God of Shadows

by Lorna Crozier

  God of RATS

  Okay, he’s had trouble with PR. And with his design. He should’ve made bigger, cuter ears, as his sibling did with mice. He should’ve made a different tail. Even kept it the same but endowed with curly hair or uncurly hair, enough to hide the nakedness. Many claim the tail looks like a snake, to which, unfair to the snake, we seem to have a natural aversion. There’s no resemblance, really, between rodents and reptiles. Herpetologists could tell you exactly why but an amateur knows too.

  For one thing, the common garter snake is thicker than a rat’s tail, more supple, beautifully green. And maybe, most importantly, snakes have a different nature. Unlike rats, they’re shy. They don’t want to hang around with us, they don’t want to nest in our attics or piss in the insulation. We don’t hear stories of them eating babies in New York. A snake is not a rat. A rat is a rat is a rat, Gertrude Stein might have said.

  To our displeasure, their god gets them through the tiniest opening and endows their teeth with the ability to chew through the toughest matter: live electric cables between the studs, spark-plug wires in your car. So what if there aren’t rat temples in your country? One running across the bedspread evokes more blasphemies and strikes more terror in the human heart than the god himself dropping from the sky on fiery wings.

  God of THE NARROW-MINDED

  Her task is to shock them into changing. To tuck a ferret in their trousers. To tangle a blackbird in their hair. To kiss with a scarlet mouth the endpapers of their sacred books. None of this works with the hard cases. They insist on the evils of immigration, the laziness of the poor, the rabidness of modern women, a.k.a, Fembos. There are tortures she can use—the convincing arguments of fire and fire ants, for instance—but that’s not her style. She finds another way to ring their bells. When the front door opens, a bison bull crashes in, swinging his monstrous head full of thunder, breaking clocks and crockery, smashing couches, crushing walls. They flee their houses, they run through the night. Their north and south, their right and wrong, their us and them get muddled. Past the edge of town, in the darkness of the forest they denied was there, they stumble in ever-widening circles among the high thoughts of the trees.

  God of BITES

  One of the most powerful, most hard-working, he’s got so much to watch over, to cause to occur. Think of that boxer and the torn-off ear, the soccer player turned vampire and banished from the game. Then there are pit bulls, along with the bred-to-be-more-gentle dogs maddened by chains, the feral cats you capture to get spayed, the mother crow who ripped a flap of skin off your neighbour’s bald head. Not to mention the alligator, whose jaws can’t be forced open unless it wants them to. As well, rose thorns and acacias, winter wind, nibbles of fear as you forget the names of things. Don’t overlook the bugs, especially mosquitoes: this god has to be familiar with every single one. And then there’s the snide remark and its reply, milk teeth on nipples, the teenager’s chomp into her pillow to stifle her cries when she’s fucking in her parents’ basement. It all started with that first crunch in the Garden. Remember before the apple, the lion lay down with the lamb? Perhaps the lion licked the lamb’s face, perhaps it wetly gummed the pink inside the woolly ears before this god bared his teeth.

  God of THE MUTABLE

  The most protean, the least likely to show up in a painting or become a graven image. Just when you think there’s a form you can grab on to, this god shifts—animal, human; male, female, in-between. It’s the holy ghost, kind of. Something like pure spirit but it’s got an arm that rivals the best of pitchers’. When you want a straight answer, it throws that curve that flummoxed both Babe and Mickey. It smacks into the palm of your gloveless hand and hurts like hell. You never ask again. As for parables, good luck! All its stories begin the same way and no one’s allowed to write them down: “We do not really mean, we do not really mean that what we are about to say is true.” God of the mutable! Here’s to you.

  God of CLICHÉS

  He’s taken over the tattoo parlour. Draws valentines above the heart, butterflies on ankle bones. Writes in curlicues on the tree planter’s weary back, with roses across the businessman’s bicep. In one week he carves a million tears. Even he gets tired. Snakes following the veins and . He’d like to cover the palest flesh from head to toe with a thousand needle pricks of snow. You’d have to get that close to see them and you’d feel the cold.

  BOOK III

  “From the Koran, from the Vedas and from Deuteronomy,

  From every dogma, full of fury, all the gods

  Have come out into the open: Look out! and keep a better watch.”

  PAUL VERLAINE

  HIS WORDS

  He was spit

  when his words were apples,

  he was grass

  when his words were plows,

  dog when his words were flies,

  snow when his words were skulls,

  he was melt

  when his words

  were written down.

  Rot when his words

  were iron. Given this,

  think of all the things

  he cannot say.

  God of ASTONISHMENT

  When Yahweh reveals himself to man, bushes burn, the mountains tremble, and the wings of his six-winged angels batter the air with thunder. The god of astonishment goes for a subtler theophany: the quiver of the rare bat that shows itself in daylight dipping into the pond then perching upright on the rafters of the tea house, spreading its wings to dry. The multitude of spider crabs that scatter in low tide, going sideways, as sore afraid as you to face what’s ahead and what’s behind; the common cockroach that if decapitated remains alive, its head still thinking; the jackrabbit jump of a woman’s heart when she hears her husband of thirty years pull into the driveway in his red truck, its windows down, an old song on the radio, and then his words as the screen door slams: “I’m home.” God speaks to us like that, in clear tones and not in riddles, yet sometimes we walk right through her on our way. When we do that, when we miss her brightness in the morning on Quonset roofs, in the yellow head of certain blackbirds, she’s tempted to startle us in our tracks, to place her fiery mouth upon our mouths and fill our lungs with marigolds and bees.

  God of THE DEAD

  Needing a break from darkness, he takes his two-week vacations in high summer above the Arctic Circle. The rest of the year, he likes to nap in ICU rooms, all those harsh lights and alarms signifying a life about to end.

  Where he rules there is a lack of active verbs; there is no present or future tense. Even nouns glance over their shoulders—they revert to what they were. Daisy, for instance, becomes an eye. Enough of them in a vase creeps you out. The beholder is beheld.

  Yesterday he thought he heard someone singing badly over the waters. If it’s another Orpheus, he must be told there’s no looking back. Here everything is doubly lost, both then and then again. When this god listens to the dead breathing, what he hears is wind in the pages of a pageless book, wind in a clear-cut forest, wind in the hair of a woman whose head’s been shorn.

  God of BITTER

  He puts the hard seed into the heart of the jawbreaker. Your mouth and tongue black, you bite into it and the taste of this god sweeps through you. You’ve known him all your life. He caused your father’s acrimony to seep into the womb: he fed the cells that became your liver, lungs, eyes.

  When you were born, your mother said, you had a sullen cry. The nurses gave you over quickly. Your father moved from job to job; the bosses niggardly, his co-workers—not as smart, he said—got ahead. Everything has a jaundiced cast to it as if you wear glasses smeared with ash from the weekly burnings at the nuisance grounds. Once, the caretaker there forgot to build a barrier fire around the perimeter and thousands of rats streamed into town. That made you smile.

  You married the most adorable, most charming person you’d come across, she bore the dearest children, but it made things worse. You wanted to drown the stuffies, slash the tricycle tires, pin
ch the babies.

  You keep thinking of your father’s last expression, a grimace no undertaker could mask with wads of cotton and makeup pots. After the funeral when you walk through the door of your house, as usual your poodle, who loves your drunken mother-in-law more than you, won’t stop barking and a puddle of pee spreads at your feet. You don’t get rid of him. You’re not mean, just hard-done-by. You’d stick your head into a hive of bees if you could do away with bitterness. You’d fight the biggest bear for the sweetness on his paws.

  God of HORSES 1

  Likes particularly to put them in a field at night, snow falling, and you don’t know they’re there. As you pause on your skis, you hear a tall exhalation, and when you look up, a horse stares right at you—sees you so clearly the stars stutter. Something higher than the horse—is it a ghost blanketed in snow, is it a pale rider?—bends toward you. Cold is the word made flesh, and far from any solace, you feel its grip around your chest. Strangely, you’re not scared, but you can’t cry out or walk away.

  God of GUILT

  So many, so many supplicants, they’re close to needing a heaven of their own. A place of wallowing and muck. The groom who abandoned his high school sweetheart at the altar, the woman who gave up her sixteen-year-old cat so she could move into a luxury apartment, the man who drove his mother to the home and never went back—these are the worshippers though their faith is frangible and brief. They expect the gods to forgive them. Deep guilt, authentic guilt, belongs to the good of heart and spleen. What have they done? No one knows. They don’t brag about their sins. They don’t move on. If their souls could be scanned, the gods would see a luminous opacity, an accumulation like hoarfrost thickening on a windowpane, light struggling to shine through.

  God of THE LEFT

  Take it to the left, the jazz saxophonist said and his band knew what to do. When you ask the loneliest customs agent in the world on the border between Saskatchewan and Montana how to get to the town your friend lives in, he says, Stay on this road. When you want to turn left, don’t. The bride behind the wheel rabbited her car to the left and missed the church. She lived happily on her own till her dress wore out. To determine who’s in charge, once a month the god of the left arm-wrestles her opposite. Sometimes she loses. For a few days after her fist and forearm slam to the table—the wood shattered—she has trouble holding a comb, a knife, a pen. Easy to misread her handwriting and misinterpret what she wants you to do.

  God of DOUBT

  Remember the parasite that thrived inside a man for twenty years without his knowing? Doubt’s like that. Once it’s been around for a while, even if diagnosed and treated, it won’t go away. It doesn’t stop you completely but you stumble and don’t go far. It lacks the vigour of a total loss of faith, the punch in the face you feel when you catch your lover cheating. It’s like an invisible puncture you notice in the inner tube only when you’re in the middle of the lake and can’t swim back. This god steps up once the book has been sent out for review, the painting’s on the wall, the overly confident piano waits for you on stage. Doubt rinses you in its sullied water; you come out dripping but unborn again. You fall—not into St. John’s dark night of the soul but into a prairie dusk stretched long and thin. Doubt’s divinity hangs around like smoke blowing in from summer forest fires, a thousand miles north but changing all you see. Tinged with red, stricken, the sun’s a slow ineffectual bleed.

  God of HORSES 2

  In human years, she’s eleven and will be that age forever. All she wants is horses. She runs with them in the meadow, curls beside them in the stalls, curries them until they gleam with her single-mindedness. Her incense smells of hay and horse dung. To amuse herself when she’s bored at holy gatherings and can’t just ride away, she chants under her breath: Withers, fetlocks, dock, barrel, poll, throat latch.

  The first horse she created was no bigger than a fox. She carried it from continent to continent in a sack on her back. That felt demeaning to the horse. It grew larger. She debated with herself for centuries over the option of adding wings. Some of her cohorts advised it. But she wanted horses—their beautiful unfeathered ankles so strong and slim, their hooves drumming—to love the earth and never long to leave it, even though like us they cannot stay.

  God of GREEN

  Everything he taps with his famous thumb turns green. The north side of the tree, then the other three directions, the humpbacked boulder, the bottom foot of the white stucco wall, the wooden shingles. You’d swear the cedar deck was the surface of a legless snooker table covered in felt. Moss grows on the back of the sloth that hasn’t moved for days from its hammock in the trees. In his presence, berries and fruit of all kinds never ripen, except gooseberries, except kiwis and limes. You see him in the gaze of the jade-eyed cat. When he looks at you, the glint of fallen snow kindles the green receptors in your retinas, the sea turns phosphorescent, and fireflies, hovering above the hedges like levitating emerald chips, catch in the hairs on your arms, in your eyebrows, in your shy moustache.

  God of INDIFFERENCE

  You suspect you made this one up.

  It makes the sound of silkworms, soft, soft.

  Looking for it is like looking for the drugged.

  So what? Who cares? Who knows?

  It’s all relative, it’s all context.

  He slammed the door so hard the window

  broke. Taped cardboard over it

  and it stayed like that your whole childhood.

  Who cares? Blessed are the cool.

  The empty. Pick a number. Any one.

  God of THE SELF-DEFEATING

  Nostrils bully the taste buds; savory routs what’s sweet, the mouth mistaking plums for lumps of Marmite. Sleep opposes the comfort of the goose down bed. The big toe disdains the little toe though they inhabit the same shoe. How dumb is that? When this god’s in charge, greasy spoons at 6 a.m. get rid of coffee and stubbornly insist on pomegranate juice. In mid-July, winter for no good reason decides to occupy the summer house. Snow drifts through the screens onto the adulterers lying on the wicker couch, their sweat freezing into fragile quills along their fickle bellies, their marmoreal inner thighs. Yes says no to the loyal dog, the kind boss, the clean washing on the line. No to the driver who stops to pick you up on the remotest road in Saskatchewan. As the car disappears, a dust devil twists toward you from the emptiness ahead; you walk into its grit with open arms though you’ve just had your only bath in days.

  FALSE GODS

  These are the ones who show up at the party, grains of rapture bagged and tucked up their sleeves, heaven’s golden mead in flasks in their secret pockets. They’re everyone’s best nightmare. They sit in the front of the club, stuff the biggest notes in the G-strings of the strippers. At the gym they work out beside the bouncer, lift so much weight they bless him with ambition until he has to turn his body sideways to walk through doorways and down the aisles of buses. You see yourself in the otherworldly shine of their briefcases, in their clever suits of mirrors. You never catch the colour of their eyes. Though clouds bust open, the false ones drive with the cloth tops down and don’t get wet. They walk on swimming pools, holding aloft cocktails as pale as ichor. They watch over you with the patience of Styrofoam. What’s your want? they whisper. Only one word is necessary to call them close—need, need, need.

  God of SNOW

  During the longest nights she lets fall millions of stars, covering all, covering all, the ugly and the beautiful, the humble and the vain, and everything is hallowed in her eyes. Boughs of conifers grow heavy with their faith in this god’s chaste intentions. Mice scrawl their journeys beneath the Milky Way; they tunnel in like arctic bookworms and live inside crystal tomes of snow. Tall blades of yellow grass trace empty circles across the surface of the drifts—a winter sense of time. When you walk in wonder your past fills in and disappears; your mind turns white, immaculate. You may be lost but you don’t care. No other gods, you say as you break a trail across the frozen lake, breath frosting y
our scarf and lashes. What touches touches lightly and does not stay.

  God of PUBLIC WASHROOMS

  You see her sometimes in the face of the woman who pushes the bucket on wheels with its mop, its slosh of water, its bottles of cleaning fluids and rags. When your eyes meet in the bank of mirrors, something sparks and flutters in your breast like a siskin set on fire. This is a rare encounter. Usually you don’t look at her. You’re embarrassed by the tasks she executes in the row of cubicles high and narrow as confessionals. Her head is lowered, she has work to do. Sometimes you see this god when she squats on a stool by the entrance, in her lap a collection basket. For your coins you get a folded square of paper you never read. The toilet flush is a water-logged bell that summons her inside. You wish you’d used the stall to release a paper bag of yellow butterflies, to leave on top of the tank a swaddled Bethlehem baby; at the very least, to write on the metal door the verse of a psalm that will convince her of your specialness, your lyrical devotion, as she scrubs all natural signs of you away.