Godlings
Rachel felt the tiny Jesus on her shoulder squirm as she watched the swimming boy. It could feel what she was thinking, the sinful desires coalescing. She wanted the boy dead, and the jesus knew it, reasons and excuses flowed through her mind. Justifications for hideous acts, things he had said at school, ways he had looked at her, or not looked at her. She tried to sort these in her mind into a coherent argument the Jesus could not argue her out of.
She watched the boy from the waterfall, half hiding herself by the shrine to the patron saint Al Allia, her pink and white fingers atop the raven head. The stone mossy with age and smoothed by centuries of rain fall, the larger totems that had protected it had been born away to grace the houses of richer men during the settlement era.
She laughed to herself, forgot the urge to murder, savouring the look on the tiny Jesus’s face, in its eyes the suffering of humanity, though he was only four inches tall. Sometime she enjoyed making him suffer, to see how far she could take it, how much he was willing to forgive, in truth she only did it out of boredom or of frustration at his eternally forgiving nature.
She turned away from the water, from the swimming boy and the other girls who were no doubt watching him- why else did he swim in the pool if not to be seen? It was part of the essential social fabric of the life of her peers, checking out boys swimming in the rockpools and by the waterfall was expected, almost required. She was too cool for that though, far too mature for such mindless crowd following.
She preferred loneliness, and had never wanted the Jesus, he was a gift from her parents that she had neither asked for or felt she needed. But she had found now after several months that his persona was soothing, a calming presence that prevented her from sliding too far into depression and damaging introspection. Almost like a pet.
She found a bench on the edge of the large park. Children played football or games of war and conquest at the far end, watched over by Pagan deities or trademarked action characters.
“Why don’t you fly like them, my little Christ?” she asked the Jesus, her green eyes focusing on his tiny figure. She let him walk upon her hand, his sandled feet light. Yet he had a weight as if he was a fully sized person, just very far away. He glowed too, that residual aura of holiness that even this mass produced copy was still imbued with.
“Why should I need to?” his voice was light, measured, traces of lingering accent, three thousand years and a million miles away from home. The voice resonated in her head, for her ears only. “I give the gift of love eternal, everlasting salvation. The devil gives tricks of flight”
She felt guilty for tormenting him. He was eternally patient, ever loving. It drove her mad. She was not alone in this, most of her friends were on their fourth deity already, and they had only been of the legal age to get them for a year or so. You had to be thirteen, for a proper deity though she couldn’t really remember why, religious reasons, no doubt. Most of the girls had lost or misplaced their Jesus’s at some point, and they did not last long when outdoors, too many predators that even a pint sized godhead could not guard against. If it was not that it was the ever changing nature of fashion, though Christianity was the state sanctioned religion there were a whole bunch of companies representing half a hundred denominations and sects who claimed their Jesus was more real, that they had either a more accurate DNA structure or a heightened state of consciousness. Then there were the cooler, more out there, kids whose parents got them tiny Buddhist Llamas, guaranteed reincarnations of enlightened beings, or old earth spirits, bottled and shipped out in tiny human or animal form, ready to give the very old time religions for a reasonable price.
But her parents had always resisted religious indoctrination, meekly claiming agnosticism, though more to spare themselves the agony of having to actually make a decision of which religion they believed in and sticking to it. It was only when Rachel began losing friends, spending more time by herself and when she was out of school more often than she was in. They had been unable to maintain their façade of detachment from religion and had fallen in with common wisdom and invasive advertising. She got the Jesus after her parents had found the suicide note. A childish fantasy of hers, common she knew amongst girls her age, only it panicked her parents. A girl of fourteen needed a guide.
So she was gifted the divine son of god, thus becoming another Christian teen, but she never indulged in the pointless competition. She had briefly hoped he would be controversial, perhaps declare in favour of Catholicism or Protestantism but she could never pin him down. She wondered whether he was circumcised, just to see the look of discomfort on his face as he picked up her thought.
She loved him really, he had an anti authority streak she had not imagined from the constant biblical extracts and preaching she had been exposed to at school. He agreed with her on a surprising variety of topics. He also never really tried to sell her Christianity, it was something he was rather than something he preached. He wept when they discussed the atrocities committed in his name.
She cheered him up by telling him the good of some Christians, she did not pretend to him to be religious, he would have seen through it immediately.
She was wondering what to do with him after her sixteenth birthday when she finally got the right to choose what religious affiliation or not to follow, though to be honest in the climate of the time you kind of had to choose one or another. Atheism was heavily frowned upon and seemed utterly pointless considering the obvious proof being shown everywhere. What with new religious deities and spirits being discovered or cloned all the time it was a brave man who stood up and called them all fakes. Miracles and curses were a multimillion dollar trade in themselves, let alone the money made from donations of the faithful.
All the people she knew had abandoned their Christ's when they were old enough to do it legally, many showed their rebellious streak by sporting demons on their left shoulder and angels on their right, or demons on both shoulders if they were truly hardcore. Many went overtly secular and bought mini Guavaras or Lenins, but these were usually abandoned as they were too complicated. Those kids that kept an Adolph or a Bin Laden or a Manson were usually pitied, and often referred for counselling. She was tempted by a mother goddess, the primal feminine figure, the first and oldest of any human belief figure. She felt it represented her feelings and temperament better than any patriarchical Hebrew prophet.
Her mother had a Virgin Mary that she had been given when just a girl in the early days of religious fervour when they had given them out at every confirmation. She kept it hidden, unsure of how much she wanted to believe in it, but she had been caught there once or twice by her daughter, bent down in prayer to the tiny figure. The Mary had ageless but ancient face, dark eyed and knowledgable, closer to a mother goddess than the church would have liked her to be, and she certainly was no virgin.
She remembered the arguments over her brother, who after a brief period with an overtly female demon who had lounged naked and lascivious on his shoulder, had converted to Islam. He now had a complete series of ever changing shapes surrounding his whole body, letters in Arabic script telling the name of god and shaping themselves into phrases from the Koran or into complex mathematical patterns. It was symbol of his submission to the one true god, he said, and it gave him his true purpose. She feared he might hurt her Jesus, but he was very tolerant, although he always argued with him over points of scripture and interpretation. Then she could feel the Jesus get angry, which made her uncomfortable. Some people she knew deliberately goaded their figures into fighting together, different types of Jesus from different denominations of the church, or smackdowns between different religions. That was just a boy thing, she guessed.
She looked at the sky, making out dim outlines that scarred the blue. If she really concentrated she could make out shapes, very nearly hear them, almost. A faint astral chant, the sound of distant heavenly bodies, not singing the praises of the lord as she had once thought but just for their own pleasure and joy. A beautiful birdsong for the Gods, just cosmic static.
She wanted to be up there with them, to be an abstract shape without form, to know enlightened creatures below are attributing you with strange, fortune telling, qualities. But also to know the infinite truths of the heavens, the gulf between stars and feel them all sing back to you. Things more ancient than life has any right to be, more huge than she could conceive. She felt the beginnings of vertigo on her feet and palms and smiled as the edge of fear thrilled through her.
She looked down at the Jesus, for a second she had forgotten he was there and saw he was singing. He was sitting on her palm with eyes closed. The songs she did not recognise, and were in a language she didn’t understand, the ancient tongue of Arameic, from a Jewish kingdom in old, old Palestine with a future of less than a hundred years before it was swept completely away. She felt the tune through her, the words had meaning even if she didn’t directly understand them there was a part of her that resonated to them, a part of her brain that was ancient and wise that understood.
She loved it when he sang, she tried not to concentrate on it as he always stopped when she started paying attention. She though this one might be about the freeing of the slaves from Egypt but she wasn’t quite sure.
She glanced again at the children, muddy and pagan and full of war thoughts. They cursed each other and fought in the dirt. It struck her then how apt their little gods were to them, the gods of children are the gods of destruction. There is nothing more a child likes to do than to build a world, make believe an entire civilisation then on a whim, or boredom or simply because he is tired of it he will destroy it utterly.
Then some older boys looking tough walked past, sneering slightly at her Jesus, and she tried to look older and more mature, and not care about religion or anything like that. But they were gone by then, and anyway it was time to be home. She placed the tiny Jesus on her shoulder and sauntered back, thinking sinful thoughts about boys and heavenly creatures.
2001
She watched the boy from the waterfall, half hiding herself by the shrine to the patron saint Al Allia, her pink and white fingers atop the raven head. The stone mossy with age and smoothed by centuries of rain fall, the larger totems that had protected it had been born away to grace the houses of richer men during the settlement era.
She laughed to herself, forgot the urge to murder, savouring the look on the tiny Jesus’s face, in its eyes the suffering of humanity, though he was only four inches tall. Sometime she enjoyed making him suffer, to see how far she could take it, how much he was willing to forgive, in truth she only did it out of boredom or of frustration at his eternally forgiving nature.
She turned away from the water, from the swimming boy and the other girls who were no doubt watching him- why else did he swim in the pool if not to be seen? It was part of the essential social fabric of the life of her peers, checking out boys swimming in the rockpools and by the waterfall was expected, almost required. She was too cool for that though, far too mature for such mindless crowd following.
She preferred loneliness, and had never wanted the Jesus, he was a gift from her parents that she had neither asked for or felt she needed. But she had found now after several months that his persona was soothing, a calming presence that prevented her from sliding too far into depression and damaging introspection. Almost like a pet.
She found a bench on the edge of the large park. Children played football or games of war and conquest at the far end, watched over by Pagan deities or trademarked action characters.
“Why don’t you fly like them, my little Christ?” she asked the Jesus, her green eyes focusing on his tiny figure. She let him walk upon her hand, his sandled feet light. Yet he had a weight as if he was a fully sized person, just very far away. He glowed too, that residual aura of holiness that even this mass produced copy was still imbued with.
“Why should I need to?” his voice was light, measured, traces of lingering accent, three thousand years and a million miles away from home. The voice resonated in her head, for her ears only. “I give the gift of love eternal, everlasting salvation. The devil gives tricks of flight”
She felt guilty for tormenting him. He was eternally patient, ever loving. It drove her mad. She was not alone in this, most of her friends were on their fourth deity already, and they had only been of the legal age to get them for a year or so. You had to be thirteen, for a proper deity though she couldn’t really remember why, religious reasons, no doubt. Most of the girls had lost or misplaced their Jesus’s at some point, and they did not last long when outdoors, too many predators that even a pint sized godhead could not guard against. If it was not that it was the ever changing nature of fashion, though Christianity was the state sanctioned religion there were a whole bunch of companies representing half a hundred denominations and sects who claimed their Jesus was more real, that they had either a more accurate DNA structure or a heightened state of consciousness. Then there were the cooler, more out there, kids whose parents got them tiny Buddhist Llamas, guaranteed reincarnations of enlightened beings, or old earth spirits, bottled and shipped out in tiny human or animal form, ready to give the very old time religions for a reasonable price.
But her parents had always resisted religious indoctrination, meekly claiming agnosticism, though more to spare themselves the agony of having to actually make a decision of which religion they believed in and sticking to it. It was only when Rachel began losing friends, spending more time by herself and when she was out of school more often than she was in. They had been unable to maintain their façade of detachment from religion and had fallen in with common wisdom and invasive advertising. She got the Jesus after her parents had found the suicide note. A childish fantasy of hers, common she knew amongst girls her age, only it panicked her parents. A girl of fourteen needed a guide.
So she was gifted the divine son of god, thus becoming another Christian teen, but she never indulged in the pointless competition. She had briefly hoped he would be controversial, perhaps declare in favour of Catholicism or Protestantism but she could never pin him down. She wondered whether he was circumcised, just to see the look of discomfort on his face as he picked up her thought.
She loved him really, he had an anti authority streak she had not imagined from the constant biblical extracts and preaching she had been exposed to at school. He agreed with her on a surprising variety of topics. He also never really tried to sell her Christianity, it was something he was rather than something he preached. He wept when they discussed the atrocities committed in his name.
She cheered him up by telling him the good of some Christians, she did not pretend to him to be religious, he would have seen through it immediately.
She was wondering what to do with him after her sixteenth birthday when she finally got the right to choose what religious affiliation or not to follow, though to be honest in the climate of the time you kind of had to choose one or another. Atheism was heavily frowned upon and seemed utterly pointless considering the obvious proof being shown everywhere. What with new religious deities and spirits being discovered or cloned all the time it was a brave man who stood up and called them all fakes. Miracles and curses were a multimillion dollar trade in themselves, let alone the money made from donations of the faithful.
All the people she knew had abandoned their Christ's when they were old enough to do it legally, many showed their rebellious streak by sporting demons on their left shoulder and angels on their right, or demons on both shoulders if they were truly hardcore. Many went overtly secular and bought mini Guavaras or Lenins, but these were usually abandoned as they were too complicated. Those kids that kept an Adolph or a Bin Laden or a Manson were usually pitied, and often referred for counselling. She was tempted by a mother goddess, the primal feminine figure, the first and oldest of any human belief figure. She felt it represented her feelings and temperament better than any patriarchical Hebrew prophet.
Her mother had a Virgin Mary that she had been given when just a girl in the early days of religious fervour when they had given them out at every confirmation. She kept it hidden, unsure of how much she wanted to believe in it, but she had been caught there once or twice by her daughter, bent down in prayer to the tiny figure. The Mary had ageless but ancient face, dark eyed and knowledgable, closer to a mother goddess than the church would have liked her to be, and she certainly was no virgin.
She remembered the arguments over her brother, who after a brief period with an overtly female demon who had lounged naked and lascivious on his shoulder, had converted to Islam. He now had a complete series of ever changing shapes surrounding his whole body, letters in Arabic script telling the name of god and shaping themselves into phrases from the Koran or into complex mathematical patterns. It was symbol of his submission to the one true god, he said, and it gave him his true purpose. She feared he might hurt her Jesus, but he was very tolerant, although he always argued with him over points of scripture and interpretation. Then she could feel the Jesus get angry, which made her uncomfortable. Some people she knew deliberately goaded their figures into fighting together, different types of Jesus from different denominations of the church, or smackdowns between different religions. That was just a boy thing, she guessed.
She looked at the sky, making out dim outlines that scarred the blue. If she really concentrated she could make out shapes, very nearly hear them, almost. A faint astral chant, the sound of distant heavenly bodies, not singing the praises of the lord as she had once thought but just for their own pleasure and joy. A beautiful birdsong for the Gods, just cosmic static.
She wanted to be up there with them, to be an abstract shape without form, to know enlightened creatures below are attributing you with strange, fortune telling, qualities. But also to know the infinite truths of the heavens, the gulf between stars and feel them all sing back to you. Things more ancient than life has any right to be, more huge than she could conceive. She felt the beginnings of vertigo on her feet and palms and smiled as the edge of fear thrilled through her.
She looked down at the Jesus, for a second she had forgotten he was there and saw he was singing. He was sitting on her palm with eyes closed. The songs she did not recognise, and were in a language she didn’t understand, the ancient tongue of Arameic, from a Jewish kingdom in old, old Palestine with a future of less than a hundred years before it was swept completely away. She felt the tune through her, the words had meaning even if she didn’t directly understand them there was a part of her that resonated to them, a part of her brain that was ancient and wise that understood.
She loved it when he sang, she tried not to concentrate on it as he always stopped when she started paying attention. She though this one might be about the freeing of the slaves from Egypt but she wasn’t quite sure.
She glanced again at the children, muddy and pagan and full of war thoughts. They cursed each other and fought in the dirt. It struck her then how apt their little gods were to them, the gods of children are the gods of destruction. There is nothing more a child likes to do than to build a world, make believe an entire civilisation then on a whim, or boredom or simply because he is tired of it he will destroy it utterly.
Then some older boys looking tough walked past, sneering slightly at her Jesus, and she tried to look older and more mature, and not care about religion or anything like that. But they were gone by then, and anyway it was time to be home. She placed the tiny Jesus on her shoulder and sauntered back, thinking sinful thoughts about boys and heavenly creatures.
2001
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