The God of Small Chances

THE GOD OF SMALL CHANCES

by L Chan

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 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 and circled the god’s head twice before making their escape; not getting far before dissolving into floating motes. 

An examined the god out of the corner of her eye, taking in their sharp cheekbones and close-cropped hair. Standing up straight, they seemed to mirror An in size, slight of build and emitting 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 on 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 obvious pain,, their dark eyes filled with 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 tunnels, commuters dangling from handrails like sides of meat, sustained by phones, iPods, and newspapers. 

An wondered if the others could smell the lingering scent of the island on her, a pernicious acridity unreduced by both her night time and pre-work shower. Jurong island, a manmade monstrosity, artificially raised from the sea bottom to play host to edifices of steel and concrete; a complex digestive system of pipe and vat, ingesting crude oil and excreting a catalogue of chemicals. There was a stickiness to the air around the office where An worked accounts receivable. Colleagues went out for lunch while she watched the gas flares off 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. 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 chess board, placing 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. 

She was near enough behind him to see the board as he did, a bottle of tea sweating through a plastic bag at her side as a peace offering. An chose not to greet her father, who 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 washed 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, the moment of union marked by the fierce blaze of both god and man becoming something more. Her father would speak prophecy 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 with a chilled plastic bottle of tea brewed from chrysanthemum flowers after he had lost the chess game. 

“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 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 tracked 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 seats 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 I, 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 hadn’t told 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 care for 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, eliciting side-eyed glances from the office folk sitting beside them. An glared at them till 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.”

•••

The stacks billowed fire; An’s breath misted the window. The office was cold enough that she wore a cardigan at all times, whereas sweat was a constant companion outside. A file was open on her computer, a spreadsheet that went into that uncomfortable territory where columns needed double letters. Invoices on flimsy paper littered her table, the thermal ink fading to nothing. Just like her small god. 

It wasn’t so hard to look at the hellscape of pipes and refining towers and industrial gas tanks and think of the guts of some preternatural beast, a behemoth of petrochemicals. Yet her father had told her of a time when a dragon slept beneath the waves, in the midst of seven islands off the coast. The Chinese thought that seven was a lucky number, a homonym for rising up, fitting for a dragon. 

He’d heard about the dragon from fishermen with the same gift as An and him: longer than the freight trains that brought cargo from Malaysia, scales bluer than the midday sky, clawed feet large enough to snap a sampan in two, the beast coiled and curled in on itself under the waves. Dragons, he explained, lived longer than nations and their sleep was deep; sometimes he wondered if the beast had woken up when the dirt from the trawlers began to fall into the sea. 

The numbers blurred in her vision. Coworkers flocked and cackled over the bubbling electric kettle; steam from cups smelled of fake coffee and real sugar. Her own coffee was cold; a kaleidoscopic swirl formed on the surface as the creamer separated into floating oil and worse. She’d met the small god near the old playground, the one with the dragon in the sand. An hadn’t thought about dragons in a long time. 

•••

Noonday at the dragon playground was An’s favourite time. With the weight of the midday glare squeezing eyes into squints, the sand hot enough to burn bare feet, the other children sought refuge at home, or queued in front of the rattling motorbike of the old man that sold ice-cream. She hated queues; girls from her school took the opportunity to twist her braided hair, so An ate at the furthest end of the canteen, ordering a thin soup of coconut curry and vegetables from a sympathetic Malay lady. 

The rest of the time she kept to herself, away from the pinching hands and averted eyes of her classmates. She didn’t blame them, any more than she could blame the swarming leukocytes in her blood crowding out an invader. Nobody liked An, a girl with one eye on schoolwork and the other looking beyond to see if a stray god made their way past her classroom to the steal food from the altar in the teachers’ office. 

After school, she waited till the boisterous tide had rolled out, making her way to the playground where she clambered to the head of the dragon and dangled her skinny legs in regulation school shorts over its tiled eye. She felt safe here, sweat beading on her brow, on the head of a stone dragon, imagining the bulk of its coils under the burning sand. Of course the builders wouldn’t have constructed a full scale monster for the children, but she could hope. She was still mulling this over when the clod of damp sand hit her on the cheek. 

 Consider how long it takes to fall two metres backwards as a child. Forever and then the rest of your life. Long enough for An to see the smirking faces of her classmates about to turn to slack-jawed horror, long enough for the glare of the sun to turn the world white, long enough to take in the sand coming up to meet the side of her head, knowing that the angle was wrong, wrong, wrong. It shouldn’t have been long enough to for her vision to fill with the rush of scales, iridescently blue; the sweep of golden horns leading to a series of bony fins; the glint of an eye larger than her balled fist. When she landed, impossibly, on her front, with only a chipped tooth to show for it, there was nothing left but the puff of settling sand. 

•••

Maybe there was a dragon under Jurong Island, entombed by the ambition of a young nation state. Maybe the gods were all gone, save for the scavenger gods and the brightly nascent newborns. Maybe her father had turned his back on everything long before the cancer chewed through his marrow and spat out blood cells by the way of Jackson Pollock. The fires were quiet, the office workers popping up like prairie dogs over cubicle edges at the violence of An’s exit. Maybe she wouldn’t have a job the next day, but she was going to save a god. 

•••

Sunset burnt fierce auburn and russet into the dull walls of the government flats. The heat of the sky was spent, but the evening breeze still pulled warmth off the road and up An’s legs. She found her god by a block of flats, just off the playground of her youth, the last of the five the government had ever built using that design. They hadn’t gone far, for all their power, they were still unsure of themself, only knowing enough to manifest a faded t-shirt and tattered shorts. The god was smaller than before, their hair only coming to the tip of An’s nose now. They were not alone, a trio of things circled them, human shaped but inky dark like shadows come to life. So they’d come for her god already, the scavengers her father told her about. Gods overtaken by their own hunger, wearing signs of their corruption, pitch black as though light itself eschewed contact. Shared hunger pulled them into packs, but not close enough; An saw one snap at another, coming away with a mouthful of penumbral flesh. She never thought about what happened to the god with the strange eyes from the small temple, and now she didn’t want to. 

The glow from her god was subdued. A night ago they’d blazed with the newness of their puissance, now they barely shone. One of the scavengers swiped at the god, coming away with a streak of their substance. The first time An heard her god’s voice, and it was a scream. The blow showed the scavenger was not a flesh and blood construct hooded in shadow, but rather its body drank in any illumination that fell on it, dark skin shimmering and pulsing like a sack of snakes. An’s god leaned against a wall for support, seeming smaller than before. The mystery of the smaller god resolved itself.  

The carrion gods paid An no heed as she slid by them, taking her place beside the small god, taking the god’s hand in hers. The god stopped shivering. The scavenger gods ceased their circling at this new development, but soon resumed their hypnotic sway. There was little time to bolster the flagging strength of her god.

“Name your dominion,” An said. There was no belief without form, her father told her, definition was its own power. 

“You would know, An. You were the one that called me up.” The small god’s words were high and clear, a glass bell of a voice, gaining confidence as they continued, “I am set over small chances; my celebrants are the gamblers and all others who hope.”

One of the carrion gods brushed An, the touch exploratory but insistent. Its fingers sank knuckle-deep into her flesh, precipitating a wave of neuralgia that rode all the way up her arm. An gasped, pulling away; the arm the creature touched useless at her side. The gap between her and her god widened and the scavengers tensed.

An swung her body around, shielding the god with her back and arms. “Chance is a good a name as any. I need you to trust me.” An hadn’t done this before, not in all her years watching her father from the shadows of the temples of her childhood. But she knew this, a bone deep knowledge. 

“Where does the god go?” she asked her father, his blood still wet on his back from the ritual. 

“I hid him, of course.”

An knew where to hide a god, there’s just enough space. You hide a god in your heart. She wrapped her arms around Chance and pressed them in towards her own chest.

She felt, in that space between heartbeats, a moment of transcendence. She was not a god, they were not a human; but together they were both and more. Where the carrion gods took and consumed; her god gave and gave until it seemed that An’s veins would burst from it. 

With the small god in her, the playground and predators fell away, and so did time. Gods did not experience time as people did; to them there was only the now, an infinitude of moments branching out. An saw her life, possibilities arrayed and stretching out into lives that might have been, futures radiating out from pasts, branching out in snowflake fractals. She moved back in her own timeline, watching that last afternoon before the screech of brakes ended her mother’s life, and seeing again how her father slowly shut himself away from temple work, from everything until the hungry cells emerged. 

An gulped cool air into her burning lungs, her tongue bone-dry and her eyes smarting as Chance slid from her body and she returned to her time. Emptied of the god, the air felt a little blander, the colours of the world more muted. An knew, from decades of watching her father over-season his soup, that there was a cost for touching divinity, a debt that accrued forever and this was her life now. An’s knees hit the ground hard. The two of them were alone. The scavengers had fled; frightened off by the burst of power from the pair of them. 

“They’ll be back,” Chance said, dark eyes staring into the distance, helping An to her feet. “They’ll gather in numbers.” Chance seemed a little taller—fuller—after the experience. 

“All the things I saw, can I go back?” An asked.

“You could. Many people have lost themselves to the past.”

“Like my father,” An mumbled. “He walked away from everything after my mother left us.”

“He would have spent a lifetime looking in through the windows of a house he could not enter. Your mother was already dead. It was not for the small gods to bring her back.”

“And my father? What chance do you offer him?” 

Chance turned up their sharp chin and looked An in the eye. “Five percent to two years, one percent to five. You know these numbers.”

“They’re not fair.”

The god of small chances put their fingertips on An’s cheek, they were cool and unyielding. “Every small chance is fair.”

An wanted to pull away, but Chance’s gentle fingers held her chin like a vise. “It’s not fair to me,” she managed.

“Nothing is fair on the scale of one. Pull back. There is a rhythm to the race of electrons, to the ebb and flows of disease through the populations, to the aching groans of the plates under Mount Fuji, to the whimsical blinks of the quasars in deep space. There is a dance and I keep the beat for all the small chances.”

“That doesn’t help me.”

“No, it doesn’t. You can reach out to him, you know.”

An could have. Should have. But time had been curtailed. Anything she did with her father could be the last time they did something together, and it wouldn’t be perfect. So she precisely, perfectly, nothing. 

“He left the temples, he left the gods, he left me,” An said at last, words scraping up a dry throat and spat out through parched lips. 

“You know why that is,” answered Chance, their piping voice steady.

Even now the call of the comfortable past pulled at her; hot, clear soup at dinner, thickened with pork bones and sweetened with dried dates, never the same when her father made it; the smell of her mother’s hair, clean and rich, as An was hugged to sleep, So it must been with her father. “Yes.”

“But you live as though your father’s death is already in the past,” Chance said. An had no answer. 

Chance had her eyes on the horizon, lower lip dimpling under her teeth. An recognized the habit; things flowed both ways, it seemed. “More of them are coming back. Too many for the same trick to work twice,” said Chance.

“Maybe you should have run,” An said. 

“I know my chances. I prefer it to be sooner rather than later. In any case, I am happy that we got to speak. So many gods miss the ones that call them up.”

An pulled the small god along. She was done running away.

•••

The government had built five dragon playgrounds, of which only one still stood. The state hadn’t been shy about dragging the carcasses of dead ideas all over the country, so it had always puzzled An that they stopped at five. A country that hated gods and entombed a dragon may have had other plans. She ran her tongue over the jagged edge of her chipped tooth; maybe not all the dragons were gone.

“They want me. If you go now, you can get away.” The scavengers came, keeping their distance at the rim of the playground and daring each other to strike first. An counted twelve, but there may have been fifteen. She took Chance’s hand again, and it was only the second time but maybe it was the last and that was the most unfair thing of all. 

One darted in, oil slick smooth, and struck, taking a chunk out of Chance’s side, An screamed as though it was her own rib that had been smashed, her own flesh torn from her body instead of the shimmering stuff that gods are made of. Chance had a raw animal look on her face. Maybe they knew when the next big asteroid would hit or why the double-slit experiment worked, but their eyes showed whites all around and when they whimpered it was no different from the sound of a child. 

An waited, with their backs to the head of the dragon in the playground, because she only had a single shot for this. Chance would probably tell her that the odds for her plan succeeding were miniscule, and that it was alright–all the small gods died or became scavengers themselves. 

Nothing was fair at the scale of one. 

When the carrion gods, with their inky skins like the wings of dark moths, decided to attack, they did so en masse. Scavengers, the lot of them, and unused to the civility of queuing. Before they reached them, An took both of Chance’s arms in hers and pressed the god into her. 

The afternoon sun shone down on a girl with a faceful of sand. The fall wouldn’t have killed a normal child, but the angle was wrong. This branch of the snowflake of possibilities was dark all around; nothing changed the outcome, save the one when the dragon woke from beneath the ground and uncoiled its undulating length across the sandpit, breaking An’s fall and blasting grit into the faces of her bullies. 

The evening wind caressed the god and the woman, defiant in a circle of skulking figures. Like before, a moment transcendence, wordly meeting the other, but the carrion gods had already learned to keep their distance. Like before, An saw the constellations of outcomes, each one different, each one an ending. 

Chance broke away first; the scavenger gods chased them down. They were ripped apart even before the last one touched them. 

An held the god close to her. The dark figures didn’t interact well with human flesh, but interact they did. The two died with their arms around each other. 

So many paths, all going dark. All was the same to Chance, the curse of being a god. Sometime between a heat-blasted midday and the death of the sun itself, the dragon would likely wake again. But not in all possibilities–in some branches it died in its sleep, its nightmares and death throes setting off earthquakes in Indonesia. Other times it woke too late, distraught over the deaths of its other kin under the sea and buried beneath the other playgrounds. Its tears brought rain that flooded half of Singapore for a day. 

But it could wake at just the right time, like it had before. Twisting and lashing out with the length of its body, serpentine and terrible in its raw power. An wasn’t a god. She could choose. The dragon woke.

When the wind died down and the grains of sand bounced back to the floor, there was nothing to show of the scavenger gods but flopping scraps of their dark matter, melting into the ground, nothing left of the playground but shattered masonry. The dragon had already taken flight, cutting through the air with the fluid grace of a sea serpent. It was young yet, even though dragons counted their ages by the passing of empires. The winds that held it aloft were strong enough to whip the drying clothes from the bamboo poles sticking out from the windows of nearby flats. It met An’s gaze from building height, before speeding up to the clouds. 

And then there were no dragons left in Singapore. Maybe elsewhere in the world, because the oceans were deep and there were still valleys hidden by fog in the hinterlands of China. An didn’t think to enquire about the chances. 

•••

Nobody saw the god of small chances at An’s side; everybody believed in them. There would be other days, other battles, but they’d already won once, and that was a step forward. Chance could have worn any form they desired, but they still favoured faded t-shirts and cut-off shorts. It matched the weather, though they didn't feel heat or humidity. On a whim, they sported studs down their left ear in the colours of the spectrum. 

Chinatown bustled, people queued to pray at the hollow temples, others cast their faith towards races or the lottery. An had more tea for her father. There would be other scavengers or worse, but the air was thick with incense and hope today. Maybe hope for the small chances of a cure, but there was more than one thing that could be cured in her father, and she didn’t need hope for that.