Mine is the hand that felled the walls of Troy.
Mine the clash of kings, the sewer choked with corpses.
Mine is the blood-stained moon on the horizon.

Mine is the hand that tore Aedon and Polytekhnos apart.
Mine the love-gone-wrong, the plate thrown in anger.
Mine is the rust-brown water from your spigot.

***

Yes, the priests’ admonitions are true. No temples have been raised in my name, nor shrines carved from marble cliffs. Yet I have my adherents still. 

Warmongers dance to my songs in council chambers. Marketplace gossips offer up my hymns. My altar stands in the defense contractor’s boardroom and my scripture hangs from the tabloid racks of your supermarket checkout. You know me, though you only speak my name in darkness, when I stand above your slumbering form. 

Eris. My name like an orison upon your lips. Your patron goddess, your sentinel unseen. 

I claimed you in your childhood, when your lullabies were the nightly quarrels that flew from your parents’ bedroom. You pled for intervention, fervent in your cries, but Aphrodite had long since abandoned your home. No joy lived within those walls—only a penance the lovers had assigned themselves. Only a Sisyphean aspiration which crushed them night after night.

 You knew of love’s failings long before you found your first kiss. You were fifteen years old when the factory explosion rocked your town, and though you grieved, what your felt most keenly was relief. Your mother finally found the liberation she had never been strong enough to claim for herself.

These are the small miracles I work with now. The whispered word. The leaking pipe. The malfunctioning gauge in the control panel. You would not see them as divine, yet they shape the course of your days just the same. 

Mine is the crack that brings down the city wall. The missed bus, the errant spark from the flames. Mine is the flood that sweeps away all that’s stagnant and rotted. 

So you fled that town and chose the city instead. This is where you finally felt at home, in the teeming streets and the clamorous crowds. In these towers you cast aside your skin to claim a new one. You found lovers of your own, men and women both, but you did not let them claim your soul. You bore the wounds of your childhood, and you did not relinquish your heart carelessly. 

Your parents never heeded my lesson. Without endings, nothing new is born. They tried to build a home in Eros’ moldering temple, amidst its stale incense and rotting petals, but paradise for some is hell for others. 

I brought him into your life because you needed him. Because the walls you’d built around yourself had grown too tall, and you were suffocating within them. He shattered your foundations and forced you to rebuild yourself yet again. You did not know if you admired this new person you’d become, but you understood that you could not return to who you were. The only way forward was to change, and then to change again. You changed your job, changed your hair, changed the way that you walked down the street. You carried banners through the square, protesting corrupt institutions. The aristocracy did not come crumbling down, but you knew that you had planted a seed.

Summer fell to autumn, and autumn to winter. You built your nest; you grew restless. The rituals of love turned into habits, became a pattern etched in stone. You drew the curtains open and sat on the edge of your bed.

You did not know why you had to break his heart; you knew only that you must. When you burned his letters and his left-behinds in a trash can on the fire escape of your apartment, you told yourself, just getting rid of old memories. But I have always been your goddess, and you have always offered sacrifices upon my altar. 

So today the spigot sputters with rust-brown water, staining your shirt the color of locusts, of the gloaming sky in the west. But you have come to accept these small miracles I offer, and you only smile to yourself as you find another in the closet. You will miss your bus, but there will be bus behind it, and another job if this one is lost. 

You do not hear the roar of trucks colliding on the overpass, or see the pillar of flame that consumes the passengers. But I have claimed you as my own, and I will not let another god take you for his pyre. 

You are my acolyte. You are my champion. You are my sundered heart that breaks, and breaks again.

[M. Shedric Simpson is an artist, musician, and familiar to a long line of black cats. Their fiction has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Dread Machine, Fusion Fragment, and Shoreline of Infinity. They live with their spouse in Seattle WA, in a little old house between the mountains and the sea. They can be found online at shedric.com.]