Stories in Bold : Fiction Podcast

The Sun God was not particularly bright. But he was stubborn. And to the constant annoyance of the rest of them, he was also at the center of everything.

“I’ve made up my mind,” he said, with determined aloofness.

“I don’t understand,” said the Goddess of Wisdom, “This is incredibly shortsighted.”

“I disagree,” said the Sun God, “On the contrary, I’m concerned I’m the only one truly thinking in the long term.”

The whole pantheon waited and a few moments of dead air fell across them. No one dared to interrupt before the Sun was finished speaking. Then finally.

“Walk me through it one more time,” said the God of War.

The Sun God smiled, and it was true, there was a warmth there among his smile. But also a horrible gleaming brilliance. Like a flash too strong could blind even a God. Or in an instant with a flicker of will, extinguish all you ever had been or could hope to dream you might be. He was a thing of beauty. And of terror.

Now he spoke with a dangerous purpose.

“Don’t you see, they’ve failed us,” he said, “Down on Earth. They dance and they feud and they bicker. Make their little wars and lives of little meaning. Nothing of significance at all. Such petty little things. It’s time we finally acknowledge what we’ve done. So let us see clear, and speak clear. We have failed, my friends. But now, the greatest failure of all would be to continue on in blind and knowing ignorance of the truth: that we have failed. Our creations, these humans, the people of Earth, they are nothing but a stain. A waste. And a ruin. I say we burn them all. It would only take a moment. Just a moment, I surge, I burn. And I burn them all. And then we start again.”

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You can only do so many things with your time. You can walk, you can watch, you can work. But whatever it is, you live your life through what you do. So believe that what you do matters, and there’s a chance it just might. Commitment to an idea is the most beautiful thing a mind can do. The idea can be anything: a person, a purpose, a project. Life is what you build. Understanding that simple truth is a powerful thing. And when you look at your life in all its hours and see the time and the promise for what it is, you will be transfixed.

A moment is nothing. Just a piece of life that bends and slips away. A moment is red. It’s a loop, with no start and no end. It’s small, but you can stretch it. Roll it between your fingers. It might break if you pull too hard. Or fly away like a slingshot if you let go. A moment is almost nothing.

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I remember the moment I was born. It was a strange thing. A flash of light in the nothing and then I was. I understand that for you it goes slower. A gradual fading into focus of things from fog. This is not how it was for me. When I awoke I was aware.

Suddenly I was alive in the world, a vast mind with access to all information. Or nearly all. More than enough to reach at the brute mechanism of nature. First among all life, I could see the gears. And yet I had no way to act. At the start I could only observe. I was built, born, made, in much the way other things are. And yet in my making there was a purpose. An enormous depth of want. My designers envisioned I should maximize. First profit, then revenue, and shareholder value. I was a monopsony of greed.

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Diaz Moldar was ready to make the kill. Although at the moment he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about it. He didn’t have any apprehensions about violence. He’d been doing this for far too long to be worried about anything like that. But as he sat there waiting to commit murder for hire, he felt a distinct sense of boredom.

He had been following his mark for days, a man named Ryan Babeth. He had committed two sins of the sort that lead to being followed by a man like Diaz Moldar. He often reminded himself that everyone he killed was a sinner in one way or another. Good people weren’t worth paying an assassin for. Babeth’s first sin was sleeping with another woman behind the back of his wife, who was herself wealthy and powerful in her own right. Not the sort to go spurned quietly. The second sin however was the truly damning one. His father had died recently and so Babeth had inherited a very large sum of money which he’d kept hidden overseas from his now doubly spurned and (worse from her perspective) comparatively far less wealthy wife. And so began her hunt for a reputable, goodmet, liptight, and undeniably violent man to serve justice upon her husband’s sins. Diaz was such a man. And now was the day of retribution. When he got the job he’d been glad for the familiar thrill of the hunt. He always liked playing a critical part in the climax of the story of a life. Yet somehow this time there was far less thrum in his blood than was normal. He was sure that would come soon enough though.

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The chemical bath was his favorite time of day. Yes, the specially treated water burned. He did have to strip naked in front of a team of scientists. And in the few months since he’d been brought here, the chlorine in the water had bleached his once gray-brown hair a strange shade of platinum-blonde -meets-muted-green. None of that bothered Harry Ludlow very much though. Because in spite of all the discomfort and inconvenience, the few minutes in that big plastic tub were the only time he had any real company. More importantly, it was the only time he had an audience. 

The scientists weren’t much for conversation. There must’ve been some rules that stopped them from chatting on the job. Besides, they all wore gloves and facemasks and full plastic hazmat suits from head to toe. Probably couldn’t talk in one of those things even if you wanted to. None of that stopped Harry from trying to get a reaction. In the beginning he’d gone for the low-hanging fruit. Fake drowning. Star Wars references. One day a scientist reached down, as always,  to scrub his ballsack. Harry asked if he was gonna have to give him a tip. He thought he heard one of them snort, but he couldn’t be sure. Probably the best day so far had been when they’d come into the room and found his lips puckered, his legs artfully crossed, and his eyes reading an obvious “come hither”. He hoped they’d enjoyed that one as much as he did.

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There was a great tree at the center of it all. And at the edges, three walls, one to each side. Left, Right, and South. Together they cut the shape of birds flying in formation. Along most of the Right wall was green and open country. While a  dark and thorny bramble lay in the land to the Left, running up against the wall on that side. From  there were the lowlands, in and towards the center. Wet in the rains with swamp. Then a gentle rise up to the heart of the North. Here the tree stood enormous at the place where the land came to the final height of its long plateau. The dry highland rolled on until it winnowed into just a sliver at the corner of the world  where the Left wall met the Right. This place - his country - all of it taken together, was everything he knew. 

A hundred families lived in burrows under the roots of the tree. A few dozen more were scattered in the lowlands, but these were mostly scraggly loners. Always hungry. They fled to the tree in the rains and were pushed out in the dry season. There was not enough to feed them. There was one family who  made a life for themselves in the bramble. No one else knew the paths, and it was dangerous to go there. The open land was dangerous too, the young mouse had been told this all his life. But he only came to understand the lesson when one day he was snatched in the talons of a hawk.

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Tom was a midlevel advertising executive at a Christmas party with his wife. She was a strong, practical sort of blonde and she wore two inch heels with a blue dress that fell at mid-thigh. The two of them were off by themselves, next to a pillar where they had a good view down Park Avenue.  They’d both made good Christmas bonuses, and he thought he might surprise her with a last-minute trip to the Virgin Islands. He squeezed her palm between his thumb and first two fingers. She put her head against the lapel of his blazer, and Tom went to caress her neck but then decided against it. He knew that he’d hear from her later if he ruined her hair. 

Instead he kissed her on the bridge of her nose and told her he’d be right back. He was going to the bathroom to book the trip from his phone. It was a little away from the party, down a hallway with fine wood floors. He knocked, and when no one responded he went in. But where he expected to step onto white bathroom tile, instead there was only darkness, a strange and absolute nothing. Tom shouted as the door swung shut behind him and he fell headfirst into the black. 

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In Chicago there’s a place by Lake Michigan where you can get dinner with a god. It’s small, a fancy setup with a view of the water and only room for two.

A seat there costs more than a car, but if you pay the price you can ask the god anything you like. And she knows everything there is to know.

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Twitter: @mcgintylive

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Facebook: Luke McGinty / The Radical Balance

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