The God of Small Chances

by L Chan

This is a sample from Augur Magazine Issue 1.1. The full story can be read by purchasing the issue here.

An met the new god on her way home, during the witching hour after the last bus left and before the morning papers arrived. The government housing estate exhaled the roar of late night eighteen-wheelers, and the streetlights blinked with the dance of winged ants.

The god was halfway between the row of trees with their parasitic ferns drooping lazy fronds and the playground with the mosaic dragon erupting from the gritty sand pit. An hadn’t seen a god being born before, but there were things common to all infants—ungainly legs, gasping mouths. The god flickered in and out of phase like a badly tuned television signal. They coughed and butterflies with wings of pure light burst from their mouth. They circled the god’s head twice before making their escape, but did not get far before they dissolved into floating motes.

An examined the god out of the corner of her eye, taking in their sharp cheekbones and close-cropped hair. Slight of build, they mirrored An in size and emitted the soft glow of divinity. They were clearly in distress; bent over coughing, their spine pressing against the thin alabaster skin of their back. The god vomited onto the grass, the spew twisting and resolving itself into many-legged worms—centipedes made of the same bright matter as the butterflies—that wriggled away and did not return. The god writhed in pain, their dark eyes filled with the desperation common to god, human, and beast.

An walked away. This wasn’t the first time she had seen a god.

•••

The train screamed down the tunnel. Commuters—sustained by phones, iPods, and newspapers—dangled from the handrails like sides of meat.

An wondered if the others could smell the lingering scent of the island on her, a pernicious acridity unreduced by both her nighttime and pre-work shower. Jurong Island, a manmade monstrosity, was artificially raised from the sea bottom to play host to edifices of steel and concrete. A complex digestive system of pipe and vat, the island ingested crude oil and excreted a catalogue of chemicals. There was a stickiness to the air in the office where An worked accounts receivable. Colleagues went out for lunch while she watched the gas flares burn off of the tall refinery stacks from her window. It wasn’t the faint industrial scent that clung to her like a second skin.

Commuters’ stares followed her off the train and up the platform as she headed to work. The first human instinct is to exclude the other, even if An was, to all casual observation, indistinguishable from any other office worker in her corporate camouflage. She wasn’t like them at all.

•••

The temple that overshadowed the public courtyard was—like most things in Singapore—clean, shiny, and too cold to be natural. Chilled air leaked, at no small expense, from the inch-wide gaps in wooden slats. Her father sat on a stone bench, one leg on the ground and the other folded close to his body, the cheap plastic slipper flapping against the sole of his foot as he flexed his ankle, waiting for his opponent to make the next move.

Elephant took foot soldier, walnut-brown fingers plucking the lacquered plastic disc off the paper chessboard, and placed it alongside its fallen fellows on the gritty stone bench. A wiggly line described a heart on the gray stone, drawn out in the white of correction fluid. Names had once accompanied the heart, but those had been worn to a gunmetal sheen by the continuous polishing action of chess players placing vanquished pieces on the sidelines of the battle.

An chose not to greet her father. She stood near enough behind him that she could see the board as he did. A bottle of tea brewed from chrysanthemum flowers was sweating through a plastic bag at her side. She had bought it after work as a peace offering. Her father chewed on his lip, stroked his stubble, and glared at the pieces, which refused to cooperate with his vision of a winning game. He’d been a large man once, blessed with a warrior’s thickness of arm and thigh. Illness had long since taken that from him, consuming him from the inside out, voracious cells spreading from marrow to lymph, splitting and eating along the way.

Her father had worked the temples. Not the big soulless ones that breathed cold air over the neat queues of celebrants waiting to push folded notes into bursting collection boxes. No. These were the old temples—in the small places, in the estates—where healing didn’t come from rainbow pills or little glass vials. Back then, the rickety wood of the makeshift temples was painted an auspicious red, darkened by heady incense smoke.

An’s father droned chants, his eyes rolled back in his head, all the while tearing his tattooed back to shreds with a nail-studded rope. No one else saw the small god squatting beside her father, waiting for the right time to leap into his body, the two coexisting in the same space. The god took the form of a small, toad-like man, eyes gaping and set on the sides of his head; his nose a flat, vestigial flap of skin. After the god laid his webbed fingers on her father and stepped into his flesh—their union was marked by the fierce blaze of both god and human becoming something more—her father would speak prophecies or divine truths. The rest was for show, An’s father once confided in her—without it, nobody would believe anything the god said.

“Hi, Pa.” An greeted her father after he had lost the game with the chilled plastic bottle of tea.

“Hello, girl.” An couldn’t remember when he last called her by name; the name that her mother chose for her. It was the character for peace and had not passed his lips since her mother died. He wrapped his thin arms around her. Even when she reached adulthood, his hugs could pull An off her feet. Now she barely felt the pressure of the embrace. Pulling back, he looked into her eyes. An traced the contours of his face; he had the look of something broken and then put together again. The shape was there, but the cracks remained. “You saw one, didn’t you?”

An nodded. Gods left a distinct mark on their people—a shimmer or glow on their skin, a slight palimpsest in their movements—as though they were shadowed by a stutter of themselves. The rest of the world, busy with their phones, their errands, their lives, could barely see it. Most people could go their whole lives without seeing a small god, which were exceedingly rare.

“Every morning I wake up and consider that perhaps the gods are still around, that I have merely lost the ability to see them,” her father said in a mix of Mandarin peppered with the more guttural Hokkien of his forebears. An smiled, leading her father up the staircase to the hawker centre that overlooked the temple. A pair of office workers shared their table of four with her. Holding up a frail old man had its own talismanic power. She knew her father hadn’t lost his ability to see the gods, merely the desire to.

When she started, the words spilled from her like water from a pot boiling over. It was the most she’d said to her father in years—maybe the most she’d said to another person all year. Her father took it in, reaching up to rub at the memory of a beard taken by chemotherapy long ago.

“This government hates gods. Back when half the country was swamp, and you were as likely to see food or a corpse in the Singapore river, the gods grew out of the ground like insects. They are not like you and me, different even from ghosts. To work with the gods gives virtue and character. That’s what we were taught.” He looked at the shiny edifice across the courtyard. “Virtue makes us honest, makes us value hard work. The government likes that. Character makes us question. That is not so convenient.”

“Look at the temples we have, the churches, the mosques. We have no shortage of gods.”

“Empty houses, gilded cages. The government smothered the small temples with its heavy love of bureaucracy. No better way to kill a god than to hollow out the hearts of the people. This country was founded on gods and strange beasts. Do you know we used to have dragons here?”

An did. She didn’t tell her father but she did. This was old talk; her father recycled conversations like clothes: he didn’t have many, and they came up more often than expected.

“You never told me what happened to the small gods,” she said.

“You never wanted to serve the temples.”

And her father never wanted to take care of his family. Again, old battles. It had been years since this particular skirmish, but An was still surprised at how narrow the distance was between old scars and fresh blood. There was a hole shaped like her mother in the space between them. A gap that neither of them had reached across in the intervening years.

“Just tell me.” Sickness had taken many things from her father, including his gumption for fights. For that, at least, she was grateful. He took the remnants of his bottled tea and sprinkled droplets onto the table, which elicited side-eyed glances from the office folk sitting beside them. An glared at them until they returned to the business of eating.

“Imagine these drops of tea are small gods. This world is not for them, without the nourishment of belief or the safety of a temple. What happens to the tea?”

Coughing up butterflies, losing them to the night.

“It dries.”

“Clever girl. The new gods know this. They are dying from the second they breathe our air. Some live for a heartbeat, others…” He nudged a droplet with a yellowing fingernail, merging it with another. “How long do you think a person will go without food before eating another person? If the land doesn’t kill your god, the others will. It is their way.”

Continued in Augur Magazine Issue 1.1 . . .