Divine Misfortune

Quick shrank into human proportions, and helped Lucky right the sofa.

“But you want to know the worst part about it?” asked Quick. “The worst part is that after it was all over, I still didn’t care. Do you want to know when I started caring?”

“No,” said Lucky.

“It was about fifteen years later. I had a handful of followers, but nothing to get excited about. I couldn’t figure it out. Here I was, the grand and revered Quetzalcoatl, and I was mostly forgotten. A few hundred thousand dead mortals didn’t mean much to me, but they sure as hell made an impression on any potential followers. Guess they decided that if ol’ Quick wasn’t powerful enough to save an empire, they’d be better off looking for divine intervention somewhere else. And damned if I didn’t agree after I had a century to think about it.”

He transformed into his slouching serpent form.

“By then it was too late, of course. I’d blown my reputation. I’d lost all credibility. End of story. Game over.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Quick. You’ll get back on your feet… er, tail.”

“No, I’m finished. Just an old used-up god, a remnant from a different era, more of a novelty than a deity. Don’t make the same mistakes I did, Lucky.”

Quick sighed and ran his tail around the tomato juice stain. “Teri is not going to be happy about that.”

“I’ll tell her I did it,” said Lucky. “It’ll be easier for her to take.”

“Thanks.”

Lucky slapped Quick on the shoulder. “I get what you’re saying about Phil and Teri.”

“So you’re going to tell them?”

“I’ll let them know. When the time is right.”

Quick shot Lucky a glare.

“I need some time to show them the benefits of my company. You can’t expect me to spring this other teeny little mostly unimportant detail on them out of nowhere, can you?”

“No, I guess not,” agreed Quick. “But you should tell them. And tell them soon.”

“Oh, absolutely. Next week or the week after that. A month at the very most. In the meantime, I’m sure everything will be fine.”

With a sigh, Quick slipped off the sofa and slithered away.

11

Phil stopped at a convenience store to buy a lottery ticket on the way to work. He didn’t normally waste his money but decided it wouldn’t hurt to check the benefits of his new god. He figured that a lottery ticket was a good test for a minor prosperity god, and Phil wasn’t taking anything on faith.

He won twenty bucks.

In the interest of science, he bought another five tickets. Three of them were wi

Phil would’ve purchased another round of tickets, but he had to get to work. His understanding of the god/follower relationship told him there was a limit to the good fortune Lucky could provide. There was only so much prosperity to go around, and until he earned more favor to raise his share, he figured a hundred bucks wasn’t bad. Just a little help. Exactly what Lucky had promised.

There was a traffic jam on the expressway, and the navigation charm pulled off on its own. He didn’t fight it. The eyeball hanging from his rearview mirror seemed to know what it was doing. It guided him down side streets and alleyways on a route he would never have picked on his own. But it worked. Whatever lane he was in was the fastest. Every light was green. And his car merged so smoothly, it was almost as if the other drivers had all signed an agreement to let him pass. Phil’s only complaint was that the charm did such a great job that he found himself a little bored by the end. He’d remember to bring some reading material tomorrow. Maybe he could get a DVD player installed.

There was a new computer waiting in his cubicle. He ran his hands along the monitor.

Elliot’s head appeared over the cubicle. “They found it in the back of a storeroom. Nobody even knew it was there. Must’ve been misplaced. They offered it to Bob, but it’s kind of old so he turned them down. So lucky break for you, huh? And since my car showed up at my apartment yesterday, all polished with a full tank of gas and a two-for-one coupon for Applebee’s pi

“Yup. From now on, it’s smooth sailing.”

Phil leaned back. His chair collapsed, and he fell on the floor.

Elliot couldn’t stop laughing.

“That’s priceless,” he wheezed between guffaws.

Phil inspected the chair. The screws had all fallen out.

“That’s weird,” remarked Elliot needlessly. “You didn’t do anything to anger your god, did you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Eh, probably just a prank. They’ll do that sometimes. Or it could only be a coincidence. Things like that happen, even with luck on your side.”

Phil inserted the screws back into place. He rattled the loose chair.

“Here, dude, this might come in handy.” Elliot reached over the cubicle wall and held up a screwdriver.

“Thanks,” said Phil. “Where did you get this?”

“Had it in my desk drawer. It was there when I moved into the cubicle. Fu

Phil smiled as if amused, but the smile was accompanied by the dawning realization that perhaps life wasn’t so simple when you followed a luck god. The idea kept popping into his head. It was easy to ignore at first, but as the day progressed it started occupying more of his thoughts until it proved to be a distraction noticeable not just to him but to those around him.

Without a god watching over you, it was safe to assume that things just happened. Finding twenty bucks on the sidewalk was good luck, and having a pigeon crap on your shoulder was merely ill fortune. There was an advantage to being subject to the whims of an indifferent universe. You didn’t have to interpret every little thing that happened to you during your day.

If Phil had picked a patron of gardening then it would be a lot easier to blow off these little occurrences unless they involved making sure the tomatoes grew properly or keeping gophers from eating the carrots. If his deity’s domain had been automobiles, Phil could know a leaking radiator was probably a sign he’d fallen short in his tribute and a lack of bugs on his windshield was a divine thumbs-up. In either case, it would be easy to ignore a sprained ankle or a cracked foundation as just a random event.

Phil’s god was a god of luck, and everything was in his province. All the little things, anyway. And Phil was begi

The support of the gods wasn’t absolute. At least once a year a foolhardy disciple of Zeus was struck by lightning on the assumption that he was immune to thunderbolts. The truth was that with Zeus on your side, the odds of getting zapped went down significantly, but no god, not even a big leaguer like the King of Olympus, could immunize all his followers against every stray bolt of lightning from the sky. And Lucky couldn’t protect Phil from every possible bit of bad luck.

But Phil couldn’t help but see a conspiracy of heavenly disapproval behind every touch of ill fortune. The supreme irony was that with Lucky at his side such moments were rare, and that just made them more obvious. And it wasn’t Phil’s imagination that those unlucky moments were a bit more unusual now.

For five minutes, he couldn’t find a working pen. Even the pens given to him by coworkers were inexplicably dry once he took them in hand.

At lunch, the waiter dropped Phil’s food three times and had to send it back to the kitchen. The waiter apologized. The restaurant waived the check. But Phil wasn’t certain their incompetence was the problem.