A Divine Interlude

  On a divine recliner, laughing merrily at the tragedy of it all, Dennis was eating popcorn as he took in the sweet horror of the events. He pressed a button on his Divine Vision Recorder remote, saving the scene for later playback.

  This was too entertaining not to remember and a golden opportunity. This family had such promise. The Milligans could be a tale for more useless mortals to remember, to get the fear rumor-mongering going.

  Dennis’s laughter slowed as he turned contemplative. Among thoughts that would cause most mortals to stare blankly in incomprehension at the scope of the idea or be driven mad was a more straightforward complexity he mused upon. The rules of existence.

  For the god of menace and for most of the divinities in existence, reputation helped maintain his faith base. What did it matter if you had a victory today when you wouldn’t last even a scant few eons?

  Dennis’s mandate wanted every living thing capable of understanding to suffer with the potential that it could be that bad. He wanted paranoia because he wanted them to believe he was out to get them. The name of his approach hadn’t been nailed down in the proper context by mortals yet. They were so limited it was pitiable, but Dennis called it “branding.”

  Many of his family disagreed, especially the in-laws, who didn’t want to be here in the first place. But Dennis found it hard to care when results had him in the top runnings of the pantheon.

  A knock came upon the barrier he had erected to keep out other existences from intruding on his me time. Dennis stopped his divine mental masturbation at his own glory before it could reach completion and snagged up a mace sitting next to the recliner on his way to the barrier. He sighed and checked the peephole he had put in place to see who was intruding on this most sacred of spaces.

  He tossed the mace into a void that opened over his shoulder as he waved a hand, and the barrier dropped.

  “Hello there, Dennis. I thought you could use a snack.”

  Jeph was standing before him with his usual apron covered in flour and a stupid-looking floppy white hat that Dennis uncharitably thought of as a flaccid, penis-shaped mushroom. The divine baker was also holding a small ramekin in some oven mitts he was wearing. The container was…a soufflé?

  “What’s this, Jeph? We can’t be poisoned in the traditional sense. My play has already gone through. We’ve already made our moves for the rest of this portion of the game.”

  “You can’t think giving me a “snack” will help the mortals change those fates. And who calls a soufflé a snack? Honestly, that is a dessert.”

  Jeph entered the space and made an awkward upward gesture with one foot. A quaint and skirted table rose from what could be called the floor. He placed the soufflé upon it and removed his oven mitts before replying.

  “Dennis, God of Menace. I, Jeph, God of Baking, do at this moment, with a clear and present mind, state that this soufflé, at this moment, is a snack for you. It is given with wholesome intent and through no duplicity in its creation, existence, or the completion of its task in making you a less cranky bitch by absolving you of some of your hunger.”

  Dennis glowered at the God before him with suspicion. Then he withdrew a spoon from his belt pouch of white fur that glittered with two red gemstones embedded upon it. The spoon was longer than should have been able to fit inside the pouch at his belt.

  The god representing the fear of the unknown occurring and ruining everything cautiously poked the divine soufflé with his mighty and incomprehensibly powerful eating utensil. When nothing happened, he casually picked it up, ignoring the paltry heat of the ramekin, and dug in.

  Godly snorfling and slurping could be heard throughout the corner of the universe the two gods occupied at the time. A chef in a widely renowned restaurant heard the noise, and a scowl grew on his face. He smelled what he thought might have been one of his prize desserts being poached by one of the new staff. He grabbed a cleaver from the knife rack and started to hunt.

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  Jeph flicked a finger, and a senior staff member rushed to the man and calmed him down before a random newbie could be served as a main course in someone’s meal. Dennis snorted as he continued the snack and winked at the god of baking a moment later.

  The same chef had gathered all the waiting staff and let forth a divinely inspired tirade that left most of those present shaking in their little white kitchen booties. It would be remembered for years as a warning for staff not to nibble on this particular chef’s creations.

  Jeph sighed, removed his chef hat, and scratched his balding pate. After the tirade, in a mercurial shifting of mood, the chef took a junior kitchen aid under his wing and showed the boy how to properly twist and cut the bread to make the designed loafs the restaurant was famous for.

  The acts of kindness and malice continued for some time as the two gods used the chef as an outlet to play out a microcosm of their grander game. A simple gesture from either god sent the man down a path of seemingly capricious acts of kindness and intimidation. This went on for an indeterminate length of time before a third god stuck her head into that corner of the universe.

  She was as beautiful as a god should be, with long flowing red hair and artfully done make-up that you couldn’t even tell was there if you weren’t a direct attendant to the gods. Her beauty was marred by the fact that the last half inch of her nose had been bitten off by something with fangs. Her expected dulcet voice was misplaced by a harsh bark at the two warring gods.

  “Oi! Knock it off! Pierre has a divine message to deliver in his forties, and if you end up driving him mad with your stupid antics, I am taking it out of both your hides! Jeph, it’s your message, and you should know better than this.”

  “Dennis! Where the hells is my Cheese of the Millenia club package?! It was supposed to be here ten years ago!”

  Jeph hung his head in shame at the childish display he had let get out of hand and said,

  “Yes, Melissa. Sorry.”

  Melissa harumphed at him and turned her gaze back to Dennis, who was gently moving his pouch behind him on his belt.

  “I think it got delivered to me by mistake, yes. A simple wrong address on the label, I believe.”

  The god of menace had done what he thought of as “doing a sneaky” and withdrew a fated sharpie from within the pouch, hiding the movement behind his back from Melissa.

  Jeph saw the movement and rolled his eyes but said nothing. Melissa narrowed her gaze on the God of Menace.

  “I’ll bet, and I just needed to remind you of it, I’m sure. Well? Go get it!”

  Dennis nodded in what he thought was a sly I-just-got-away-with-it manner, then sank into the bottom of the space, disappearing from sight of the two remaining gods. Melissa turned her disembodied head to her brother, her red tresses floating around her like an affectionate bunch of red seaweed that wanted to get angrily frisky, and said,

  “You had better know what you’re doing. By the way, Milo is unhappy with pushing the scales that far. You’ll need to square that with him later, but Winnie is a different story. Get her back in the game, Jeph. I need her for my own play.”

  Jeph waved both hands at his sister in a calming manner.

  “The bread is rising, Melissa. Give it time to get ready.”

  “Don’t give me bad baking puns. Give me a reason not to interfere beyond divine consequences for interrupting a sanctioned match.”

  The nostrils of her disembodied head flared in anger,

  “We all saw how Dennis played and how badly he broke some of your pieces. Show me that I didn’t make a mistake in trusting you could turn it around in the post-match results, or I will bake your balls with a side of cocktail and horseradish sauce.”

  “Aren’t mountain oysters usually pounded flat and fried?”

  The rest of Melissa’s body came fully into the space. Her expression warmed to the subject. Her tone became less directly combative and more violently flirtatious as she continued threatening her brother with gruesome disfigurement.

  “You can broil them as well, which I might do as a nod to your bailiwick.”

  “Broiling…Is…Not…Baking!”

  Jeph was more affronted by this than the threat of becoming a eunuch god.

  The two sibling divinities argued about the merits of baking vs. frying or broiling and moved away from this space to do godly things elsewhere.