A Lee Martinez
Divine Misfortune
© 2010
To Mom and the DFWWW, for all the usual reasons.
To Sally, just because I know she’ll be really, really excited to be mentioned in a dedication, and anyone who can put up with me for this long deserves some kind of acknowledgment.
To World of Warcraft. For the Horde!
To me, because it’s been a while since I’ve dedicated a book to myself, and damn it, I’ve earned it with this one.
And to Squirrel Girl, greatest superhero ever. And, yes, she did defeat Thanos single-handedly. It’s in continuity. Deal with it.
1
“Hello. My name is Anubis. I like long walks on the beach, carrying departed souls into the underworld, and the cinema of Mr. Woody Allen.”
Wincing, Teri pushed the PAUSE button. “Oh, ick.”
“What? What’s wrong with this one?” After an hour of watching Internet videos, Phil’s patience was wearing thin. It seemed no god would be good enough for his wife.
“Look at him,” she said. “He’s got a dog head.”
“Jackal,” corrected Phil. “It’s a jackal head.”
She frowned. “Eww. That’s even worse.”
“How is that worse?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just is. I mean, dogs are nice, at least. But jackals… who has anything nice to say about them?”
“He isn’t a jackal, honey,” he said, with an edge on the term of endearment. “He just has a jackal head.” He loved his wife dearly, but she was making this difficult. If it had been up to him, he’d just pick one. Any old low-maintenance god would’ve worked.
“But what about that cinema of Mr. Woody Allen line?”
“You like Woody Allen,” countered Phil.
“Yes, I like him. But who says cinema?”
“Now you’re just nitpicking.”
“But it’s important. The words someone chooses say a lot about them. And people who say cinema are pretentious.”
He rolled his eyes. “He’s a god. He’s allowed to be pretentious.”
“Not my god. No, thank you.”
Phil scrolled through Anubis’s profile. “He’s a pretty good find. I think we should sign up with him while we can.”
Teri looked at him coldly. She didn’t use the look a lot, but it meant there was no changing her mind. He didn’t feel like fighting about it anyway. There were plenty of other gods. Somewhere in the hundreds of listed profiles, there had to be one she couldn’t find anything wrong with.
She was right. It wasn’t a decision to be taken lightly. The string of events that had led him to peruse the digital pages of Pantheon.com, the Internet’s second-largest deity matching service, hadn’t made him forget that.
First had been the promotion. Another one passing him over. The fourth opening in as many months. Instead, that kiss-ass Bob had taken Phil’s step up the corporate ladder. Phil had been practicing his brownnosing and was damn good at it. Better than Bob. So good in fact that Phil had actually swallowed his outrage and walked up to Bob’s new corner office to congratulate his new boss.
He’d found Bob, chanting in Sumerian, hunched over a small altar.
“Hey, Phil.” Bob, his face covered in black and red paint, smiled.
“Hello, sir,” replied Phil, trying his damnedest not to sound annoyed. “Didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll come back later.”
“Oh, please. Don’t worry about it.” He made a casual sweeping gesture at the altar. “Five minutes won’t kill the old boy.”
Phil leaned in against the doorway, perched on the edge of Bob’s corner office with its plush carpeting and obnoxiously large desk clearly made from some rare and expensive wood that Phil couldn’t recognize but still resented. He tried not to notice the lovely view of the park just below.
“Something I can do for you?” asked Bob.
“Just wanted to say congratulations. You deserve it.”
“Thanks. Honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t get it. I thought for sure that fatted calf I offered ol’ Baal here wasn’t going to be enough. What did you offer?”
“Nothing.”
“Ah, that explains it. You know, it never hurts to stain the sacrificial altar now and then. Keeps the boys upstairs happy.”
“I don’t have one.” Phil crossed his arms tight enough to cut off the circulation. “An old boy, I mean.”
“Really?” A curious expression crossed Bob’s face, as if Phil had just admitted to being a cross-dressing jewel thief clown in his spare time. “You really should get one. They’re an absolute necessity. I don’t see how anyone gets along without some upstairs help.”
That alone wasn’t enough to push Phil into the decision.
On the car ride home, distracted by his worries, he’d been in a minor fender bender. The damage wasn’t serious, just a dented bumper and an ugly scrape to his paint job. But the other driver’s car didn’t have a scratch.
The other driver pulled out a special knife and ran it across his palm, drawing some blood to offer to his god as he incanted, “Blessed be Marduk, who keeps my insurance premiums down.”
Phil arrived home. As he pulled into the driveway, the first thing he noticed (the first thing he always noticed) was his lawn. It taunted him, a symbol of his promising life, once green and flourishing, now greenish and wilted. He watered and fertilized it. Had even brought in a specialist. But it was dying, and there was no way to stop it. He took comfort in the fact that nobody else in the neighborhood could get their grass to grow either. There was something in the soil, a lingering curse laid by Coyote on this spot of land for the injustices the Native Americans had suffered at the hands of the Europeans. The natives got smallpox, and the suburbs got yellowed grass. A light punishment for stealing a continent, Phil had to admit, but still annoying.
Except his next-door neighbor Ellen had a lush green lawn today.
Phil didn’t have to guess what had happened. The four-foot-high faux granite goddess statue told him everything he needed to know.
Ellen’s car pulled into her own driveway, and she noticed Phil eyeing the lawn.
“Pretty cool, huh?”
He stifled a scream. “I thought you already had a god. That weird one. The one with the horns and the nine arms.”
“Oh, sure. That’s still working out for me, but he’s a jealous old goat,” she said. “But he doesn’t do lawns. So I just hired an outside service. They stick up the statue, offer the tribute, and my god doesn’t get jealous and smite me dead. It’s a win-win.” Ellen knelt down and ran her hand across her lawn in an almost obscene manner. “That Demeter sure knows how to handle crabgrass, doesn’t she?”
And that was that. The next day Phil went online and signed up on Pantheon.com.
Teri was against the idea at first.
“You knew I didn’t want any gods before we were married,” she said. “We had a long talk about this.”
“I know, but-”
“My grandfather was killed by a desert god, y’know,” she said. “Just for cutting his hair.”
“I know, but-”
“In the end, they always get you, Phil. They always screw you over. Read your history.”
He took her in his arms. She offered some resistance, then hugged him back.
“Honey,” she said, “I know you’re frustrated with how things have been going lately, but I don’t think you’re thinking this through.”
“I am,” he said. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and it makes sense to me.”
She pulled away from him. “We’re not doing so bad, are we?”
Phil looked at his house. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough. They had the finest furniture IKEA could supply, a television larger than would have been sane ten years ago, and enough bric-a-brac and art hanging from the walls to keep Teri happy but not appear too cluttered. Although he could’ve done without the sailboat motif. Something he’d always found odd, considering he’d never heard Teri even talk about sailing once since he’d met her.