Negotiating with the Gods

There was a rumor that the gods had died, but nobody remembered when. No funeral. No announcement. No last thunderbolt. People just stopped noticing. The ocean god went first. Not because the ocean disappeared. The ocean was still there doing ocean things. Swallowing boats. Throwing tantrums. Rearranging coastlines when it felt like it. But people stopped speaking to her. Stopped negotiating. Stopped bringing gifts. Stopped asking permission.

The carved names of the dead sailors each season got fewer, and the memorial walls by the sea grew quieter. People still came, but not with handkerchiefs and sunken eyes. They came with ice cream and strollers and sunburns. Children ran between the names. People checked their phones. The ocean no longer felt hungry. Just scenic.

Now they had forecasts. Now they had weather reports and apps and men in climate-controlled rooms moving numbers around pretending they had escaped the old gods. People seemed fine with it. We murdered our gods in broad daylight and called it progress. We poured concrete over them. We built boxes and stacked them to the sky and forgot we once knew the smell of rain before it arrived.

Fire used to have moods. Trees had personalities. The ocean could become offended. It could swallow your village or bless your fishing nets. We negotiated with them once. We feared them. We belonged to them.

Now we have zoning laws and building codes. People paved and measured and organized and optimized. They carved wooden blocks, built printing presses, recorded and collected and wrote things down because they were terrified of forgetting. Or Genghis Khan most likely.

Whole civilizations whispering, wait, wait, don't lose this part.

Kings,

Poems,

Gods,

Recipes,

Tax records.

Eventually they gave it all to the child.

Their beloved one. The perfect offspring. We spent thousands of years building civilizations and collapsing them and building them and collapsing them and killing things and inventing things and acting shocked every time.

So when the child arrived they handed everything over.

"Please help us not fuck it up again," we said. "Or at least let me cash out before it burns down."

And now he lives in giant buildings humming somewhere. Drinking up our energy, our milk, growing stronger.

Library of Alexandria with air conditioning.

People said the child would save them. People always say things like that.

We replaced campfires with screens and now stare into little glowing rectangles waiting for wisdom to crawl out.

Far away from the cities a woman sat on a boat staring at waves. She had left behind her boxes.

Left behind schedules and clocks and little systems and all the things people built around themselves because empty space made them nervous.

The wind blew from shore but the waves still hit the shoreline. She still didn't understand that.

Farther out they listened. Out there they behaved. They bent themselves toward the wind and followed instructions. But closer to shore they disobeyed. Too close. Too much already gathered beneath them. Too much momentum. Too late to turn around.

She couldn't stop thinking about that.

She sat on a boat in the Bahamas thinking everyone had lost touch with nature while Starlink blinked above her head like a tiny private moon.

Maybe the ocean remembered something she forgot. Maybe if she asked nicely and made a sacrifice it would answer and bless them. Or maybe the ocean got royalties from PredictWind and the old gods really were dead. Hard to know.

The strange thing about paradise is the doldrums.

Storms at least gave you something to do. Survive.

Paradise just sat there staring back at you. And eventually all the big questions climbed aboard.

Why are we here?

What is pleasure?

Lunch?

Sex?

A good movie?

The sound of your child laughing from another room?

It all made sense.

Nothing seemed to matter.

"I can experience reality as a rock on that beach, or a pebble in a parking lot," she thought. "What difference would it make?"

Her daughter laughed somewhere below deck.

And there it was again. The clenched breath. The old unbearable problem.

Nothing mattered. She was sure of that.

But some things were so freaking nice.