daisy pusher

Men make gods and unmake them.

They come to him to die.

            Some crawl on swollen knees and blistered hands, some slink with stooped shoulders and knocking knees, and yet others approach him with a defiant swagger to their step and hips cocked, as if they are owed his service, his boon. Rich or poor, young or old, cur or king, they come.

            (Some demand, some plead; make it fast, be gentle, draw it out- I must atone, I must suffer- reluctant or determined, he feeds them the red-capped crowns of toxic fungi and runs bony fingers through their hair while the bile and froth and sin rises in their throats).

            They come to him dead or dying, floating facedown in the rain-swollen river with fat trout nibbling at the waxy flesh of their cheeks, laid tenderly in pine-wood boxes, neatly quartered and contained in bulging gallon garbage bags, stewing in congealed blood.

            (To a man, they die with prayers on their foam-flecked lips, crying out in a hundred different tongues to a thousand different gods, obsequious oily-tongued invocations; some plead absolution, others for their family’s prosperity, and one girl smiling feebly through her haze of fever only asked her god to bless him for his mercy).

            It’s strange, he reflects as he scoops out handfuls of moist black earth to make their graves, how men make gods. Kneeling at altars and offering their blood and bounty, feasting on their prophets’ flesh to prove themselves worthy of divine adulation, hacking heads from bodies to punish another’s blaspheming. Stranger still how quickly they are forgotten, these figureheads for sorrow and suffering. Men turn always to greener pastures and brighter prospects, and their past ventures lay scattered in the dust.

            (Somewhere, he thinks, jackal-headed Anubis of the baleful, weighing eyes and cruel hands is crumbling as his temples have, first an ear, then an arm, his moist black eyes now dry and scratched from dust and debris, his immaculate body gone to stone-tumble rot.

Beneath the earth Fenrir’s skeleton is crouched with Gleipnir hanging loose and decomposed around its vertebrae, his skull fired to a gleaming white, the sword thrust between his massive jaws spotted with rust; his leering eyeholes directed ever-upward, yearning even in his death to swallow the sky).

            There must be newer gods, he thinks as he inters bones and bodies, plants makeshift gravestones in the soft earth with no mark but those nature had incised. Gods of automobiles with acrid grey clouds rolling from their gaping maws, the flattened, empty pelts of possums and squirrels clenched within their fists. Gods of computers with diodes winking behind the glassy expanses of their eyes, misaligned circuits sparking in their copper-plated brains, watching all and knowing all and recording all until their sleek plastic shells are punctured and melted into slag. The faceless, sexless gods of an impersonal world, watching the rushing and fumbling of these strange, soft creatures called men, coldly analytical eyes seeing all and yet acknowledging nothing.

            They come to him to die, and he washes out their sins with poisoned water and scented salts, slits their bellies open to offer their viscera to feral dogs and feral children, counts their ribs and lays them down to slumber forever in the deep, dank darkness of their close-crowded graves.

            He is his own kind of god, he thinks, sprawled out beside a freshly-turned mound of earth as the swollen red sun curves down over the horizon, slender fingers splayed over the opalescent chunk of rock serving as a gravestone. A lesser deity, the god of lean prowling wolves in lichyards, of carrion crows picking leathery flesh from the dead. A god who listens.