she divided up the small apartment into regions and the CSI crew started working across the room in rows, wall to wall.
    "So, Forgotten Zed, huh?" Jamie talked as she looked at the rug, wall, ceiling, and rug again, inch by inch.
    "Yeah," said Tuck. "Um, where should we stand? Do you need us to move?"
    "You're fine. Who would have thought? I mean, the guy WAS forgotten. Not much going on around him. Most gods you hear something about. Who he's dating, where he's living, what she's wearing. Why don't you hear about gods getting drunk? Can they get drunk? I assume there are gods out there who drink. It'd be a waste to live for thousands of years without a martini now and then. You guys want to go out for drinks after this is all over?"
    "Tuck doesn't drink," said Paul.
    "I don't drink."
    "Why not?"
    "I don't like feeling out of control."
    "He won't even take gas at the dentist. He'd rather just suffer."
    Tuck gave a tight lipped smile as Jamie looked up at him.
    "No drinks, then," she said. "Chinese food?"
    Paul laughed. "After a murder scene? Tuck won't be eating for a week."
    "Two to three hours," said his partner.
    "I get it," said Jamie, looking at the floor. "But you two WILL hang out with me sometime. My boyfriend is out of town for a month, I'm bored, and you two are more fun than Buffy reruns."
    Tuck looked at Paul, lost.
    "You know," said Paul, grinning. "The demon slayer show?"
    "Oh, yeah. That fake docudrama. I hate that show."
    "You and all the other demons."
    "Nobody thinks it's actually real," said Jamie, looking at the window closely, "just like that show about angels spending all their time helping people."
    Paul snorted. "Like we have the time for that. Ruled by the mortgage. Not all of us have been making money for the last thousand years. You find anything?"
    "Yeah. The smudges on the dirt here suggest that they took the screen out for the shot and put it back. That mean anything?"
    "That they were careful," said Tuck, "but we already knew that."
    "Somebody had tea," called one of the crew from the kitchen. "Anyone want some?"
    "What kind?"
    "Peach-a-Palooza."
    Paul wrinkled his nose. "We'll pass," he called back, then turned to Tuck. "Why do people drink fruit tea? Tea is supposed to be from leaves. No fruit. No hips. You with me on this?"
    Tuck shrugged. "Partially. I prefer Peach 'Plosion to Peach-a-Palooza."
    "Seriously? You DRINK that stuff?"
    "Not Peach-a-Palooza."
    "Holes on the table," called another of the crew. "Little ones, like they had something screwed in here."
    "Makes sense," said Paul. "They'd need some kind of mount for two shots that close together at this distance."
    Tuck glanced out the window toward where he thought Forgotten Zed's apartment must be. "I can't even see it," he muttered.
    "What was that?" asked Jamie.
    "The building. Zed's apartment. I can't tell where it is from here."
    "No kidding. That's an amazing shot."
    "Two amazing shots," said Paul, "which probably means they braced the table as well. Everybody off."
    Tuck stepped back awkwardly off the rug as Paul rolled it up, shoving it against the wall.
    "We are trampling the rules of evidence under foot like the Romans in Carthage," he protested.
    "The Romans had rules about evidence?"
    "Just one: don't destroy it."
    "Pish," said Paul, crouching down close to the floor. "See? Holes. They attached the table to the floor."
    "And what's this," said Jamie, on her knees and pulling out a flashlight. "Looks like blood here."
    "Finally," said Paul with a smile. "They left a little bit of a mess. Something you can get a lead from, Tuck?"
    "If it's leftover from a fight, then I'd think so." Tuck took a deep breath. It meant another hour or two of feeling terrible, but that was to be expected. "Part of the job, right?"
    "Exactly," said Paul. "And when it's done, we take Jamie out for Chinese."
    "I thought we were doing Denny's?"
    "Only if it's three in the morning. Otherwise I override you and say it's Chinese."
    "I know an all night Chinese place," chipped in Jamie.
    "In that case," said Paul, "it's definitely Chinese."
    Tuck crouched down over the blood stain. "But I like pancakes," he muttered.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 07

2010-11-13T20:07:00.002-07:00

[So...I had this section written two days ago. Yeah, I just forgot to post it. Really sorry.]
    In a suite on the fifth floor of the Hilton, Damastes sat and waited. His companions had something playing on the television in the other room, but that was not a technology that Damastes had ever taken to. He used it, certainly--it was unavoidable--but it was not his choice for entertainment. Books were much more calming. At his age, he found that mattered to him.
    There was a polite knock on the door.
    "Come," he said.
    Ninny poked her head in. At more than a thousand years old she was long lived for a demon, but she didn't look a day over two-hundred, her hair still black like a raven. Beautiful. Damastes had always found her beautiful. Not for the first time, he was struck by how much she reminded him of his daughter, and, not for the first time, he couldn't decide whether that caused him more pain or joy. Whatever the case, he wouldn't resolve the debate today.
    "She hasn't come," he said.
    Ninny shook her head. "Is there a chance that intriguing Mr. Tombs got her?"
    "Possible. But not likely. I chose Veronica for her competence. Even if the psychopath figured out our intentions, I have no doubt that she was more than a match for him."
Ninny walked in and sat down on one of the overstuffed leather chairs, crossing her legs. "I suppose we have to consider the possibility that she lost her nerve."
    "Also not likely."
    "But possible?"
    "When it comes to facing death, I have seen great disparity in the reactions of men. I watched while one man ran for three hours before he was finally caught and killed--ran the entire time. I wouldn't have thought it was possible. Another time a woman was perfectly calm facing her own death, but for some reason had a craving for muffins."
    "What kind of muffins?"
    "Does it matter?"
    "I'm curious."
    "Chocolate."
    Ninny wrinkled her nose. "Those don't count as muffins. I can't find any meaningful distinction between those and cupcakes."
    "One is cake, one is muffin."
    "Both are chocolate."
    "This is beside the point. Veronica was prepared for death. She knew it was necessary."
    "A true believer," said Ninny, smiling, mockery in her voice.
    "Yes," said Damastes, his words clipped. "They do exist."
    "Oh, don't get short with me," said the demon, smiling. "You know that Hugh and I believe in what you're doing."
    "I do. And I appreciate it." Damastes adjusted his hands in his lap. "I'm afraid I've been slightly on edge."
    Ninny stood. "A significant day. Meaningful. Important."
    Damastes shook his head. "No. Zed is a god, just like any other."
    "No he's not."
    The angel realized his jaw was clenched. He consciously relaxed it. "You're right. He's not."
    "And now he's dead."
    "Is he?" His eyebrows raised.
    "That's what I came in to tell you."
    "You could have started with that."
    "I know." Ninny's face was serious. "I should have. I always feel strange when we do this--almost giddy, you know. I thought I would tease you a bit, make you wait for the news. I'm sorry."
    "So it's definite that he's dead?"
    "We just saw it on the television. The police and the TCD aren't talking, but someone tipped off the press. Forgotten Zed is gone. What he deserved, I suppose."
    Damastes closed his eyes. "Not what he deserved. But what was best."
    He heard Ninny's quiet footsteps and the sound of the door closing. He sat without opening his eyes, just breathing. Death was not what Forgotten Zed deserved, but it would have to do.

    Bradley hurried back out of the kitchen when he heard someone shout. There was a general hubbub--he didn't know why the word 'hubbub' came to mind, but it did--and it all surrounded table twelve. The woman. He pushed forward, sliding past a couple in sweater vests to get a view.
    She was on the floor.
    An older man was kneeling next to her, searching through her pockets, while his wife spoke quickly into a phone.
    "What's the matter?" asked Bradley, also kneeling.
    "Looks like anaphylactic shock," said the man, pulling back the coat and sliding his hands into one of the hip pockets of the woman's jeans. "Confound it! Why doesn't she have an EpiPen?"
    "A what?"
    "Helps with allergic reactions."
    "Should we do CPR?" Bradley felt like he should be doing SOMETHING, but he realized his rescue breathing training was eight years old from Boy Scouts, and he'd heard that things had changed. How had they changed?
    "CPR won't do much good with an airway swolen shut." The man finished checking her other pocket, pulled out her wallet, opened it up quickly, then slammed it on the floor. "She should know better! With a reaction this severe, she should have something with her."
    "They're on their way," said his wife. "Three minutes."
    "Isn't there something we can do?" asked Bradley. She wasn't moving, wasn't breathing. She was too still. It reminded him uncomfortably of his grandmother's funeral. He'd watched the body in the coffin, overly still, and had expected any moment that Grandma would sit up, twitch, sneeze, something, anything. That was the kind of stillness that held this woman's body. Bradley realized he didn't even know her name.
    "Nothing that I know of," said the man. "I'm not idiot enough to try that tracheotomy with a hollow tube that you see on TV."
    "Oh," said Bradley. "Could we do that? No, you just said not to."
    The older man's mouth twisted, and they sat. Doing nothing. Part of Bradley's mind knew that there was chatter in the restaurant. The manager was saying something, possibly to him, but he couldn't track it. He was looking at the woman's face, and it looked strangely calm. When she'd come into the restaurant she had looked so anxious. Strained, almost like she was in shock.     Now she was napping. Just without breathing.
    The front door of the restaurant swung open to swallow a rush of medics and equipment. Bradley was pushed back as the EMT's did their work, and he sat down at an empty table. There was a plate in front of him. C-three, his brain informed him, but the Thai escaped him. How had it happened? He'd been very specific. He HAD.
    The EMT's moved out and people started sitting down again. Bradley apologized and stood, giving the table back to the three women eating together. He started back to the kitchen and nearly collided with the round chef and the less-round manager.
    "Why didn't you tell the chef she had a peanut allergy?"
    Bradley blinked at him. "What?"
    "Why didn't you mention her allergy? She must have told you."
    "She did."
    "So why didn't you tell the chef?"
    "I did."
    The chef was red in the face. "I would have remembered that, and I heard nothing."
    Bradley blinked again. This was ridiculous. It was like a bad dream, except he wasn't holding a miniature banana palm. (For some reason, those kept showing up in his dreams.) Should he argue? His word against the chef, and the chef had worked here longer. Also, he realized with a bit of cynicism, it's easier to replace a waiter than a chef.
    "I see where this is going," he said.
    "Hang on, Bradley," said the manager. "This isn't going anywhere. I just need to know what happened."
    Bradley shook his head. "Don't worry about it. I've loved working here. I'll go."
"Hang on, Bradley!"
    The chef snorted. "Go. Good riddance."
    Bradley ignored the manager as he slipped into the back and grabbed his things, walking out into the alley. He hadn't loved working at Thai For First. He'd thought he would, since he liked the food and he liked being funny, and he'd assumed the two would combine in waiting tables almost as well as they would with dinner theater. He'd been partially right. The two had combined, but more like a weak soup of humor and curry. It hadn't tasted THAT great.
The door closed behind him, shutting off the chatter and sizzle, leaving him in the muted city sounds of the back streets. Never quiet in the city, but quieter, like Northern Lights had forgotten about Bradley. It had. That was fine. He put in his earbuds and started walking.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 06

2010-11-07T01:32:00.002-06:00

[Thanks to everyone who gives feedback. This book feels very new for me, so the encouragement is very appreciated.

    Bradley stepped out of the kitchen and leaned his head against the little wall that hid him from the diners. His feet hurt. They shouldn't, since he'd been walking on them every night for the endless eternity of cleaning tables and washing dishes. In fact, he was usually on his feet for longer than he had been that night, but his feet hurt twice as badly. He couldn't figure it out.
    "Sore feet?" asked Denise, stopping next to him.
    Bradley rolled his head sideways on the wall to look at her. "How did you know?"
    "Happened to me, too, first night I started waiting tables. I think it's the stress. Gets to you, makes your body tense. Been rough?"
    "Have you been watching me?"
    Denise was smiling. "Off and on. I wondered what was going on at table ten."
    "Chicken nuggets," said Bradley.
    "The kid wanted chicken nuggets?"
    "No, the kid wanted Khao Pad Namprik Pao Sai Kai. It was the dad who wanted chicken nuggets."
    "Look at you!" said Denise, smiling even more. "Rattling off that name like you grew up shorter and more Thai."
    Bradley stood up straight and rolled his shoulders and head, trying to get out some of the tension. "I've washed enough of it off plates, I ought to be able to pronounce it by now."
    "Fine. Don't accept a compliment. You've got a new customer."
    "Hey, Denise, I didn't mean it that way."
    "I get it," she said, starting to walk away. "Sore feet."
    "Yeah," he called after her. Sore feet. That was probably it. Also, speaking without thinking. The menu came easy to him, but he remembered Denise talking about it. Took her months to get it right. Stupid, acting like it was nothing special. Stupid.
    But Denise was also right about the customer. Sitting at twelve, alone, a small lady with a fluffed up coat on, like she was puffer fish, trying to look bigger than she was. She looked intelligent, which was promising. At the very least, if she were rude to him, she might do it in a clever way. She didn't look like the rude type, though. Not that Bradley had enough experience to be certain there really was a 'rude type,' but if there were, she didn't look it. She looked stressed. Flushed, too. Jogging on your way to eat dinner? Oh, please don't let her be sick. He did not need that. Table eleven had been filled with an entire pack of teenagers, apparently raised by wolves, without the benefit of either elbows or handkerchiefs. Sniffles and coughing out into the air. He was probably doomed to a weekend inside, shivering under his duvet, and a weekend being sick was a weekend not being paid.
    But, sick or not, the lady needed water. He grabbed the necessaries from off the serving counter and headed over.
    "Hi, I'm Bradley, and I'm the guy who will be explaining the mysteries of our menu tonight. Can I start you off with something to drink?"
    She blinked at him, not seeming to comprehend.
    "Drink?"
    "Yes," said Bradley. "Juice, fountain drinks, beer, wine?"
    She shook her head. "No thanks. This water is fine. Empty stomach. Anything alcoholic would make me pass out on your table."
    "No problem," said Bradley, mentally adjusting down the value of his tip. That was okay. He'd had some decent tippers already. If the rest of his tables commented on his hair instead of giving money, he'd still be coming out ahead of his nights washing dishes. "Would you like me to give you a minute to look at the menu?"
    The woman was looking down at it, but her eyes seemed to be having a hard time focussing. Should he say something?
    "I can't read it," she said finally, throwing it onto the table. "What do you recommend?"
    "That depends. Are you in the mood for something simple and filling, or more complex? Do you like mild or hot? Meat or vegetarian?"
    She held up her hands. "Too many choices. Just a second." She thought. "Don't care about complex, either way works. Hot is good, and the only people I know who are vegetarians never had to deal with chickens."
    "Have you had to deal with chickens?" asked Bradley.
    "Oh yes. So what do you recommend?"
    "I really enjoy the--"
    "Hang on. One more thing. No peanuts. I'm allergic."
    Bradley mentally switched gears, running through the menu in his head. "In that case I recommend the Kuaytiao Lad na."
    "Sounds exotic."
    "It all sounds exotic," said Bradley, bobbing his eyebrows.
    The woman laughed. It sounded slightly brittle, but genuine. Bradley smiled along.
    "That was funny."
    "Thank you."
    "So tell me what that exotic sounding dish actually is."
    "Noodles, broccoli, and chicken. Pretty much."
    "No peanuts?"
    "None, and I'll make sure to tell the chef."
    "Perfect. You're a saint," she looked up at his name tag, "Bradley. Definitely a saint."
    "Oh, I'm much more than that," he said. "I'm a minor deity at least."
    The woman looked at him sharply, then burst into laughter again. Bradley wasn't sure his joke was worth all that, but he smiled anyway. Was that the right response? The more he looked at her, the more on edge she seemed. Her eyes were red, and her cheeks had faint tracks on them, like she'd been crying.
    "You're shaking," he said, surprised that he said it out loud. Might as well go all the way. "Are you all right?"
    She stopped laughing, her face very serious. "I just need food, Bradley. I'll feel much better. Any way to hurry it along? I can tip extra."
    Bradley was shaking his head. "No, ma'am, that's not necessary. Especially since I can't be sure I can deliver. Our chef is a bit like Old Faithful."
    "Reliable, is he?"
    "Actually, Old Faithful isn't as consistent as people think it is. All depends on how long the last explosion was, but one thing is always certain: it's not comfortable to stand too close."
    "He blows up sometimes?"
    "Sometimes. Why am I telling you this?"
    "I don't know, but I find it very amusing. Of course, that may be due to fatigue."
    "Right. I'll get your order in. Chicken, noodles, veggies, all of it spicy?"
    "Perfect."
    "How spicy?"
    "What are my options?"
    "Anything from 'forgotten memory of a peppercorn,' to 'melt your eyes' spicy."
    "Hmm. Give me a runny nose."
    "Nasal drainage spicy it is."
    She wrinkled her nose."
    "I guess I won't ever use that phrase with a customer again," said Bradley.
    "First night waiting tables?"
    Bradley put his finger on his nose.
    "I won't hold it against you," she said. "Just get him to hurry."
    "I'll see what I can do."
    He left her, glancing back to see her huddled into her coat. She looked exhausted and energized, both at the same time. It was strange. Attractive, and they were about the same age, but still strange. Also, the height difference would definitely be an issue. They'd have to end any dates close to a stepladder.
    Also, what was he even thinking? Why had he spent the whole night noticing if female customers were single or not? Was he that desperate for company? Yeah, he probably was.
    Time to talk to the chef. It hadn't been so bad tonight. The chef was at the ideal level of fatigue, not tired enough to be disastrously temperamental, but fatigued enough to seem mellow. He'd probably been up too late playing online. He'd overheard the guy talking about it a time or two. Or twenty. Who knew there could be so much drama over who got to walk away with a particular piece of digital armor? It was like junior high all over again, but with a lot more acronyms. He still had to go look up what, exactly, 'DPS' stood for.
    Bradley slipped through the doors into the kitchen, walking over into shouting range with the chef.
    "What's up, skinny?" asked the round man. Once again, Bradley was astounded by the man's creativity. He was tempted to call the chef 'fats' in return, but no, he wasn't that stupid.
    "I've got an F-three on order, but it needs a little extra care."
    "You want extra care? I was up half the night raiding. Finally got my tier-ten shoulder piece, thank you very much. I'm too tired to do special care."
    "Hey, I understand, but it's pretty important. The lady has a peanut allergy."
    "Oh, right," said the chef. "Sorry. I get it. I'll be careful. F-three, careful on the peanuts."
    "Perfect. Thanks, chef. She's also very hungry so," the chef glared, "so I'll take her some bread. Absolutely. No need to bother you. I'm out."
    And Bradley backed away, not making eye contact. He'd read somewhere that eye contact provokes male gorillas, and since he'd noticed some similarities in intelligence between mountain gorillas and the chef, he was trying to apply the lessons he'd gleaned from the nature channel. So far it was having some positive effects. No eye contact. Back away.
    He still thought it was weird that they served bread as an appetizer at a Thai restaurant. It didn't seem right, but at least it gave him something to bring the woman. He filled two glasses on the way, smiled, asked an older couple if everything were delicious--either it was, or they were too polite to say otherwise--and then he was back at table twelve with the woman in the coat.
    "Here's some bread."
    She cocked an eyebrow. "At a Thai restaurant?"
    Bradley shrugged. "Don't ask me. I've always thought it was weird, too. But it's good bread. Sometimes I snack on it in the back. That's why you only have three pieces. The baskets usually have four."
    She looked at him closely.
    "You're messing with me."
    "I am."
    She laughed again while Bradley smiled.
    "Deadpan humor, I see. A little refreshing. My husband is like that. Sorry. Was." Her smile vanished.
    Bradley rubbed his hand over his mouth. Uh-oh. "I'm sorry. He passed away?" She nodded, and Bradley didn't know whether he should be glad he'd guessed right. "Recently?"
    "Recently enough," she said, reaching for a pieces of bread and tearing it in half. "I'm sorry. I don't usually inflict this on others, but it's fresh in my mind tonight. Things keep reminding me of him recently. Like your humor. He'd always joke but never laugh. Just smile. Are you a laugher, Bradley?"
    "Not much of one. The world is an amusing place, but not really a funny one."
    "That's the kind of thing Gerald would say." She shook her head. "Again, sorry for inflicting this on you. I should eat something. Make myself shut up."
    "Nothing to worry about, ma'am. You come here to enjoy good food and be comfortable. So be comfortable. I'll just bring you the food."
    "And the jokes?"
    "Only bad jokes. For the really funny stuff, you have to get Denise."
    "Which is Denise?"
    "That server right over there."
    The woman turned in her seat to look. "She looks pretty serious."
    "Oh no. She's like a barrel full of monkeys. Non-stop yucks."
    "Monkeys?"
    "Monkeys."
    "Also, you just said 'yucks.'"
    "Yes, I did."
    She was smiling again. "I think I'll stick with you as my server, Bradley. I've been through much worse things today than a few bad jokes. I think I can handle anything you throw at me."
    "Except peanuts."
    She shook her head. "That one wasn't funny."
    "Should I keep trying?"
    "Sure. Keep trying."
    "I need to go check on my other tables. Wave at me if you need anything, okay?"
    She nodded.
    "I really mean it. Not in a romantic sense. I'm not trying to come on to you. It's just that you look pretty strung out, and I know what it's like to be tired and have a bad day, so I wanted you to know that I can call you a cab, or whatever. Get you mango with sticky rice. It's good."
    "You recommend the mango?"
    "With sticky rice. Yes. In fact, you could just skip dinner and go straight to desert. The syrup they put on the rice is to die for."
    "You mean it has peanuts in it?"
    "I could check--oh. Joke. Actually that was quite clever."
    She smiled. "Thank you. And I'll stick with the Kuay-whatever. I need real food in my stomach before I try anything else."
    "Absolutely. I'll go see how it's coming."
    "Thank you, Bradley."

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 05

2010-11-06T20:03:00.000-06:00

[Another section. This book is definitely more serious than other books I've written, so if this puts some of you off, I apologize. I'm afraid this is the course the story is taking, though. We'll have to wait for Lord of the Manor for a more lighthearted tale.]

    Vera Mason waited for the oversized hit-man she'd hired to return. Bjorn Baernson. She'd found him through the cousin of the acquaintance of a guy she'd talked to in a bar in part of Northern Lights that, on a normal day (in a normal life) she wouldn't have even dreamed of stepping foot in, let alone sitting over a drink for three hours while she waited for someone to show up and introduce her into a world that frightened her. And excited her, she admitted. There was something visceral and pure in hiring someone like Bjorn. (That's what he'd insisted she call him. Just Bjorn.) Hiring a killer was so primitive and so simple, all wrapped up in modern business language of contracts and targets and clients. Disturbing how easy it had been in the end, to get so much power over another person's life.
    But that was then. This was now. She was waiting for him to come back, and her hand was sweaty on the gun that she had inside the pocket of her overstuffed coat. Cold. She was always cold these days.
    She paced up and down the alley they'd chosen for the final payout. Did Bjorn suspect anything? She didn't think he could. After all, why would a little woman like Vera try anything with a big, dangerous man like Bjorn Baernson? She was fluff, she was nothing, or at least that's what she'd tried to be every time she'd talked to the man. No reason to tip her hand, to let him know that, assuming he succeeded, the hit-man had to die.
    That was him, the big shadow walking into the street light with a flash of blonde hair, then out again. That was him. He looked sad. Did killers look sad? It didn't seem right. Maybe he did think something was up--but how could he? She should pull out. No. She'd planned all this for too long. She couldn't pull out. There wouldn't be another chance like this. All the money they'd put into this, all the bribes, the searching, the guessing just right that Forgotten Zed would be the next target: an opportunity like this might not present itself for another hundred years or more, and she'd be long dead by then. This had to happen now. Vera tightened her grip on the handgun and forced her body to stand still.
    Bjorn loomed up next to her. That was probably the only way he could go anywhere, looming to the bathroom, looming to the library, looming to his daughter's birthday party. Oh no. Don't think of him that way. Don't give the man a family. He was a killer, and, for all he knew, he'd just killed an innocent woman. He didn't deserve Vera's pity. He deserved what he was going to get.
    "Vera," he said in his faintly nordic accent.
    "Bjorn."
    "It's done."
    She swallowed, her hand tense in her coat. Vera wondered if she'd ever felt this much adrenaline. She tried to keep her voice from shaking. Did she ask about how it happened? Should she show any curiosity? She didn't want to. She didn't have any interest in knowing, even though she had no illusions about who had caused the death of Veronica Sweeps. She also had no doubts about what Miss Sweeps had intended to do with the power she'd collected--the power of a god. And now that power was inside the man in front of her, and Vera needed it. She had to have it.
    "You probably want to be paid now, like we agreed."
    "I don't."
    "Good. Wait. What?"
    "I don't want to be paid, Vera. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"
    "Maybe. Sure."
    "What do you have in your pocket?"
    Vera swallowed. Did she draw and fire? Did she just shoot through the coat? In an instant the decision was taken away from her as the giant of a man stepped to her side and grabbed her arm. She struggled for a moment then stopped, letting him pull her hand out of her pocket. There was no point in resisting, not a man that size. She was a sparrow, he was a mountain, and there was no question about who would win that fight.
    "I thought as much," said Bjorn, smiling. He was even laughing. "I knew I liked you, Vera. So much spunk in you, though you tried to hide it. Oh yes, I knew you were up to something from the moment we first met, though I wasn't completely sure what it was. Now I know. You intend to kill me?"
    Vera found herself nodding. She was going to die. Might as well be honest. "I have to."
    "You have to? Interesting. Quite the determination you have. May I ask why you couldn't simply kill the woman you sent me after yourself? Clearly you have the courage for it."
    Vera swallowed, her arm still swallowed up in the large man's fist, the gun worthless in her hand. "It would be too easy to track me."
    "So you needed an expendable middle-man. Is the gun registered to you?"
    "No."
    "Then how could they track you?"
    "It's complicated."
    "Does it have anything to do with the strange feelings that I am having? This something new inside of me?"
    She nodded.
    "I thought it might. Do you know what's happening to me?"
    She nodded again.
    "Could it cure cancer?"
    Vera found herself at even more of a loss for words than she'd been the moment before. "Excuse me?"
    "How old do you think I am, Vera?"
    "I don't know. Fifty-something?"
    "Bless you. I'm sixty-five."
    "You don't look it."
    "No, I don't. I've always been healthy, always looked young for my age. Fit as a lion and twice as dangerous." He laughed, his face very amused. "I think it has something to do with my great-grandmother. She was a demon, you know."
    "I didn't."
    "Oh yes. At least that's the story. And so I've lived to this wonderful age through some of the most violent battles of our times. When the militaries stopped wanting me, I got other jobs. Not the kind of work you tell your mother about, but you already knew that, didn't you. I see on your face that you're confused. The point of this story, Vera, is that no gun, knife, or bomb ever came close to killing me. And now, after all that, I'm about to be killed by myself. My own cells, grown out of control. Bone cancer."
    Vera swallowed again, her mouth dry. "I've heard that's a painful way to go. I'm sorry."
    "It's fine. I don't mind. In fact, when the doctor told me the cancer was incurable, I already knew that it wouldn't be cancer that killed me. I would never let it go that long. I prefer action. But I have a daughter."
    "Oh," said Vera. She thought she could see where this was going.
    Bjorn was nodding. "Yes. I want to take care of her. Give her something before I go. So when I heard about this job, and what you were offering, I took it. Enough to take care of my girl, or at least for a solid downpayment on a place of her own. I want her to have the money. Could you do that for me? Unless, of course, whatever I have going through me could cure this cancer. In that case, I'd prefer to have the money, though," and the big man shifted, a look of pain flashing across his face, "it certainly doesn't feel comfortable."
    What should she say? The power of a god--could it cure the cancer? She had no doubt that it could, but...she needed that power! She was so close. Couldn't she lie to this man now, to this admitted murderer? It was just one more thing, one more small price to pay. She'd do it. Vera opened her mouth, then hesitated.
    "Your great-grandmother was a demon?"
    "That's the family story."
    "Oh. No, then. I don't think this power can cure you. I'm afraid it runs almost opposite to your genetics. In fact, the power is probably making it worse."
    Bjorn grimaced, then smiled. "That I would believe. You were about to lie to me, weren't you?"
    "I was."
    "Tell me it couldn't help me, though you thought it could."
    "Yes."
    "But you're telling the truth now?"
    "I think so."
    "I thought that might be the case. Ah well." He reached into his own pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. "Here's my daughter's address. She's living in her mother's basement. Could you get the money to her? Not to the mother. Make sure of that. Not a bad woman, but I don't feel any need to provide for her. Understand?"
    Vera nodded, taking the paper in her empty hand and putting it in her pocket.
    "One final question, Mrs. Mason."
    "Yes?"
    "Is it important that you be the person who kills me?"
    "I think so."
    "Understood. In that case, it was a pleasure working with you. I have always admired determined women, and you are no exception. If I were thirty years younger and one-hundred pounds lighter, we might have had something. Make certain to leave here quickly. Goodbye, Vera."
    Before she could react, Bjorn had bent down, pulling her hand up next to his head. She involuntarily jerked away, but his grip was solid, and his other hand closed around hers, pushing back on her fingers, pulling the trigger. The bark of the pistol made her jerk again, and she let out a small whimper as the large man slumped to the ground. She was shaking. She was crying. She wanted to scream. Why had he done that? She knew why, but why? He was a murderer, a bad man. He loved his daughter. He was a good man. Vera didn't know what to think.
    Shouting from somewhere nearby shocked her into action. The gun went back into her coat and she started walking, quickly, on her someplace, though she couldn't think where. Even as she walked, she could already feel the power flowing into her, making her tears sparkle as they rolled down her cheeks--or perhaps she only imagined that.
    Vera was truly trembling now. She hadn't eaten all day and she needed food. There, across the street, was a restaurant. She couldn't even tell what kind of food they served, though it smelled good enough. Food, then she was gone. She glanced around as she walked by a garbage can. She'd worn gloves, so she wasn't worried about prints, so, when she thought no one was looking, the gun went into the garbage. She covered it with a fast food bag and jogged across the street through a break in traffic. Someone was on the way out of the restaurant and held the door for her as she went into Thai for First.

Accidental God 2.0 -- Section 04

2010-11-06T18:54:00.000-06:00

[Luther and Atty are back. I think I may have lost my sense of Luther a little in all this, so he may need revisions, but I think their conversation is pretty enjoyable anyway.]

    Luther stepped to the side as a teenage boy pushed a shopping cart past, a teenage girl sitting in the cart and calling directions to her date. At least Luther assumed it was a date. It looked fun.
    "You should try that," said Atty, standing next to his friend by the cold cereal that filled the shelves.
    "Will you push me?" asked Luther.
    "No, silly. Dating. You should try dating."
    "Yeah. I knew what you meant."
    "Hang on. Was that a joke? Did Luther the lugubrious just make a joke?"
    "That's quite a vocabulary word. You sure you know what it means?"
    "Yes, I know what it means," said Atty, stretching his arms up over his head in a tall, athletic yawn. Atty did everything in a tall and athletic manner. It didn't really bother Luther--he'd long since become reconciled to his five-and-a-half feet--but even so, Atty looked the way Luther had always imagined angels should look. Sure, the guy was wearing jeans and a sweat shirt, but he made that sweat shirt look majestic. Give the man wings and a sword, and he was the perfect avenging angel. Not that Atty would ever pick up a sword. "Lugubrious," continued Luther's friend. "Adjective. Looking or sounding sad or dismal. See also ‘glum.’"
    "Expanding your vocabulary?" asked Luther, turning back to the selection of breakfast cereals. Which to choose? None of them appealed.
    Atty grabbed a box of something corn-flavored and tossed it into Luther's cart. "Try that stuff. It's good. And yes, I'm expanding my vocabulary. It's a way of expanding my horizons, which I think a person ought to do whenever possible."
    "I never buy this cereal," said Luther.
    "Expand your horizons."
    "I don't feel like dating."
    "Please refer to my previous comment."
    "I'm tired."
    "You can't be tired," said Atty, smiling at the young couple and their baby that politely stepped by the two friends. "It's your birthday. Can't be tired on your birthday."
    "It's not really my birthday. It was ten days ago, and you forgot it."
    Atty looked exasperated. "Are you still going on about the whole Julian-Gregorian calendar thing? Please, Luther. Just because you were born before the change is no reason to make things strange and confusing for the rest of us. If George Washington was willing to adjust, you should do the same."
    "Washington changed his birthday?"
    Atty shrugged. "I think so. Read it someplace. Anyway, how old are you now?"
    "Old."
    "Come on. Really. How old?"
    "One-thousand-two-hundred-seventeen."
    "Wow. That is old."
    "And ten days," added Luther.
    Atty looked at him closely. "Another joke. Dude, that's two in two minutes. You're on a role. See? You're expanding your horizons. This whole job change is good for you--don't put that back."
    Luther hesitated, the box of cereal in his hand. "But I don't want it."
    "Try it."
    "It looks like it would get soggy. I don't like soggy cereal."
    "Try it and like it."
    "What if I don't like it?"
    "Then I'll eat it." Atty took the box out of Luther's hand and put it back in the cart. "We're moving on now."
    Luther sighed and started pushing the cart. Moving on. What a concept. He was certainly having a hard time moving on. A month since he'd been fired and what had he accomplished in that time? He was tempted to think that he'd caught up on his TV watching, but from what he'd seen, that was impossible. There was always more, and with the very rare exception, each show was blander than the last. It wasn't that they were bad, since most of them weren't. They were just like flavorless Jell-O: kept you busy for a minute or two, but in the end there really wasn't much to say about the experience.
    "Uh oh," said Atty.
    "What's that?"
    "You're thinking again."
    "Something wrong with that?" Luther looked around to find out what row he was on--he'd lost track--and turned down the width of the store, looking for the pasta section. Pasta was easy to cook, and that mattered to him recently.
    "There's a problem when you're thinking lugubriously."
    "Ugh. Sounds like I'm coughing up something green and phlegmy."
    "Yeah, that's a pretty good description of your life," agreed Atty.
    "My life is not phlegm."
    "Looks like it from where I'm standing."
    "You could always stand somewhere else."
    "No can do." Atty grabbed some sports drinks and tossed them into the cart. "Don’t worry, those are for me, and no, I absolutely cannot go stand somewhere else. I had to pry you out of your apartment like I was an octopus working on a clam."
    "You saying I'm a pearl?"
    "I'm saying your life looks all gray and phlegmy inside. What happened to you? You were the powerhouse behind Heartbreak Hal's entire divine operation. You were his archangel. You don't become an archangel by being a TV watching lump."
    "I'm not a lump. Just having a down spell. A break. An hiatus."
    "'An hiatus?' Now who's being snooty about vocabulary. And grammar."
    "It's not snooty if it comes naturally."
    "Then you're naturally snooty."
    "I'm trying to buy pasta here," said Luther, looking at the rows of bags and boxes. Did any of the twists, curls, tubes or bow ties actually taste different from any of the sticks or elbows or diagonally cut tubes? He knew how to cook the stuff, but he realized that the finer points of pasta were lost on him.
    "No," said Atty. "You're shopping for food with me in a pathetic and futile attempt to convince me that you're okay so that I will leave you alone and you can go back to your room and your TV that is sucking the life out of you."
    "I don't just watch TV. I read books, too." Luther didn't bother to mention that TV really was about all he'd done for the first three weeks. It was only during the last few days that he'd become so disgusted with his own inactivity that he'd pulled out some old non-fiction he'd been meaning to get to for a long time. The history of cotton was surprisingly compelling.
    "Okay, so you read books. Try the manicotti."
    "Which is that?"
    "The big tubes."
    "The box says it's cannelloni."
    "Who cares? Everyone calls it manicotti, and you should try it."
    "How do I eat it?"
    "You stuff things in it. Italian pasta-like things. Then you use a fork. Also, reading books doesn't quite count. When was the last time you talked with a person? An angel? Human? Heck, I'd take a demon."
    "Right now," said Luther, sighing inwardly and grabbing a box of cannelloni. Maybe it would be good, but figuring out how to stuff it sounded complicated.
    "When was the time before that?"
    "Rae called after I got fired."
    "That's nice of her. How long did you talk?"
    "Ten minutes?"
    "Are you asking me or telling me?"
    "It was ten minutes. Not much more, if any."
    "And that was when?"
    "I told you. After I got fired."
    "And who have you talked to since then?"
    "Mr. and Mrs. Farkas."
    "Who are they?"
    "My neighbors."
    "Those people? Dude, that's not a conversation. That's listening to Mr. Farkas tell you what's wrong with the government and Mrs. Farkas telling him to shut up. As I suspected, you have done nothing involving human interaction in the last four weeks."
    "I'm not like you," said Luther, pushing his cart down the aisle again and looking for more food. He didn't know what he wanted--ah, had to grab spaghetti sauce--but he knew he needed more food. Eating out all the time was starting to get to his digestion. "I don't feel a need to be with people all the time. I don't mind being alone."
    "But this isn't being alone," protested Atty. "This is depression. This is hiding yourself in the hole of your apartment and hoping time and television will bury you there." Atty grabbed Luther by the shoulder and stopped him, looking in his face. "I know I'm not the most sensitive or thoughtful angel around--Divine Chuck sure doesn't expect me to help people out with counseling duties--but even I know this is bad for you. You look bad. You look sunken and wan."
    "Wan?"
    "Another vocabulary word."
    "Oh, I got it. I just don't know that I look wan."
    "And sunken. When was the last time you looked in a mirror?"
    "This morning."
    "Really?"
    Luther opened his mouth, thought, and closed it. Had he looked at himself? He couldn't remember if he had. In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he'd looked at himself. After more than a millennium, he knew how he liked his hair--simple and ignorable--and he had no illusions about what his face looked like. A little old, a little gray on top, and what else was there to see? Wrinkles, maybe--even angels get a few after a while--but what need was there to keep track of every little change? And who would he be trying to look good for? Not his former boss, certainly. Heartbreak Hal had stopped paying attention to much of anything over a hundred years before. It had been up to Luther, then, to step in, to take care of people. Hal kept giving out the divine power for miracles, so Luther kept performing them. But you didn't need to look good to hand out miracles. No need to be dashing or fashionable to make someone's feet feel better, ease their back pain, make their hips ache less.
    "I guess I don't know the last time I looked at myself."
    "It's because you don't know who you are."
    Luther wrinkled his forehead. "But if I didn't know who I am, wouldn't I look in the mirror more often?"
    "You do know I'm talking metaphorically," said Atty.
    "So was I. Feeling comfortable with who I am would mean I would need to keep checking on myself less, not more."
    "Oh, you knew who you WERE, but you don't know who you ARE. Not now. You were the guy who took care of people and who had no life of his own.”
    "I had a life."
    "What?"
    "I did stuff."
    "Such as?"
    "Fifteen years ago. I took a break and got another degree."
    "The degree was in what?"
    "Why does it matter?"
    "Tell me, or I start singing Abba."
    "I'm not a fan of Abba."
    "Dancing Queen--"
    "Okay. It was in Theological Philosophy."
    "So work related."
    "Anything wrong with that?"
    "Not at all. Luther, I'm not trying to say that who you were was bad. Just the opposite. I thought you were awesome. That's why I wanted to be your friend in the first place. And why I didn't let you drive me away."
    Luther was about to argue that he hadn't tried to drive Atty away, but that would have been a lie. "I'm not very good at making new friends."
    "I could tell. Which is why I made friends with you. Don't kid yourself. It was like trying to hug a cactapus."
    "A what?"
    "A cactapus."
    "There is no such thing."
    "Isn't there? I could have sworn there was some demonic creature out there called a cactapus."
    "No."
    "Fine. Doesn't change the point of my story. Your work has been your life for at least the one-hundred years I've known you, and I was okay with that. Totally supportive, in fact, because you were good at it, dedicated, helping people, and I admired that. Plenty of time for a life outside of work later, I figured. Well, now you're definitely outside of work. Where's the life?"
    Luther started pushing the cart again. "I'll find it."
    "Where?"
    "I'll take up cooking." He grabbed something and tossed it into his cart. "I'll learn how to cook that."
    "Scouring pads?"
    "Is that what I put in?"
    "Yes. Cleaning aisle."
    "Darn it. No, don't put those back. I need to clean my bathroom. Also, I think I'm starting to see your point."
    "Which is?"
    "I have no life."
    Atty sighed. "That wasn't my point at all. My point was that you had a wonderful life, all due apologies to Frank Capra, but it was all defined around one thing. Now you get to redefine yourself. It's like the universe has conspired to offer you a midlife crisis, free of charge."
    Luther wrinkled his nose. "Do I have to buy a motorcycle?"
    "Only if you want to."
    "Do I want to?"
    "See what I mean? Here," said Atty, dropping a box of snack cakes into the cart.
    "Do I like those?"
    "Stop it."
    "But you said I don't know who I am, so I'm not sure if I like Twinkies."
    Atty was laughing. "Knock it off."
    "I would, if I knew whether I wanted to knock it off or not. I'm so confused."
    "Fine," said his friend, holding up his hands in surrender. "I get it. You're done talking with me about this. I can take a hint."
    "Can you?"
    "When you smash it into my face like a cream pie, yes. Can I ask one more thing, though?"
    "Have I ever been able to stop you?"
    "No. So I'm asking. Will you talk with someone about this?"
    Luther looked into his cart. Twinkies, corn cereal he didn't want, scouring pads, cannelloni, and one bottle of spaghetti sauce. And Atty's energy drinks. Did he really want any of this stuff? Distressingly, he didn't know.
    "Yeah. I'll talk with someone."