Stuck

So that happened.

My life changed forever.

There were all these questions at first about how all my mom’s followers would be expected to serve her and what they’d have to do. It turned out that while she might be a sucky mom, she was a pretty nice goddess. She said they’d all have to stay in the city if they wanted to stay under her protection. She also said I should follow her or else some other god (ie Rom) could still come after me technically, although he probably wouldn’t because it was considered rude to attack another gods family.

So… I swore allegiance to my mom. Weird. I know.

But a week later nothing felt all that different. I was hanging out with Makeshift and we were making out all over the place, like in parks and on abandoned rooftops and in the back of movie theaters. I was painting Olive’s nails and listening to some punk band she’d just discovered that she loved. I was making dinner with my mom who along with being a goddess, had also gotten her mind back and could focus and ask me all kinds of normal mom things, like what were my plans for the future and how serious was I with Makeshift and did I need to have a talk about safe sex.

Ugh.

But also awesome. I mean maybe you’re used to a normal mom and are tired of all that, but having someone getting into my business felt sort of nice and normal. She also had money, because all her subjects gave her a little bit each, sort of like tithing, and it added up.

So that’s the end of Sera Blue, for now. And if every moment of every one of my days from here on out  feels normal and boring and average in comparison? I plan on loving every instant of it. co, running away with the Sea Goddesses

 

Fallen

“For I am goddess of the fallen,” my mother said.

She spun around again and light fell off her in arcs.

“What does that mean?” Makeshift asked.

“No idea,” I whispered back.

All the Blue women, all my mom’s sisters, nieces, and Mom were walking toward her all together and when they got to the edge of the sandpit they all knelt down and bowed their heads.

“No,” Rom said. “They are mine. Always, the Blue’s are mine.”

But they didn’t even look at him as they raised their heads and stared at my mom in this creepy out of it kind of way. And then my mom turned her head and Makeshift and Olive were falling to their knees too and making this zoned out humming sound.

“Goddess of the Fallen?” I whispered. “What does that mean, mom.”

“Mother and so much more,” she said quietly, and there was something different about her voice. Like she’d become a lot older, maybe. “For the fallen have had no one to shepherd them for much too long, as year after year they are used and cast aside by my brethren.”

“Your… brethren? You mean other gods?” I was starting to see where this was going but it still didn’t make sense. Not really.

“They are not yours to have dominion over,” Rom said. “They are ours, even when we’ve used them.”

My mother turned to him and seemed larger than him. “Then take them back. If you can.”

Rom glowed. His light was a flash of magnesium white.

“The others will not like this. It is not a gracious thing to take from all of us.”

“It is not a gracious thing to leave broken people strewn across the city. But now they will have a champion. A protector. A goddess.” She waved her hand and the Blues and my friends sat down on the ground, no longer acting all weird and frozen. “Be gone, King Romulus. We will meet again at the Event but not before then.”

He opened his mouth and then closed it a couple of times, and then shook his head and turned away. He walked into the darkness of Dolores Park, leaving the rest of us behind.

“So, everyone who’s messed up every year by the gods, that’s what you’re the goddess of?” I said.

“For far too long we’ve been unprotected,” she said. “Left mad and broken. No more.”

I noticed some dark figures coming near us, and tensed.

But then they came closer and bowed at my mom and sat down, circling my mom in the sand. More and more of them came all night long.

Goddess Of The

My mom sat back on her heels and clapped her hands.

I was able to squirm away from her and get to my feet. “What’s wrong with you? Why did you do that?”

I looked at my family, then over at Rom. My grandmother looked oddly still and serene, sort of frozen. Rom scowled and shook his head slowly back and forth.

Makeshift and Olive came over to me and we stood huddled together.

“What the?” Olive whispered.

“No idea,” I replied.

My mom made a strange clucking noise as she got to her feet and slowly spun around. She stopped when she faced us and her whole body shown with a strange blue light for a moment. “For I am made and in the world now,” she said quietly. Her voice sounded flatter and it carried over the still night air. “At long last.”

“Mom?” I whispered. Was this some new kind of delusion.

“For I am made manifest and goddess inside the confines of this fogtown,” she whispered but it also sounded like her voice was yelling inside of my head, too. “For I am the Goddess of,” she paused and glowed all over again as she swayed from side to side.

I had a bad feeling about all of this.

Muddy Cold

We sat in that muddy, cold sand pit with Rom the tech god on one side of it and all the Blue woman on my other side and me, Makeshift, and Olive sitting around our pathetic, completely failing “how to make a new god spell”.

My mom started laughing harder and I felt bad for her but I also wished I could turn back time and have a different mom. A mom who provided stuff and wasn’t out of her mind. She walked past my grandma and walked toward us swaying. “I can feel them,” she said and swam her hands through the air.

When she did that I felt funny on the inside. I felt all my stolen tokens start to move around and grow agitated. I held really still though and didn’t freak out even though it felt weird. I didn’t want Rom to see that they were moving.

Please let this mean that a new god is about to get made, I thought. Please let it mean that this did all work.

“Sylvia, that’s enough. The children are mine,” Rom called out, hands on hips, watching me mom as she sashayed closer to us. He stood on the edge of the sand pit, not ten feet away but I guess he didn’t want to get his fancy leather shoes sandy.

Maybe he can’t come any closer, maybe our spell is working, I thought, but it was just a wild hope and couldn’t be true, because my mom was in the sand pit now and her hands moved around like fluttering butterflies and things were starting to feel sick inside of me. Maybe it’s something I ate, I thought, only it felt different than that. It felt like the tokens, given to me by different gods and kids, were hitting each other and when they did I felt fierce hope, or raging sorrow, or the enormity of water. But it all happened too fast and it felt like my mind wanted to throw up and my body, too.

My mom giggled and raised her head to look up at the huge moon overhead. “Hello,” she whispered.

“Get away from me,” I said to Makeshift and Olive. “I don’t feel so good.” I leaned forward, panting, and felt the joy of dance, and the madness of painting, and the rush of religious ecstacy. I started retching.

Something hit me hard. Tackled me to the ground like a football player. Someone kissed me, pressing lips against my mouth and started pulling all the tokens out of me. I struggled away and stared at the dark figure on top of me. I couldn’t see who it was. I tried to push them off of me, but they were strong and held my arms pinned to the ground.

I saw Makeshift trying to pull the person off of me on one side and Olive on the other.

The tokens were leaving me faster and faster, coming up through my throat and mouth, pulses of light and energy and whoever’s mouth was on mine was swallowing them hungrily and what was going on? This didn’t make any sense. We’d read about swirling lights and a god coming into being but this wasn’t it at all. I struggled to get away again but the person’s dead weight held me down. I tried to turn my head but the lips were pressed too hard against mine and pop, pop, pop went the tokens sliding out of me.

“Ha!” The person on top of me yelled as the last one went into their mouth and sat back from me so I could finally see who it was.

Any guesses?

It was my mom, looking more deranged than ever.

 

We messed up.

Mom and Rom both came closer and closer until they both stood on the edge of the sandbox and no one said anything and it was like you could cut the air with a knife or whatever that saying is people say when things are awful and awkward and scary.

I looked away from them and back at our stuff, frantic that we had to finish things.

But Makeshift was already tipping all the random stuff into the mud-sand mixture and Olive was dumping her water bottle on top of it and that was supposed to do it, right? Make a god, right?

Only all we’d made was this muddy pile of goo that some park worker would have to clean up in the morning.

“I’ve been looking for you, Sera,” Rom said.

“I know. What’s up?” I said with a hoarse voice. “Hey, so I’m sorry I stole all your power-tokens for the year, I didn’t mean to do that. All I meant to do was — “

“Keep your friends from their destiny. Hello Makeshift and Olive.” Rom looked bigger in the night. His clothes and hair seemed even more impeccable and part of me wished he would make me crazy right away and not just stand there and toy with me at the edge of the sidewalk.

I glanced at Jill and gave her a small smile. She’d started crying so I looked away fast.

“Nice of you to make it here, Sylvia,” Rom said, turning his awful god-gaze on my mother. “I assume you wanted to be here to see your daughter become just like you.”

My mom’s smile grew weirdly wider and she made this sashaying motion and stepped up onto the sand. I saw a group of people behind her and at first I thought they had nothing to do with us but then I heard my grandma call out, almost as loud as Rom, “Sera, you are in a lot of trouble.”

Great, she was hear, too? Along with all my aunts and cousins. Good thing we snuck out of the house in the middle of the night, right?

“We forgot something,” Olive said quietly. “The last thing.”

I frowned. I couldn’t think of what it was. I couldn’t really think much about anything.

“We forgot to name what god we want to be born tonight. You have to say it, Sera.”

I swallowed hard and tried to speak it. I tried to say “The Goddess of the Playground” which was what we’d come up with for who would be the least likely to be super evil and also who didn’t exist yet, but when I opened my mouth Rom raised his hand and I couldn’t make any noise at all. I mouthed it a couple of times, but only made a wheezing sound.

My mom laughed.

Thanks, Mom. Not that if I said the words the pile of goo we’d made in the sand pit looked even remotely able to turn into something magical, but at least it would have had the chance to assuming we’d made the spell right. But now we’d failed.

Maybe we’d always failed and now was the moment we got caught. Makeshift and Olive and I all held each others hands and made a circle around us. I felt the tributes — the bits of power inside of me — pulse faintly, like they were letting me know they were still there and thanks for the ride and it had been nice knowing me and all that.

The rest of the Blue women surrounded her and made this spooky girl gang in the night and I had this idea that somehow they could stand up to Rom if they wanted to.

Grandma must have been on the same wavelength because she walked toward him and when she got near, knelt and kissed the ring on the hand that he held out to her.

Gross.

“King Romulus,” she said. “I would ask of you one boon for all the years of service me and mine have paid you.”

He scowled at her. “Perhaps.”

“Let Jillian go. Untie her from whatever fate you have in store for,” Grandma turned and glared at us, “those three.”

Thanks, Grandma. But I couldn’t totally blame her because Rom nodded and Jillian scurried over to the rest of the Blues and at least she wouldn’t be hurt too.

“It is time,” Rom said.

“It is time,” my mom repeated in a deranged sing-songy voice and laughed.

Then everything started to change.

Things get real in the sandbox

We biked hard and zoomed down 18th and up Dolores toward the playground, which is new and full of all these ultra-modern playground equipment that looked sort of like monsters in the moonlight. We threw down our bikes and ran into the big sand pit and opened up our backpacks and started grabbing all the stuff we would need for the ceremony.

I looked up, looked around and didn’t see anyone. Well, there was a guy huddled in a sleeping bag near the swings and some girls smoking joints up on the hill but I didn’t see Rom or any of his minions there.

“Hurry,” I said.

We all moved as fast as we could. Olive lit the candles and handed out the scripts to us. I mixed the dirt and sand in a big heap in the middle of the pit. Makeshift took out a glass bowl and put all the other ingrediants in it.

“Ready?” Makeshift whispered.

I nodded and closed my eyes, wishing and hoping this would work. Then we starting reading out loud the god making spell and I felt like I was eight years old and at a slumber party where we were pretending to wake the dead or something. What I mean is, it felt like we were playing pretend and that this wouldn’t do anything. None of the books said we needed to be true believers or something though, so it didn’t matter what it felt like, I hoped.

Makeshift and Olive stopped speaking and looked at me. I fumbled with the script, barely able to read it by the flickering candle light, “And so we call on you, ambient energy of the city, to come forth and coalesce. To come forth and be made real.”

“Oh powers and gods, we call you here,” Olive said with a wobbly voice. She looked up and stared at something behind my shoulder. Her eyes went wide and she stopped speaking.

Makeshift bit his lip and said quickly, “We call you here and let you manifest among our gifts.”

“So it is said and so it will be done,” I said and then I glanced over my shoulder.

“Sera,” a voice boomed and echoed so loud it probably carried across the entire city and there was Rom the god who wanted to destroy me with my poor cousin Jillian just beside him looking pale and scared.

“Sera?” another voice called out and I looked in the other direction and saw this barefoot lady wearing too many coats smiling in this deranged way.

“Mom?” I called out to her.

Faster faster faster

Sorry I haven’t written in a bit, I’ve been super busy and I’ll explain why soon, but where was I? Oh yeah: Rom had Jillian so it was time to make the god, not next week, not tomorrow, but tonight.

Crap. It’s one thing to plan for something like that and read books and make lists, it’s another to actually do it. Crap, crap, crap.

You know that nightmare where something is coming toward you and you can’t see it, and you don’t know if it’s real, but you are running away from it and no matter how fast you move it is always coming closer?

Welcome to my life.

“We have everything?” Olive asked.

“Think so. Best we can,” Makeshift said.

Jillian was supposed to bring back our supplies, but she’d failed and there was no way we were going to send Olive or Make out to get caught. We found some random stuff  in the house that would sort of work: some tarnished rings, moldy potting soil,  and some herbal tea that maybe, hopefully, had nettles in it. There was one thing we needed and didn’t have, and it was one of the major ingredients: San Francisco sand.

I didn’t want to leave the house, it was the last thing I wanted to do, but if the sand wasn’t magically going to come to us, we had to go to the sand. To the sand box three blocks away in the Dolores Park playground to be more precise.

Makeshift, Olive, and I went down to the crumbly basement that smelled like rats and kicked the tires on a pile of rusty bikes until we found three that seemed sturdy and about the right size.

Makeshift put his arms around me in the dark and gave me a long, wet kiss and we held each other hard and tight and no matter what, I was glad I’d rescued him. No matter what, our love was just as important as any god’s need to be powerful and almighty.

“Ready?’ Olive asked.

We all wore heavy backpacks jammed full of dirt and everything else.

“Ready.”

“Ready.”

She opened the creaky garage door and we biked out into the night as fast as we could. The air tasted like salt water and the flowering citrus trees up and down our block.

I’d never biked so fast in my life.

Even so, it felt like something was chasing me and getting closer and closer all the time.

Complications

We sent my cousin Jillian out to get a bunch of stuff that we need to make the god.

Stuff like –

Clay or ten pounds of dirt.

Sand from San Francisco

Silver

Gold

Iron

Jasmine

Nettles

Jillian volunteered to go. It’s too dangerous for any of us to leave the house.

We sent her out and she was going to go to all the closest stores and would be right back. We were all ready for her to come home. We had a small plastic tub that we’d hauled up to the attic where we were going to make it.

Minutes ticked into hours and Jillian was still gone. She didn’t answer her phone. I called and called and eventually it went straight to voice mail, like it had gone dead. Jillian is way too organized to ever let her phone go dead.

I didn’t dare ask anyone in my family to help me find her.

“Maybe she’s hiding out somewhere,” Olive said and gave me a hug.

Makeshift and I held hands for hours and he told me the entire story of this one line of X-men comics and it was stupid and it took my mind off of Jill and where was she.

(Was Rom hurting her right now? Was he hurting her brain and destroying her? Or maybe she was hiding somewhere and had no way of getting home? Maybe we should leave and go find her, but where would we even start looking? Come home, Jill, please. Just come home.)

Grandma called out that it was dinner time and we all gathered around the dining room table that was too small for all of us, but Grandma insisted it be set every night and that we all eat together. I couldn’t help staring at Jillian’s empty seat as my Grandma served up mushroom soup and endive salad for everyone and like usual my cousins and aunts talked about shopping like that was the reason they’d come to town. My grandma interrupted them now and then to tell me that I needed to go see Romulus soon and really it was high time we set up a meeting and making him wait was only making things worse.

I kept it together until desert time and then I blurted out, as my Aunt passed around ice cream cups, “I think Jillian might be in trouble.”

All the eyes of all the Blue women stared at me. My mom made a strangled laughing sound and shook her head.

My grandma sat up straighter. “Jillian, in trouble, whatever do you mean?” She dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin.

I bit my lip. “I think Rom might have her.”

My grandma smiled. “Of course he has her. He called to say she would be staying with him for a time, until you are willing to come and see him. Did I not mention that?”

Makeshift held my hand underneath the table and that was a good thing because I didn’t want to hit my grandma even if I really wanted to hit my grandma. “What?” I yelled.

She tsked. “Rom owns her. He owns all of us. It is a nothing thing if he wishes her to live with him. Don’t overreact Sera. He’d like you to meet him tomorrow.”

Instead, we decided to screw that and make the god that night.

I’ll sleep when I’m….

None of us are sleeping much. Partly, it’s easiest to talk to each other and get things done in the middle of the night when there aren’t a bunch of aunts and grandmas and cousins getting in your business. Partly, night is when the worries seep in, and dreams are worse than waking.

Makeshift has developed lovely rings under his eyes. That sounds sarcastic but they’re actually really cute. Olive is even surlier than usual. Even perfect Jillian yawns all the time and is super spacey? Me, I feel anxious. I feel like there are ants running around on the backside of my skin.

Will this work? Will it work? It has to work.

Tomorrow Jillian’s going out and getting the supplies we need. Then we’re going to make ourselves a god. Wish us luck. Wish us all the luck in the world. We’ll need it.

Unstable Ground

The house shakes, all night long. Sometimes it gets stronger, and sometimes I can barely feel it, but it’s always shaking. There’s always an earthquake at Chez Blue.

It’s Rom, trying to get in here. It’s Rom, moving the earth of his city and trying to shake us out. There are two ways of looking at this.

1. A human put up protections on this house, and they are powerful enough that he can’t break them. He’s not invincible. He can’t break it. A human did something that he can’t get past. This is a good sign.

2. The shaking is getting worse all the time. He’s slowly eroding the protections. If we’re going to act, we should do it soon while we still can.