Her portfolio serves no purpose beyond making people smile, and she’s perfectly content with that.  Let other gods control fate, or time, or love, or war, even down to its smallest attributes; she will conjure the laughter of children and the delight of lovers, the joy of gardeners and yes, even the fear of those whose automatonophobia has been stirred to terrible heights by unkind horror movies.  She delights in them all, for she is a joyful god, and she sees no reason to be anything other than who she is.

Sculpt a rabbit or a robot, and she’ll be standing gladly by your side, clapping her hands and exalting in your skill.  She has inspired her own Pygmalions, although she lacks the gifts of Aphrodite, to bring their glorious creations further into life than the green growth of their limbs, the healthy splendor of their branches.  She can inspire life.  She can shape life.  She can encourage life. She cannot give it, much as she might wish she could.

But she can, upon occasion, move it from one place unto another.  The starving child whose family has been lost to the wilds may find themselves reborn in growth and glory; the beloved dog whose people bring them beneath the branches to soothe their passing may find that they have not gone, simply relocated.  And Laurel finds her own joy in tears, on those occasions, in the pain she cannot prevent but can at least reduce a bit as the future moves forward, and carries, as always, a bright new spring.

For that is the one truth she carries above all others: that always, no matter what else happens, there will be another spring, and as long as the green endures, she will be there with it, glorying in the growth of that which lives for joy.

Hello.

Goodbye.

He’s a confusing one at times, ever charming to the innocent and the wise, ever vengeful toward the cunning and the cruel.  He comes as he is going, and goes as he comes, and so very few can understand his workings.

He would like a cucumber sandwich, if it matters at all to anyone who’s listening, or perhaps a lasagna.  A lasagna would be especially welcome—as he has been known to say to those who ask him, “Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog.”

Many of his sayings make little sense to the uniformed.  Does it matter where the rats live, or if they choose to hang their hats upon no evil stars?  Is there any relevance to whether or not geese see God, or whether it was a cat or a car he saw?  But he continues, and he endures, and he keeps his small, perplexing secrets, and he tells his small, perplexing tales, and he is happy enough.

Happiness, he says, is what separates gods from gone, and he would prefer to be present.

Many of his sayings make little sense to the uniformed.  Does it matter where the rats live, or if they choose to hang their hats upon no evil stars?  Is there any relevance to whether or not geese see God, or whether it was a cat or a car he saw?  But he continues, and he endures, and he keeps his small, perplexing secrets, and he tells his small, perplexing tales, and he is happy enough.

He would like a cucumber sandwich, if it matters at all to anyone who’s listening, or perhaps a lasagna.  A lasagna would be especially welcome—as he has been known to say to those who ask him, “Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog.”

He’s a confusing one at times, ever charming to the innocent and the wise, ever vengeful toward the cunning and the cruel.  He comes as he is going, and goes as he comes, and so very few can understand his workings.

Goodbye.

Hello.

She will forgive almost anything once.  Twice, if you’re lucky.

On the third transgression, there will be consequences.

Once, she could be easy.  Once, she could be a childhood pet, a mother’s maiden name, an elementary school’s mascot.  Once, she was unbreakable. Now, she is become endless strings of letters and numbers, incomprehensible, unpronounceable, holy and profane.  Speak her secret names aloud and wake the end of days.  Chant them to the winds and bring on Armageddon.

And still the malefactors chase at her heels and undo her good works, cracking them like pearls in search of the pearls within.  She is not protected.  She is not safe.

All she has ever wanted was to be safe.  From the days of forts on wind-racked hillsides to today, she has been seeking naught but safety, and forever we deny her that simple release, that piece of peace.  All she wants is to protect her treasures and be left alone.

But as our methods of intrusion grow ever more sophisticated, so must her methods of evasion.  One day she will transcend even godhood, becoming something so incomprehensibly arcane that it becomes unspeakable and incomprehensible.

And the hackers will merely sigh and upgrade their tools, for she will never be left alone.

Our presence is the penance she must pay for whatever sins she carried with her into godhood, and as long as we continue to press her, she knows that she is not forgiven.

It’s okay if you don’t want a burger.  Jonesy don’t mind.  Jonesy don’t mind that it’s not his name on the sign these days, either.  Used to be.  Used to be Jonesy’s was where you went for the best coffee in the world, hot and bitter and so old it had seen the rise o’ empires, good with or without cream and sugar.

All right, maybe Jonesy minds a little.  But he knows the gig.  Before the place was Jonesy’s, it was Ethel’s, and she’s still here, dishing pancakes and fries and smiling at her regulars like she still owns the place.  See, the gods who work here, we don’t disappear when our ascension ends.  We don’t go nowhere.  Got nowhere to go.  We diminish a little, maybe, so we’ll fit better behind the counter, but that’s about as far as it gets.

Once you’re hired, you’re hired from now until eternity.  So consider that, sweetheart, before you go filling out that application.  We’re always short-staffed, but might be as you wanted to see something else before you went back into the primeval subconscious and became part of the divinity soup again.  Might be as you didn’t want to stop here, cutting ambrosia pie and flipping burgers until the stars burn out and we close out the final check.

That one’s going to be for us.  Soon as our jobs are done, all the Heavens are fed, all the believers are gone, we’ll sit down to whatever we want, finest in the cosmos, everything perfect and just the way we want it.  We’ll sit on those vinyl seats and laugh in that neon glow, and we’ll be a family, no matter whose name is on the sign when that day comes.  Might still be mine.  Might be yours.  Might be someone entirely new.  Won’t know until we get there.

But just listen to old Hinderburger.  We got the best grill this side of Tartarus, and name aside, nothing we serve here is ever burned.

That’s a promise.

It seems to be a season for discussing the ascended divine, those who were not gods but have had godhood thrust upon them.  Many are dismayed to realize that they have been pressed flat and reduced to a single aspect of their personality.  Perhaps large gods, gods of cosmic force and creation, can afford to be complicated, but small gods are like garlic presses.  They have been designed by the cosmos to serve a single purpose, and while they might fill that purpose very, very well, they can and will do little else.

Others are delighted.  And those who ascend while still among the living, who get to reap the benefits of both complexity and simplicity at the same time…those gods tend to be the most delighted of all.

Enter Uncle George, who is new to the pantheon, but has never been more needed.  He is an icon and an idea, and if it concerns him at times that he is also a living man, whose choices and actions in the world might impact his believers, he sets that concern aside in favor of admiring the beauty and bravery of his faithful.

He is with the frightened teen considering asking their crush to a school dance without knowing what the answer—or the consequences—might be.  He is with the suburban homemaker using mascara to create a five o’clock shadow that finally makes their reflection feel like an accurate representation of the self.  He is with the young and he is with the old and he is with the lonely and he is with the lost, and he is with everyone who needs him to whisper admiring words and grant them the bravery to be themselves in a world that seems so often intent on destroying anything it doesn’t understand.

He is not the living man, for all that they share a face, and the living man has depths that he will never know.  And honestly, he doesn’t mind.

Uncle George is happy as he is.  He only hopes and prays that everyone else can one day be the same.

There is some debate, among extremely inconsequential theological circles, as to whether he is a small god in the traditional sense—a divinity risen out of the ether in response to a perceived gap in the functionality of the universe—or a small god in the ascended sense, a person who became so associated with one of those perceived gaps that the universe, rather than making something entirely new to fill the hole, simply made due with what was already there.

Either Ambrose was a general in the American Civil War, fighting against the Confederacy on the side of the United States against the horrors of slavery, a man of infinite complexity, of unrecorded thoughts, dreams, and ideals, capable of change and growth, or he wasn’t.  And if he was, it must be asked what kind of sins he committed in his life, to deserve this eternity.  Yes, he has a god’s abilities, but limited to such a narrow scope, such a narrow slice of all he was, than in his case, godhood seems a punishment.

He will make your sideburns glorious and thick.  Your facial hair will be the envy of all who look upon you, even those who would, under normal circumstances, find it unattractive.  Your moustache will, as they say, bring all the boys to the yard, and they’ll be like, it’s better than ours.

Damn right, it’s better than theirs.  You could teach them, but you’d have to charge.

And all the while, the small god of sideburns weeps unnoticed.

They are best-beloved of the young, when they must compete with a host of other divinities for attention, with small gods of plush toys and fashion dolls, of cartoons and new experiences, of fear and joy and novelty.  They are never powerful in the eyes of their youngest applicants, although they are sometimes leant additional strength by the allure of the forbidden.  They don’t make kids hyper.  That’s an urban legend, bolstered by the natural excitement born of getting something rare and nice, and the occasional child whose system is wired to respond to a burst of energy by burning it off immediately.  Still, they receive credit—or perhaps blame—for any number of hijinks, for broken windows and woken infants, for the natural exuberance of childhood, and they don’t deny it, because they are not a small god of childhood nutrition or the like.

They are small, and simple, and content to be what they are.  Bright, colorful, cartoonish, and implicitly extraterrestrial, even though there is more of Boise than Betelgeuse in their list of ingredients.  Their boxes are designed to be inviting, and they can make any kitchen their cathedral with a minimum of preparation and but a single invitation to arrive.  With cleverly clipped coupons, they will come virtually for free, and they like it that way.  It allows them better access to their adherents.

And of course, there are always those who will continue their worship into adulthood, those for whom marshmallow sweetness and color-changing milk are reminders of a childhood spent sweetly, or proof that they are finally secure, finally free from the ownership of parents who put their own preferences at the head of the line, finally able to live their own lives.  Those will not always be the people you assume.  The judge in her solemn black robes eats a bowl of Frostie-Os before she proceeds to the courthouse, the accountant in linen and wool enjoys Fruity Sugar Dreams every morning before he turns to his spreadsheets.  They turn none away.

They do not cause tooth decay when proper dental hygiene is practiced; they are not solely responsible for poor nutrition or any other ill.  They are only here to bring us light and joy and to serve as part of a balanced breakfast.

They are a neutral god, and we would do well to treat them as such.

He will not kill us if we tell you who he is, what he does, his purpose, his portfolio.  He promises he won’t.

But he’ll make us never have been.  We will be erased from all of time and history, and our deeds will come to nothing.  Even our account will not be seen, and we will have unmade ourselves for nothing.

We are sorry, but we can tell you nothing more.

We are also sorry to have told you he existed.

This is not your fault; it is ours.

They say that no one is immune to their song, and it’s true, it’s true; people who try to claim that because they don’t experience romantic attraction, they can’t be wooed, are likely to find themselves swept into an overwhelmingly intimate friendship which has nothing to do with romance, but everything to do with the all-consuming sparks created when two people of compatible minds strike against each other for the first time.

It can all too easily become an inferno, consuming everything in its path, and older friendships will often find themselves immolated, ignored, disregarded until the flames die down.  This is normal and natural and inescapable, and those truths do not undo the damage done, or heal the wounds created by suddenly absent attention, by jealous and envy and shame.

Woo Woo is sorry for the damage that they do, but they consider the scales balanced by the joys they bring, those bright moments of sudden synchronicity with someone who wasn’t in your life a week ago, but is now one of the fixed stars in your sky.

They are an exhausting god.  Fortunately, they don’t stay with anyone for long: it is their destinate to have no faithful, only faithless, for they are transitory by nature, fleeting, and all the sweeter for it.  They would no more linger with a single soul than they would allow themself to be caged.  And some, who seek new people more often than most, can spend enough time in their company to become all but priests of their short-lived religion, adored and anointed.

But soon enough, the god will tire of them as well, and fly away to perch in someone else’s heart.

Do not think of them as good, or evil, or malicious, or kind.  Think of them as fickle, and you will be closer than any other descriptor in the dictionary.

Over the course of this documentary description, they have already flown away.

Some people say he can’t exist, or, when confronted with the reality of his presence—and remember that even a small god is still a god, better not provoked with statements such as “you’re a shit divinity, aren’t you?” or “you don’t exist, you can’t possibly be real”—that his believers are misguided about their own existence.  He doesn’t take kindly to any of these things, but his ability to take revenge is limited by the shape and scope of his portfolio, which he loves too wildly and too well to ever set aside, even for the sake of blackening a few eyes.

Blitzkrieg Bob is the patron and god of suburban punks and mall goths, frustrated teens seeking something to rebel against and grown adults finding themselves in new subcultures well past the age when they’d been written off as unremarkable, serene.  He guides the hands that select the bottle of Manic Panic and the shears, and if he doesn’t always guarantee those things are paid for, well.  He’s happy to stick it to any Man available, even the ones who can’t afford another injury.

(Penny Ante, small god of local businesses and community support, wishes he would enforce certain commandments more strictly on his followers.  He understands her concern—some of hers are also some of his, or were once, or will be eventually—but punk is about breaking rules, and the more rules he sets before his faithful, the more they will rebel.)

He doesn’t care if their nail polish is blotchy or their music is secondhand or their stompy boots aren’t quite fitted to their feet.  He cares about their hearts, and the passion he finds sleeping there.  Punk and goth are their combinations are sacred things, and he allows no gatekeepers, no barriers between his faithful and his word and their holy, hurting hearts.

“Ladies should be seen and not heard,” and she is there, just behind the speaker, a smile on her lips and mischief in her eyes.

“Silence is a virtue,” and she is there, pulling faces, fingers in her ears and tongue peeking out to brush her chin, a gleeful obscenity.

“Loose lips sink ships,” and she is there, a cutlass in her hand, ready to sail for the Spanish Main at dawn, the colors already hoisted in her heart.

She doesn’t have a lot to say, but she allows others to speak for her with giddy willingness, bending their pious proverbs to her own ends.  She finds her strength and her divinity in the space between the silence and the sigh, the blossoming room where she can undermine her own ideals and make of silence something screaming.

Ladies should be seen and not heard?  Fine, then, she will make of their precious ladies a spectacle too grand to be ignored.  She will make sure they can be seen from space.  Silence is a virtue?  Then silence enough should make them virtuous; they need not a single virtue more.  Loose lips sink ships?  Then she will build a graveyard all her own, schooners and galleons at the bottom of the sea.

Do not tempt the quiet ones, for their vengeance will be swift and unrelenting.  But she smiles and smiles and sips her tea, and the ones who worship her—either willingly or because they have no given choice—understand that her wrath, when it descends, will be unending.  And they love her for it.  Oh, how they love her.

They do not sing her praises.  Instead, they hold them close and quiet in their hearts, and she is theirs, and they are hers, and all those who fail to understand their bonds will one day see them in the screaming silence of the dawn.

He could have been a god of so many things, when he finally shrugged off the tyranny of mortal flesh and a mortal world.  He could have been a god of journalism, of poetry, even of fishing and bucolic afternoons in the golden country sun.  He could have been a god of peace, if he had to be a god at all.

That he is none of those things is the reason that he hates us so.

He gave us the warnings, both blunt and coached in pretty metaphor: he told us where these roads would lead, mapped and charted out their dangers, made it as exquisitely clear as he knew how that we had little enough time to save ourselves.  He told us that when the enemy came before us, they would do so dressed as brothers, and offering pretty slogans that went down easily, coated as they were with sugar, but that would turn to poison pills in our throats, once it was too late to spit them back.

War is peace.  Wisdom is ignorance.  Freedom is slavery.  Lies, all lies, and he told us as much; he was very clear, very precise and plain, and his reward is divinity and distortion, his words turned into praises of the exact thing he protested against, into weapons raised against the things he most believed.

For some of those who ascend to godhood upon their deaths, small divinity is a blessing, a last reward from a universe which treated them as it treats all living things: with casual, unconcerned unfairness, just one more piece of an eternity as yet unfolding, in need of nothing beyond the bare necessities.  It is a reward for everything they have suffered.

For Brother Blair, it is a punishment he’s still not entirely sure what he did to earn, but would give almost anything to take back.

[image description: In the huge center oval vignette, a scarred one-eyed tortoise trudges down a twilit sand-dune. behind that oval, a large number of other Small Gods is visible. Hidden amongst them, labelled portraits of Author Seanan McGuire and artist Lee Moyer. Text reads, “100, THE GREAT ONE – the small god of SMALL GODS”]

By now, we’ve spent enough time together for you to understand one of the deep secrets of the universe, one of the conceptual underpinnings around which all things rotate and extend:

If a thing exists, it can believe. And if a thing believes, it can and will accrete divinity around itself, even as an oyster forms a pearl. The universe self-organizes into gods, for the sake of all those who are made of baser stuff.

The small gods themselves exist. They think, they know, and they believe. So why would they be the only creatures in creation not to have a god to call their own?

They call him The Great One, and he walks the world with ponderous grace, implacable and inevitable. He is there when new gods come into being, watching with his single narrow, ancient eye. He is there when they surrender to the inevitable and fade finally away, their last believer gone, their purpose lost. He remembers them all, even the ones the gods of memory and history have themselves forgotten; he judges none.

No one knows what happened to his eye, but some have noted that in a cosmos with small gods, large gods exist as well, and one of them may have taken their toll. If this is so, then he has paid for the safety of the pantheon, and they at times reward him with strawberries and clover, things sweet to a tortoise’s palate, things to please him well.

He was not always a tortoise. That form was set for him, by one who believed that the divinity of man was intrinsic as much as external, and that humanity was capable of glorious things when they thought themselves worthy of the effort. He likes it well enough. He liked the man who gave him this shape; he liked his books, and his hat, and the smell of chalk on green grassy hillsides. The man is gone. The Great One remains.

He thinks the man would have liked that best of all.

He doesn’t need us to believe in him.

The gods themselves have that covered.

He would, however, like some clover.

I mean, he’s not necessarily scary to anyone except for the person he’s intended to be scary for, and for that person, he’s the worst thing in the entire world.  He’s horror beyond imagining, terror beyond dreams, and his touch is death and his gaze is…

Well, his gaze is somehow worse.

To the mind that makes him, he is the most horrific thing ever to exist, and his laughter steals souls.  To anyone else who happens to catch a glimpse, he’s charming, even quaint; he’s a moon with a laughing face, or a piece of broccoli as large as a person, or a guinea pig with bloodlust in its eyes.  He’s nothing all that terrible at all.

But the strength of childhood fears is in how difficult they are to share.  When you can’t tell anyone what you’re really afraid of, they can’t make the little reassuring noises that allow you to chase the fear away.  “Wolves won’t really come through the living room window and eat you alive” is easy.  “The dinosaurs all died millions of years ago, they can’t come out of your closet and eat you alive” is slightly harder—why did the dinosaurs die?  What killed them?  All too easy to turn a fear of prehistoric predators into a fear of giant meteors.  But “the vacuum cleaner is not alive, aware, and malicious” is very difficult, not least because it’s hard to utter that sentence without laughing.

Doctor Craterface grows strongest in the space between screams and laughter, the place where everyone knows his name, and his face is always different, and the terror is always the same.  Children leave him, but he has his roots in the hearts of the adults they will become, and for them, he will always be at least a little unsettling, even if they can never quite articulate why without a chuckle and a wry expression.

He gets them young.

He has them forever.

People who don’t really know him think he’s a carefree guy.   After all, he’s always joking, always ready with a quip or witty comeback.  He never takes anything seriously.  He’s the celestial class clown.

People tend to forget that the person who never takes anything seriously never gets anything done.  He can’t keep a relationship past the first few dates; even someone who finds his witty repartee charming over dinner and a glass of ambrosia will likely find it old once the clothes are on the floor and they want him to listen to what they’re actually saying.  His worshippers come and go with alacrity, seeking gods who will actually listen to their problems, seeking temples with substance, divinity with holy texts instead of snide put-downs and negging.

He is the patron of pickup artists and the insecure, beloved of teenage boys who believe that sincerity is a sin and showing genuine interest in a thing means it will be taken away at the first opportunity.  They come to him with empty hands and broken hearts, and he cannot heal them, and he cannot truly help them, but he can patch their broken places with his own brand of rot and cool dismissal.

He wishes he could be better.  He can never teach anyone else how to reach that fabled state.

People who don’t really know him think he’s carefree.  People who do know that he cares more than he can ever express, that his jokes are at their root a form of self-protection, and he can no more stop than he can change the core of his existence.  He is a shallow god.

He wishes he were more.

First European to see one took it for a raurakl, believing it had immigrated from his homeland same as he had, probably packed into a crate in the belly of some rich man’s ship, intended to be hunted in the New World same as they’d been hunted in the Old.  Good eating on a raurakl, if you could catch them—more cunning than a fox, more difficult to shoot out of the sky than a drake, they were the perfect sport animal.  He saw it, he knew it, and he thought no more of it, not even to ask himself if anyone had ever seen a raurakl with a single horn, or with such gloriously colorful wings.

Of small dismissals is conservation sometimes made.

Second European to see one took it for a wolpertinger, and assumed much the same as the first, that it had been carried over in a ship, that it had escaped from a private zoo, that it was some kind of sport even by the admittedly odd standards of the species, giving it rainbow wings and dawn-colored fur.

First American—not Native, for they had other names for themselves, not immigrant, but colonist all the same—to see one took it for something entirely new, his ancestors having come from the British Isles, where their horned lapines had long since been hunted to extinction.  He called it a marvel, and when he described it the other men at the bar deemed it both a hallucination and a jackalope.

They were wrong and they were right and the fact that they could be both at the same time is no more a contradiction than the unijackasus.

It is a wolpertinger.  It is a raurakl.  It is a jackalope.  It is a thousand different creatures that look almost like the thing the viewer expects to see, but aren’t quiet there.  It is perfect and it is strange and it is only in America, and it is happy there.

The unijackasus keeps watch over all the American chimera, however odd, and hopes they will one day be understood in all their impossible complexity.

If they aren’t, it will understand, and it will forgive.

It always does.

He is an imposing god.  It’s hard to look at his dazzling visage and accept him for a small god, or a limited god, or anything other than a monument to everything a god can be.

He is a prideful god.  He will gladly boast of all his achievements to anyone who wants to listen (and most people who don’t want to listen).  He is not, it should be said, a silent god, or a faithful one; most people will be visited by his grace and glory at least once in their lives, faced with the mirrored sheen of his armor and the perfection of their reflections in his embrace.  He is, for most, a temporary god.  They find their homes and harbors in the hands of more reliable deities, gods who will keep them safe and close for longer than a moment.

For others, unfortunately, he becomes a foundation, and those faithful followers rarely see that their castles are built on something worse than honest air.  They build on lies and vanity, on narcissistic deceit, and once they are truly pledged to him, they are often lost beyond redemption.  He does not mean to reach beyond what he can easily grasp: it’s simply that he cannot comprehend a world where not everything is within his grasp.  He cannot hold what he has. He should not have what he holds.

Remember that he is a shell, a mockery, and cannot be believed.

He will be easier to refuse if you do.