#lee moyer

Transylvanian G•thic — Lee Moyer
16" x 24" Graphite on Paper

Small Gods (with Seanan McGuire) • https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com/

T R E A T* — Lee Moyer / Small Gods (with Seanan McGuire)

*Mariella is still trying to make “fetch” happen.

[image description:  A bright-red figure with curved horns, long satyr-like legs and hooved feet, and a long pointed tail sits on a wide carved wooden set wearing trousers and a thin waistcoat. They bear a sword in their right hand that sits horizontally across their lap, they wear a large necklace of faience scarabs over a largely bare chest, a glowing cigarette whose smoke is green in the bright garish sidelight. A briefcase sits to their right. Text reads, “208, CONTRAXION, Small God of ‘Work for Hire'”]

• • • • •

There is nothing wrong with spending time in their service, providing you first read the fine print and understand how much of yourself you’re signing away.  Your time, your work, your talents…everything is on the table.  And in a world where we have to work if we want to eat, there’s nothing empirically WRONG with that.  We do what we have to do.  We keep body and soul together as long as we can, and we try and we try and they are always there.  They are always ready to take what we have, whether or not it’s what we can afford to give.

They know.

They carry a double-edged sword.  You can create great things in their service, lines of timeless beauty, works of deathless art, and they will give you the safety net to make those things possible, but those things will never truly belong to you.  What happens in their service remains in their service.  If you know that, if you go in with open eyes and a willing heart, they may still eat you alive, but at least you’ll feel you got the better of the deal all the way down into the dark.

And it is very dark.  The depths are filled with those who didn’t read the fine print, who died hungry while people thronged to attend the premieres of movies based on their creations, who fought bitter battles for credit they would never receive.  Be careful in the presence of Contraxion.  Watch your step; read before you sign.  Know, all the while, what you are doing, and while they may not treat you kindly, they will still have the potential to treat you well.

There is nothing stopping them from treating you well.

Just make sure you get paid.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: A ginger offers you a biscuit in a spiral design (which is replicated in the ‘O’ of their name). Both the Small God and the biscuit have haloes reminiscent of the pattern on a famous American biscuit. Text reads, “119, Geoff, the Small God of Biscuits.”]

• • • • •

Words mean things. This is unquestionable, incontrovertible, uncontroversial. Words mean things, or what’s the point in having words? They may mean different things in different languages, but when people are speaking the same language, they should be able to comfortably assume they’re understanding one another. That the words they use, identical and clear, should mean the same things.

Enter Geoff.

Geoff, who will be happy to offer you a delicious treat, still steaming and warm from the oven, soft as a promise, enchanting as a sigh…if you’re only willing to call it by the proper name. Thank Geoff for the biscuit, get showered in sugary joy. Thank Geoff for the cookie, find yourself unfed and uncontented. Because some gods are very regional in their delights. Some gods exist within the lee of a single meaning.

Some gods hold no truck with blue fuzzy monsters, and don’t understand why anyone would choose to do so. “Biscuit is a satisfying word,” says Geoff.  “It has snap and crunch. It feels delicious in the mouth. What is ‘cookie’? ‘Cookie’ is mush, it’s mostly vowels, the consonants it has are all doing the same job, it’s a lazy word. Leave it be, and come and have a biscuit with someone who knows what they’re talking about.”

Geoff is always glad to offer you a biscuit. Just not a hot, fluffy, buttermilk one. Those are for other gods and other hands, and less complicated culinary linguistic climes.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description:  A portrait of a space princess with growing green plants for hair and radiant - almost hallucinatory - lines and swirls behind her. And that’s not even mentioning the small moon, the stars or the trippy lettering, all rendered in an outlined style reminiscent of Yellow Submarine or Peter Max. Text reads, “207, Princess Chia, ‘the small god’ (is taped over the words ’The Spirit’ of ‘76”]

• • • • •

Hey, man.  Far out, right?  Outta this world.  Most people met her later than ’76, but ’76 was when she was first believed into being, by hair and makeup and central casting, all bringing her to incarnation on the bright-eyed face of a twenty-year-old girl who had no idea that she was flirting with the divine (in more ways than one, as Carrie herself has since ascended to serve as the small god of Rebellion).  So many decisions were made in ’76, decisions that would come to shake the world, but that seemed, in the moment, as things of little consequence, as little consequence as the filming of a two-bit science fiction film, destined to fail and be forgotten.

But they didn’t fail.  They weren’t forgotten.  They flew.  And when they flew, she flew with them, bright and young and innocent and flawed and perfect.  She inspired generations to reach farther, stand taller, rebel, blossom, and grow.  And she did it all with 1976 brushed across her cheeks and shining in her eyes.  A moment can extend beyond its place on the calendar, but it can never truly leave that place behind: it will always know where it came from.  She will always know where she came from.

And if we’re good, if we’re very, very good, if we’re bright-eyed and earnest and willing to fly, she may be there to gather us close, to tell us to protect our shining starlight hearts, to keep the spark of ’76 burning deep within our breasts, to help us take off so fast and so fiercely that we’re halfway into orbit before anyone knows we’re gone.

She’s a nebulous god.  Her faithful love her all the same, and given time, she will lead every one of them home.

Believe her.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: Half the face of a smiling being looks out from the left side of the piece. Their incisors are… incisive. Their nose and brow are pierced with silver studs. Their eye is a cat’s eye, their forehead is tattooed in a pattern visible on their neck and shoulder. Their ear is remarkably pointed. Behind them, a sheet of tattoo flash. Very bold and very pointy text reads, “118, LIV MARX ~ small god of BODY MODIFICATION”]

• • • • •

They aren’t frivolous, although many people assume they are.

They’ve been with humanity since humanity figured out what it was to be human, since the first flickers of consciousness and the self invaded the minds of previously innocent and unaware primates.  They never needed to be invited in.

A remarkable number of other gods can be considered their subordinates, if looked at from the right angle.  Patrice Angel, Polly Chrome, dear Tesla Jefferson—they are autonomous all, and yet they serve Liv.  Liv, who says sweetly, “If your body is your temple, decorate it to your liking.  Knock out a few walls, change the curtains, make it something you can live with.  Because no one else gets to decide the shape of your space.  No one else gets to tell you what’s right for you.  Become the person you were born to be, whoever that person is.”

They aren’t frivolous.  Their works can be transitory—the pierced eyebrow that seems like a wonderful idea in college, the drunken tattoo that gets lasered away in sober shame—but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

They stand with the preteen staring at the makeup aisle with wide, longing eyes, thoughts of the way his father will react warring with the need to paint his face the way it looks in his dreams.  They stand with the teen who binds growing breasts and sobs, either because they’re growing too big, too fast, and shattering the remains of her fleeting childhood against the rocks of sudden sexualization and inappropriate adult attention, or because adults who believe they know better than anyone else have blocked his access to the hormones that would have allowed him to control the shape of his body as it always should have been.  They stand with the adults those teens become, sitting in white rooms and looking at solemn doctors, begging to be allowed to repair the damage done by other hands.

They aren’t frivolous.  They only want the house in which you live to feel like a home, no matter what anyone else may think of it.

And they’re always down for a bitchin’ new tattoo.  Because even the more serious of gods is allowed to enjoy themself from time to time.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: A skeptical-looking black man with a beard and mustache wears green scrubs and leather bracers. One hand is on his chin, the other on his opposite bicep. Text reads, “117, Serious Lee, the Small God of Questioning Authority – the ‘o’ of ‘Serious’ forms a thought balloon above his head which holds a question mark.”]

• • • • •

People wind up in charge through all sorts of avenues. Sometimes they win elections; other times they’re born into power, or trick or talk their way into it. Only two things are universal: that the people in authority expect to be listened to, whether they’re right or not, and that some of them don’t deserve their positions.

Serious wasn’t initially made that way. In the beginning, they called him Sincere, and he followed the people in authority in all their dealings.  It didn’t last for long. People existing in conditions of near-infinite power will always show their true faces sooner or later, and bit by bit, Serious was born. He is the quiet question and the ungiven answer, the necessary grit in the gears to keep things running honest and clean through his simple presence.

He is always watching, and he is always asking “Why?” and when he doesn’t receive an answer he cares for, he is always willing to ask again. And again, and again, until the answer changes, or the person in authority does.

He has outlasted regimes and administrations and more managers than anyone cares to count, including Seriously himself. But he never loses faith that one day, perhaps, things will change. After all, they’ve changed before.

If he can hold on for long enough, if he can ask sufficient questions, he may eventually find a form of authority that renders him extraneous.  Until that happy day, he’s content to serve as he does, holding the important to account, keeping them from growing too content in their absolute power.

Power corrupts. Serious Lee is always there to keep it from corrupting past the point of all return.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

Tumblr:https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com

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[image description:  A wine-colored monochrome portrait of an increasingly frustrated and deranged white man lies over a page of text. Though each line is different (and all seemingly misspelled) they are to the effect that ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. There are unsettling blood stains at the bottom of the page. Text (in Courier font) reads, “206, Jack Torrents, small god of Writer’s Block”]

• • • • •

Never has there been a more perfect more infallible more glorious god, worthy only of praise, no censure, no critique.*

(*Anne O’Tate is a god of research and form, not composition, and I have to hope she can protect me, if I cast my text into her domain.  So: Jack.  Jack is the small god of writer’s block.  He offers suggestions, offers comforts and concern, and his company can seem like a blessing, when it comes at the beginning of such an affliction.  Here is someone who KNOWS.  Here is someone who UNDERSTANDS.

But if we give him our worship and our attention, here is someone who LINGERS.  Someone who feeds every excuse, every bit of precious fragility.  “Oh, I can’t write, I saw a bad thing on social media.”  “Oh, I can’t write, Starbucks was out of Pumpkin Spice muffins.”  “Oh, I can’t write, I don’t feel it in my heart.”

All of that is Jack.  He will feed the worst parts of you, will enable and encourage, will refuse to leave unless made to do so.)

And because he is such a perfect god, there is no need for someone as small and insignificant as I to attract his attention for even a moment.  He has far more important things to do with his time, far more essential worshippers to care for and defend.**

(**I am going to kill you for attracting his attention to me, even for a moment.  I don’t know how and I don’t know when, but I know I’m going to do it, because how dare you.  It’s my job to write these things down, and now here I am with Jack Torrents looking in my direction, and no ability to shift his gaze away, save for hiding myself in footnotes and praising his name.  How DARE you.)

All praise to Jack Torrents, small god of writer’s block, so essential, so desired, so glorious in his munificence and his generosity, so perfect in divinity.  We are fortunate to be found worthy in his sight.***

(***I think he’s gone.  I need a drink.)

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description:  The last bit of toothpaste (which has a happy little face) emerges from a now-completely-empty tube against a black, grey, and green marble background. Both the tube and the toothpaste are pink, white, and mint green striped. Text reads, “205, SQUIRT, the small god of THRIFT”]

• • • • •

They have followers and they have believers, and those are not the same thing.

Squirt was born of necessity, of stone soup and chewed paper patching cracks in the window.  They came into being the first time someone boiled grass and called it tea, the first time a child, denied a doll, dressed a stick in a cobweb gown and sent her dancing at an imaginary ball.  Some grow up with them, knowing their worship from the beginnings of their lives, and some come to them later; some come willingly, and some less so.  Some speak of them with scorn and others with reverence, but it’s all the same to Squirt.  Squirt welcomes them all, and they don’t care if you believe in them, because they believe in themself, and that’s enough.

They know how to make do.

They are the last drop in the shampoo bottle, the last squeeze in the toothpaste tube, the last bite of the bread; they are discount meat and making do.  They are mending and darning and repairing what’s broken but not quite past salvation.  They are a saver of everything, and that includes the lost and the broken.  No one is too battered from past experiences to be beyond the point of saving.

So come: let them take you to the thrift shops and the discount grocery stores, the stands where they sell the imperfect produce and the flea markets where lightly used goods are available for those willing to take the time.  Let them freecycle your faith, and when you leave them for more generous pastures, they will gladly wave you on, knowing you have been enriched by your time in their company, knowing they will never be truly forgotten.

They are the salt at your table forever after, and the reminder to be kind to those who have less, to lift up instead of pushing down.  They are a moment and a memory, or a lifetime, and they are always a lesson.  They will teach you how to work with what you have, and when they are no longer right for you, they will let you go.

Every time, always.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

Tumblr:https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com

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[image description:  A tiny spaceship is caught like a firefly in an airless canning jar. Its golden exhaust providing the only light in the scene. Text (molded into the glass of the jar) reads, “204, Fox Mason, the small god of ACTUAL Cancellation”]

• • • • •

Gods are made of belief.  Humans believe.  Humans, small and weak as they are individually, must therefore be said to make gods.  Gods can do epic, amazing things that humans could never accomplish, but which humans are capable of dreaming of, for a human couldn’t imagine it, a god couldn’t do it.  That is the one true limitation of the divine: it is bounded by the limits of human imagination.  But here is the secret: human imagination has no limits, and thus the only limitation of the divine is no limitation at all.

Humans believe.  Humans secrete story, making pearls out of every scrap of sand that works its way into their psyches, and they spread those stories around, making a cultural moment out of believing the same pretty lies.  Stories are incubators for gods, warm, safe places where belief can take root and grow.  More than a few gods have begun from such seeds.  The others do not shame them for such beginnings, for they are not chosen, but granted.

As time has passed, the shapes of those stories have changed, and the methods by which they may be shared have changed along with them.  No longer is it single storytellers around fires at night: it is entire productions, attractive people in shining costumes, industries built on dreams.

But a dream is a fragile scaffold unless it attracts belief to itself with speed.  Far too many dreams, built too high too fast, find themselves collapsing under the weight of their own industry.  That’s where Fox comes in.

Fox is where dreams go to die.  Fox lures them in with pretty words and shiny trinkets, promises them a pantheon, and then, when they fail to bring the believers in quickly enough, or when those believers belong to the wrong demographic, they pull the scaffolding away and leave the dream to collapse.

What Fox cancels does not return.  What Fox jars does not rise again.

And yet dreamers keep following their light, believing that this time, it will be different.  And it is, just often enough to make their beliefs understandable: sometimes, Fox takes mercy.

Not often, though.

In Fox’s den, dreams die.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: Twilight. A cheery-looking young woman in a pointy black hat with flowers in its band, a black sleeveless tee, black shorts, and black work boots rides side-saddle on an old wooden broom.  She is very high up, above the cumulus clouds and beneath the stars. She’s waving. Text reads, “114, Daria Ducharme ~ The Small God of First-Time Fliers”]

• • • • •

Some gods are gods for a lifetime, gods you win or are won by and pledge yourself to with all due devotion, serving at their altars from the cradle to the grave.  Other gods are gods of the moment, here to see us through a transformative experience and then leave us on the other side as someone new, someone other than we were before.  They are the gods of the first day of school, the first kiss, the first love, the first loss.

Or, in the case of dear Daria, the first flight.

Because she sits astride a broom, many take her for a god of witches, or of charwomen, but neither of these is quite correct, unless those spellcasters or hearth-sweepers are taking to the air for their very maiden voyages.  Because she is a god of firsts, and young to the eye, many assume that she must be inexperienced, naïve, an easy god to take advantage of.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Daria isn’t jaded, because she’s worked hard to retain the sense of innocence and wonder that makes it possible for her to truly connect with the people in her keeping, to soothe their nerves and laugh away their worries, but she isn’t new here, either.  Daria has been shepherding people through their first flights since the Wright Brothers.  Lovely boys.  Very sweet, very generous with their time in the brief hours they spent together.

Her time with her faithful is never long, but those who have flown with her once will never forget her again.

Daria is always prepared to take to the skies.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

Tumblr:https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com

Twitter:https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

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[image description: A middle-aged man stands in a garage wearing a wrinkled blue work shirt, with a patch that says ‘Len’. His arms are crossed and he holds a ‘RIGID’ monkey-wrench. Behind him, a sign reads ‘SPEEDY LUBING’. Text reads, “113, Len ~ Small God of the Day Job”]

• • • • •

There is no shame in an honest day’s work.  No reason to lower your eyes and refuse to answer when someone asked you what you did for a living; no reason to feel like wiping a counter or turning a wrench made you somehow lesser, made you somehow inferior.  Len knows all who labor, whatever color their collar happens to be, and he loves them all with equal grace.  White collar, blue collar, the occasional butcher or surgeon who considers themselves blurred all the way into red collar, they are all his children.

He also loves those who aspire to leave his grace, the artists and authors who dream of making their muse their master, riding their passion all the way to plenty; the ones who dream with genuine delight of the day they can marry and retire, staying home to raise a family, doing the hard work of education and nurturing while someone else serves in Len’s temples.  He loves them knowing they want nothing more than to leave him behind, one more forgotten god on a life path littered with unneeded theologies and thrown-aside prayers.

He has room for them all, and he knows there will always be another, because there is always work to be done, and always hands to do it.  He would prefer that all who work beneath his banner be there of their own free will.  He knows that isn’t the case, and those are the only prayers that he regrets.  The compelled.  The captive.  The nonconsensual.  He cannot free them from his temples, must depend on human hands to untie the knots and undo the locks, but he can hope for them, and he can answer them as kindly as his nature allows.

Len loves the workers.  Len loves the union man.  And Len loves an unvoided warranty.  Take care of what you own, Len begs, or be without.

Len loves you, too.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

Tumblr:https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com

Twitter:https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

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[image description: A chipper character wearing a red and deep blue plaid shirt and newsperson’s cap. They hold a bottle in their right hand and point at it with their left. The classic symbols for ‘Male’, ‘Female’, are entwined with a question mark — these symbols appear to be spinning differently on the bottle front than on its neck. Inside the thin golden bezel cameo oval that may (or may not) be shifting its orientation is an impressionist mix of magenta and blue. outside it, five colored horizontal stripes  — Pink, White, Magenta, Black, and Blue.Text reads, “201, RIVER ALGOOD, the small god of the Gender Fluid”]

• • • • •

“Okay, kid, so you found the bar.  Good on you.  That means you need to be here.  No, there’s no cover charge, and we don’t care how old you are—think of it as a public house or an inn as much as it’s a tavern.  Or hell, go with coffee shop.  That’s a modern way of saying ‘gathering place with drinks and plenty of chairs, where you can be yourself with other people who are also being themselves, and not need to worry about anybody seeing you.’  This idea that bars are only about the alcohol is a lot more recent.  But then again, so is clean water.

“Huh?  Yeah, I do talk about it like I was there, because kid, I always have been.  Go all the way back to the creation, to the first people we’d recognize as humans, standing there all hairy and muddy and naked, and there were always the ones who felt like they were one thing when people said they were something else, or who were something different today than they were yesterday, than they’d be tomorrow.  You’re nothing new.

“Honey, you don’t gotta look so scared.  You’re here.  That tells me you belong here, and that tells me you’re one of mine.  If you weren’t, you’d never have found the doors.  I’m not going to judge anything except that nail polish—it looks like you didn’t use a base coat, and it’s going to stain your cuticles.  But you’re young, you’ll learn how to do your nails without dyeing your skin at the same time.  Unless ‘necrosis’ is the look you’re going for.  In that case, you’ve got a lead on the competition.

“Anyway, you’re nothing new, and you’re something valid, and no one gets to tell you who or what or why you are except for you.  All those choices are yours to make, all those futures belong to you, and I’m just the lucky god who gets to guide you along the way.

“My pronouns?  Kid, I’ll take any pronouns you’ve got.  I keep ‘em in a bucket in the back.  Some of them can get kinda frisky sometimes, but they’re all good.  If you need new ones, you can fish ‘em out of the bucket.

“Oh, which ones am I currently using?  I find that ‘divine/divinity’ works pretty well for me.  If that’s too much of a mouthful, you can use my name—River—or ‘they/them’ is almost never entirely wrong.  But really, anything’s good by me.

“I am the god of the changing and the questioning, the malleable and the multiple, the ones who don’t conform, and the ones who won’t, or can’t.  I belong to all of them, all of you, and I will keep you as safe as I can.  It’s not easy.

“Nothing important ever is.

“So you found the bar.  That’s the first step.  Now here’s the question of the hour: what are your pronouns?  Speak, and we can know each other better.”

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

Tumblr:https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com

Twitter:https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

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Homepage:http://smallgodseries.com

[image description: A strange segmented blue metal being sits cross-legged and floating. Points rising from its knees, elbows, shoulders, and head, and a scarf/cape hangs from behind its shoulders. It holds a glowing largely-orange orb in its lap and many other such orbs orbit around it. Behind it, a green flare, and in the lower left, Hummel (who can’t quite think of what to say). Text reads, “200, PROMYTHEUS, the small god of NEW GODS”]

• • • • •

They have always been, and they do not care for the beliefs of mortals.  We are as motes of dust to them, inconsequential, save in the immune response we can sometimes summon from the universe.  When it breathes us in too deeply, when it inhales too many of our kind, it sneezes, and the results are not tissues and chicken soup.

The results are gods.

When these cosmic sneezes occur, Promytheus is there, ready to gather the new divinities close and nurture them until they waken to their place in the pantheon.  They care for their charges with the utmost delicacy, protecting them from the mortals as well as from the other gods, for newly-born gods are fragile things, still settling into themselves.  Too many are lost at this stage.

Miss Dixie, small god of kitten rescue, has often commented that she and Promytheus are siblings of a kind, both fighting to keep tiny things alive when the universe may have other intentions for them. Like kittens, very new gods are not very good at keeping themselves together, and must be fought for constantly. They are delicate. (Miss Dixie’s actual sibling, Anthro Paul, small god of animal rescue, has very little to say about his sister’s attempts to adopt other gods.  They’re like kittens.  She won’t be happy until every one of them has a home.)

As for Promytheus themself, they seem to be content with their lot, with the constant rounds of bottles and incubators, fighting against the odds to nurture generations of gods who, once they are ready to move into the world on their own, will never look back, never remember how tiny they once were, or how much they needed the love and care of the god who protected them when they were weakest.  Promytheus is fulfilling their purpose, and we who are their acolytes honor them well enough to sustain them.

They are not much believed in for themselves, but they are well believed in, and well-appreciated, for the terminus of all their labor.

Without them, so many others would not be.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

Tumblr:https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com

Twitter:https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

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[image description: A scary looking light blue face sneers. It might be a puppet face from an unknown Rankin Bass Christmas animation. Its eyes are glowing embers, its nose and chin pointed, its black cloak and ragged hair are filled with stars. The 10 wooden shadowbox sections frame the portrait to either side and contain: a Victorian era lock, a woman’s burnt sculpted face, an old electrical outlet, a left-facing seahorse, an ancient cylindrical ivory box in front of an equally-aged telescope, A two-legged clay pot with a protruding horned face from Mexico, A traffic light turning amber, an ovate sedimentary stone, a curious URL, and a sculpted silver globe. Text reads, “199, Sleep MISER, the small god of INSOMNIA”]

• • • • •

“Man, you look like hell.  Up all night playing video games?”

“I wish.  I went to bed at nine-thirty.”

“So what happened?”

“I just didn’t sleep.”

He is not a nice god.  We try to see the positive of even the unpleasant entities we document, to present them in a fair and measured light, to avoid attracting divine vengeance down on our own heads, but in this case, we have to come out and make a clear statement: he is not a nice god.  He does not have your best interests at heart, and his worship is better left avoided.

Oh, his faithful—for he has them; every god has them, or they would no longer have their godhood—will try to tell you that he serves the ambitious, the creative, and the determined, that if you can work when the world is sleeping, you will have a greater life.  What they don’t tell you is that “greater,” in their eyes, means a life of irritability and exhaustion, of slow psychic poison as your brain fails to reset itself through dreams, of withering relationships and lost compassion.  To them, all that matters is that when your life is done, you’ll have made the most money, worked the most hours, refused the most indulgences.  In their eyes, sleep is a luxury to be earned.

Lulah Bye, small god of a good night’s sleep, says that sleep is not a luxury: sleep is a gift given to you upon your birth, to be treasured and enjoyed.  It is the one thing you have that costs no money, is forbidden by no king, and is not socially shameful to speak of.  She would drive the Sleep Miser from the pantheon if she could, for he brings no blessings, and torments her faithful when they have done nothing to deserve it.

Sleep Miser himself has no regrets about his position.  He enjoys it.  He’s not getting any sleep.

So why should you?

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: A small creature with the face of a juvenile Badger stands in a flamboyant red coat, purple waistcoat, violet sash, and wide ribbon bowtie. His shadow falls on a rough wooden floor, right hand on a comparatively tall bottom stair. Text reads, “111 OTTO 111, The Small God of the Palindromes”]

• • • • •

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.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: We look slightly up at a penguin standing atop an ice-cliff in a snowstorm. He wears huge dark goggles and a leather aviator’s helmet on his head. Two complex gold metal and brown leather mechanical wings are strapped to his back and shoulders. Text reads, “193, The Great Waldo Pfeffernüsse, the Small God of Prosthetics”]

• • • • •

The Great Waldo is not a huge fan of cyberpunk.

Oh, the aesthetic, he can get behind.  The idea of rebuilding your body to escape its limitations, to expand its usefulness, he can absolutely support.  The thought that no one should ever feel as if they’re missing anything in a world where joints and hinges and WD40 exist, he’s good with that.  But the idea that replacing a part of yourself that isn’t working the way you want it to with something that suits you better could somehow make you less yourself…he can’t really accept that.

You are exactly as much yourself as you desire to be.  Your body is your own, to modify and upgrade and repair as you will.  If glasses don’t make you less of who you are, why should a pacemaker, or a carbon fiber leg, or a set of titanium teeth?  Or wings, that actually work, that a brave explorer can use to soar above the land he loves, to see things from the height he’s always yearned for and dreamed of?

Nothing you can choose to do to your own body can lessen you as a person, in his eyes, or in reality, and those are the two things that most matter to this equation.  Everything else can get stuffed.

The Great Waldo believes in self-improvement, in building new scaffolds when needed, in replacing what’s broken and improving what has room for improvement.  He wants everyone to feel content inside their skins, to breathe easy and content.  Whether that means modification or acceptance, addition or subtraction, it doesn’t matter to him.

It’s not his body that’s under discussion here, after all.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: A smiling young bald man stands in front of (and is side-lit by) a huge green traffic light. His suit is dark, his bowtie is untied, his collar is open, and he’s giving a hearty thumbs-up. Text reads, “192, ROGER THAT • the small god of SECURING ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT”]

• • • • •

“Hello.  It’s a pleasure to meet you, and really, you’re looking lovely today.  Do you mind if I sit here?  Oh, I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to intrude.  I’ll move along.  Have a wonderful afternoon.”

Roger can come off as a bit of a used car salesman, but he’s a nice guy, really, and he means everything he says.  For him, a lukewarm yes is the same thing as a no; if he doesn’t know, with absolute conviction, that he’s wanted, he’ll move along.  He’s not trying to be petulant or to threaten with his absence: he just wants to be sure that no one’s being forced to do anything they don’t want to do.

Pick-up artists and psychological manipulators are his sworn enemies, and some among the pantheon believe that his unwavering refusal to consent to their manifestation are why small gods of those communities have never manifested.  Roger wants everyone to be comfortable and free to make their own choices.  Cruel gods exist, yes.  Manipulative gods, yes.  But gods whose sole purpose is getting people to agree to things they don’t actually want, no.  And that’s on Roger, and we can all be grateful, in the end.

Even if you or I consented to their arrival, Roger wouldn’t, and that’s enough to keep them out.

Roger knows we must all sometimes consent to things we don’t actually want to do—to medical procedures that will harm or inconvenience, but do more good in the long run, to kale salads for our health or even to acts of personal service that will do us no lasting harm, but will do someone we care for lasting good.  He doesn’t need your consent to be joyful, or bolstered by a sincere desire for the thing in question.  He just needs it to be enthusiastic, honest, and made without coercion.

His position is not the easiest one to hold.  But he loves it, and every time he’s been asked if he would set it willingly aside, he does not consent.  He wants us all to be as safe as we can, and this is what he can do.

This is what he WILL do, for as long as he is able.

“Hello.  Do you mind if I sit—oh, thank you.  Yes, it is a beautiful day.  Thank you for letting me join you.”

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: A watercolor portrait of a smiling young strawberry blond in wide wire-rimmed oval glasses and a yellow t-shirt with a black biohazard symbol on it. Behind Cooper, a group of dark robot silhouettes with glowing eyes. Behind them, huge high-tech towers. And behind those, the starry night sky. Text reads, “191, COOPER • THE SMALL GOD OF MAD SCIENCE”]

• • • • •

Children are full of questions.  It’s their natural state.  What they aren’t full of is limitations.  To a child, turning off gravity or repealing the square/cube law seems just as reasonable as a game of tag or a baloney sandwich.  It’s just that for most of them, the games and the sandwiches are easier to come by than the death rays or the massive revisions to the laws of physics.

And then there are the outliers.  The smart kids with the stars in their eyes and the static in their heads and no real concept of the line between “can” and “should.”

Those are the ones he adores.  Those are the ones who adore HIM, the ones who whisper his name in the night, or a name that he recognizes as his own—he’s Cooper, yes, but he’s also Raj, and Shinji, and Jordan, and Marie.  He is whatever his faithful need him to be, as fluid as thought, as mutable as the ideas he represents.  He comes to the frustrated and the furious, and he makes them better, and he encourages them to change the world.

Some of them outgrow him, shift into the service of other small gods of science, pledge themselves to OSHI, small god of lab safety, or Grant Grant, small god of proper funding.  Some of them abandon science entirely.  But others will remain his forever, dreaming of dinosaurs and science without limits, dreaming of changing the world.

Some of them will do it.  And in the end, that’s all Cooper wants.  Science unfettered, science running wild and free and unrestrained.

He wouldn’t mind a few dinosaurs, if you’re taking requests.

And he’ll be there the whole time, death ray by his side and not a safety light in view, ready to change the world as soon as he can figure out a reliable power source.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: Portrait of Ambrose Burnside, Former Governor of Rhode Island. His strangely-shaped face offset by remarkable white sideburns. Really big sideburns that connect to a wide white mustache. He has no beard and sports a dark blue suit and a bright blue tie over a cream colored shirt front and a cream colored collar. Behind him, a beamed ceiling hangs over a room of blue and gold mosaic. Text reads, “107, Ambrose – Small God of Sideburns.”]

• • • • •

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.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: A cute green cartoon alien in an orange uniform with padded white collar and cuff rings floats against the black backdrop of outer space. He smiles mischievously while the antenna atop his head radiates energy. Text reads, “106, Quink (a big bold commercial logo) – Small God of Sugar Cereals.”]

• • • • •

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.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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[image description: A woman in a blue tunic and a white lab coat sits at a desk, one hand on an open book, the other holding a pencil. Her thick red brown hair is twisted back and held in place by another pencil. She looks at us over her old-fashioned dark-rimmed glasses. Text reads, “188, EVA DENCE • the small god of JUST THE FACTS”]

• • • • •

People think she’s a static god.  That because she stands for the facts of the matter, she is incapable of change.  What they don’t understand is that facts are not always understood in an instant: they evolve.  They are uncovered.  She is, in her way, an archeologist, sifting through layers of rumor and falsehood and misunderstanding to hit the bones of the matter.  And yes, sometimes, those bones are buried too deep to ever come fully to light; sometimes the most that can be hoped for is a few scraps of truth, a few immutable conclusions.

Sometimes that can be enough.

She checks her facts; she verifies her sources; she collects the shining specks of evidence and she studies them long into the night.  She finds the truth.  Whether she chooses to share it is more variable.  But people think she’s a static god, and they don’t understand that some truths are evolving even as she digs them out of the bedrock of reality.  Understandings change.  Things can be true without being complete.

People think she’s a humorless god.  That her insistence on accuracy means she doesn’t deserve their fellowship or their compassion.  They think she can’t be hurt as long as the accusations hurled at her are accurate.  They’re very wrong.  Truth is truth and spin is spin, and the truth hurts while the spin seduces.  She does her best.  She understands that she can’t always be popular.  She just wishes people wouldn’t take her insistence on accuracy as an indication that she doesn’t have a sense of humor.  She does.  She always has.  She just wants the world to understand itself.

Give her a mystery and she’ll pick it into pieces and hand them back to you, neatly labeled and ready to be put away.  Give her a conclusion accurate to all current known scientific facts, and she’ll see that it spreads.

Just don’t call her a liar when you don’t like what she has to say.  That’s the one label she has never earned.  That’s the one title she has never once deserved.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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