A Tale of Flatulus, God in Exile

He took refuge in the sheets section, looking for something in his size.

When the girls found him twenty minutes later their hands were full. Despite Susan's clear instructions both had gone off script. They dragged him to the dressing room and handed him the pile, each shirt with a suggested pair of pants.

"Come out and let us see each one after you try it on." Susan said. "We'll take pictures of the ones we like so we can remember."

"On your phones." said Flatulus, doing his best to stay caught up.

"Yes. On our phones." said Susan.

The first outfit Flatulus tried was a plain white shirt and jeans.

"Is this acceptable?" he said.

"Yep. Turn around too." said Susan, who snapped a picture." Turn around." Allison nodded as well and took one of him facing her, and one as he walked away.

This process was repeated for the better part of an hour, as he went through things called corduroys, sport coats, khakis, and board shorts. Every outfit was met with approval, and the flash of the camera.

When it was done Flatulus felt exhausted. He'd had to figure out zippers and buttons on the same day, and it was quite a lot more complicated than tying a knot.

"Have I tried all the outfits?" he asked.

"You did!" said Susan. "And honestly they all looked pretty great. You're the sort of person that clothes are meant to fit."

"And," said Allison, "We livestreamed the whole thing on the dating app. As a hashtag human ken doll. If people liked what they saw with a couple photos their going to love the whole you."

Flatulus nodded. None of the words made sense to him, but they seemed sincere. He could certainly feel the utterances and prayers building up.

"And we can get most of it for twenty bucks." said Susan. "We did all red tags."

"Thank you." said Flatulus. And he meant it. He'd rarely seen this much consideration from his family. Or from anyone. There once was a centaur who'd been nice to him, but she had turned out to have ulterior motives.

When they got back he prepared lunch for the house using chickpeas, tahini, and a slight bit of divine power. Then he prepared for his date.

____________________

May sat in the coffee shop with her phone, waiting for the arrival of Elmer.

She had the look of someone perpetually reaching out to hand you a pamphlet. A desperation to be understood that was limitless in its depth.

She's always been looking for a god to worship. She just never expected to meet him.

He moved through the crowd like oil across water, above it and shining. He pulled the eye of everyone as he walked forward to the table.

If you go to the website of the museum of fine arts in Boston you can see Van Gogh called The Ravine. It is pretty and bold and vaguely like seeing a ravine while being nearsighted. It is as flat as your monitor, and makes you wonder what, exactly, is the big deal. If you go to the actual museum of fine arts in Boston and see The Ravine it is profoundly three dimensional, with paint slathered on at varying depths, casting shadows on the work despite the very best efforts of a cadre of lighting designers. It pulls you in, a different picture from every angle. All of this is an attempt to explain, however slightly, the difference in seeing Flatulus as a small face on a phone and the fully realized god in person.

Ravine has been described, hyperbolically, as a religious experience. Flatulus would be described as such in a most precise and accurate way.

So entranced was May that she did not leave her chair. She never heard the first words he spoke to her ("Hello")

When he reached his hand out to her she took it with the delicacy and reverence one might use with a holy relic, cautiously wrapping her fingers around it, wondering what exactly the world was like before this moment, and why she would ever leave it.

His touch burned her, searing her soul. It was revelatory.

"So did you already order a coffee?" he asked, with a slight accent she could not place hidden in his profound bass.

"Yes," she said, timidly.

"Then I will get one as well."

He walked into the line, and she was confused. He definitely caught everyone's eye, but none were as enraptured as she was. They mostly looked at him out of the side of their eyes. She could not bear to look away.

It was coffee that, as it often does, grounded her back in reality.

"Triple espresso shot soy latte for May."

She looked away, and saw her coffee, neatly placed on the counter with her name written on it.

What could she do next? What should she do next? He was ordering his coffee and, while he was everything she might have ever hoped he would be, he was almost certainly too much for her.

She took a deep breath. Closed her eyes. Counted to ten. Then vocalized. "You deserve good things."

"Thank you?"

Her eyes shot open and she beheld a slightly confused god in front of her.

'Sorry, it's a thing I say. Like, I have to remind myself that I am worthy of love. Which sounds totally crazy. Especially bringing it up in the first fifty words I say to you."

She could feel the blush all the way down to her heels.

"I am certain you deserve love. Isn't that why we do all this?" he said, gesturing his phone around the room like an orchestra conductor.

"Did you have a table, or?" he asked.

"I do! At my place!" And there she went. Crazy dialed up to ten.

"I mean, I own a table. At my place...it's oak." she prayed for god to strike her down before she said another word. There was a sudden hint of ozone in the air.

"I would very much like to see that. But perhaps we could sit at this one for now?"

He pulled out a chair at a tiny double, and waited for her to sit in it. When she did he moved to the other side and sat.

"So, what do you do?" he asked.

Don't say anything stupid, she thought.

"I'm an accountant. I count things."

Could have been worse.

"That is fascinating. What does that entail?"

"I verify financial projections against actuals and then create reports based on the results."

"Truly math has come a long way from the days of philosophers sitting in bathtubs.'

May sat a little straighter. Was he fucking with her?

"It's a lot of excel."

"To excel is a great thing."

Definitely fucking with her.

"So what do you do?" she asked.

"I have no job.."

"So you're unemployed?"

Flatulus winced, then recovered.

"Pardon my reaction. That is probably the way to think about it, though I have not really thought of it that way. So I suppose so. I have been the job for so long that I am not sure who I am without it."

May had put him up on a pedestal. But now it was getting chipped away.

"Where did you work before?"

He paused, like a child carefully selecting a lie. "The gas business."

May had biked to the shop. May biked everywhere. The pedestal was getting smaller.

"But I think it is time to do something new. I know not what." he said.

"Let us talk of happy things." he said, resting a hand on hers.

The hardest part of any first date is, of course, the small talk. The bar gets lifted quite a bit higher when any sort of eye contact initiates a rapture. She found her eyes averted for the sake of her own sanity, his touch lingering.

"Would you like to walk me home?" she asked, confused as to where that thought came from. Though, on examination, it apparently originated from between her legs..

"I would, but I don't know where you live."

"I meant, would you like to come over to my house?"

"I would love to." Flatulus said.

May waited. Because May knew what was supposed to be said next. Flatulus waited because he had no idea. May, who had put herself so far out there that she was in a place any previous incarnation of May would never think to look, finally took his arm in hers.

"Now. I mean now. Would you like to go to my home now?"

"Very much. But what about your bike?"

May struggled for a second. On the one hand his arm was a reassuring sort of solid, like something a sculptor had carved out of marble. She was loathe to let it go. On the other hand she cared about that bike more than her students, her apartment, or the oxford comma. Practicality, as it often did with May, won out.

"I'll walk it."

She released his arm, and felt like a little girl who had released a balloon. She unlocked her bike from the warped city maple and carefully rewound the chain around the seat post.

"It's just a couple miles this way." she said.

"I have brought my walking shoes." said Flatulus.

It was, by her reckoning, forty minutes by foot to her place. Her best estimate of his ability to carry on a coherent conversation was ten. May had been an open minded and pleasant girl, and she had grown into an open minded and pleasant woman. So she allowed uncharitable thoughts into her head, but she seldom let them stay long. The thought that entered, grabbed a chair, and kicked up its feet was this:

"Why are the pretty ones so dumb."

She immediately evicted it from her head, and swept up where it had been. She didn't want to be the person who compartmentalized, who judged like that. She'd always rather be nice. And it was vaguely reminiscent of the sort of thing guys who she was interested in, but were not interested in her, said about women they were actually interested in. 'Why couldn't she be smart like you?', 'I wish she was nice like you', 'You'd be the perfect woman, if we weren't friends.'

While all the while she was standing there, being her, which was apparently just not good enough.

Flatulus, whose powers of observation were roughly as keen as a doughnut, was able to pick up the vibe she was putting down.

"May I push your bike for you?"

May, who'd been second billed at her own baptism, said "Yes."

___________

The walk was proceeding in silence, as May desperately tried to convince herself she was the type of girl who would put out on the first date, despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary.

Flatulus just enjoyed the rough crunch of show under his shoes, a strange intersection of experiences that were all new to him. The snug feel of the shoe over his feet, the way the snow vibrated as he pressed down, the strange noise that accompanied his every step. It occurred to him that for someone who had long had the run of the world he hadn't explored much.

"So where are you from?" May asked. While she was a big fan of silence in her own life, she always felt uncomfortable with the silence of others.

"I think you call it Greece. I lived on a mountain there. There were olive trees growing on the side. I could see the sea from my window. I lived there for such a long time. It was beautiful, I think. I remember it like it was yesterday. Or three days ago."

"Do you ever go back?"

"No. I don't think I will."

"So what brought you here?"

"My change in employment."

May, who generally had firm opinions and a backbone to support them, felt the urge to pry just a little more.

"I don't mean to pry.", she said, with the time honored intro of the pryer, "But you've talked about that twice. How did you lose your job."

It is important to note that, despite his actions, Flatulus was not dumb. Out of place, yes. Millennia holed up with people who eat their own children has the side effect of sharpening one's wits. And he was a rule follower. There was no shortage of rules for Gods. Mostly about who one could sleep with, who one could curse, and such. But the big rule was that you couldn't ask for faith. It wasn't written in letters a thousand miles high. It didn't need to be. If you walked around earth performing miracles like they didn't matter then, very soon, they wouldn't. And once miracles didn't matter people move on to something else, and they forget. And Gods can't die, but being forgotten? They didn't come back from that.

So while Flatulus would prefer not to lie, he didn't see much choice.

"I know I seem young. And, in comparison to my peers, I am. What happened is that the job changed in ways I did not expect. That I did not have the vision to anticipate. And I'd like to blame others for that. But I could have changed. Could have tried to refocus. But I got complacent. And, eventually, that caught up with me. And it didn't matter that I was young, or what I had done before. My time was up?"

"Could you work somewhere else in the industry?"

Flatulus smiled. The Norse gods of flatulence were household names. The Egyptians had a four thousand year head start. And Gods generally did not have resumes.

"No. I think I need to do something new. I just don't know what."

"This is me." said May.

"Pardon?" said Flatus.

"My place." she said. "Would you like to come up for coffee?"

"We just had coffee." Flatulus said.

May, who figured that her best shot was the only shot worth taking, took it.

"Do you want to have sex instead of coffee?" she asked.

"I would like that." said Flatulus.

"Then let me just get my keys out."

May worked through her purse trying to keep a cool head. What kind of girl puts out on the first date? What kind of guy? Where were her keys?

She found them, and then cycled through to find the right one. She was the kind of person who would color code her keys, yes. But she was also the kind of person who never got around to it.

She felt a small thrill of victory as she managed the lock. He was watching her, and it made her both good nervous and bad nervous.

"What should I do with the bike?" he asked.

"Could you bring it up?"

He hefted it easily, and they headed up the stairs. Keys at the ready, she opened the door in no time.

"You can leave it on the landing." she said.

She opened the door and frowned. If she had known she was going to be this kind of girl she might have thought to clean up the remnants of her lunch, the books on the table, or the laundry she had folded, but not quite gotten around to putting away.

There was nothing she could do about it now.

"Would you like something to drink?"

"Before or after the sex?" he asked. "I'd prefer not during. It is very distracting."

"Um. Before." May said. He seemed very confident all of a sudden, and she, while trying to seem confident and sexy and experienced with this sort of thing, did not feel confident.

"No thank you. My coffee was quite good."

"So what --"

May hadn't actually thought of an end to that sentence. Which was good, because his kiss caught her by surprise. No thought ended up being wasted.

Somehow one hand was on her back, and the other on her cheek. She felt her legs go weak, and she leaned in. Had the kiss been any less good she might have wondered how, exactly, someone had gotten so good at kissing. But he was calling on millennia of experience and it was more than her lips had been conditioned to handle.

He lifted her like she weighed nothing, the kiss not breaking for even a second. He steered his way through her living room, around the basket of laundry and pile of books, to the bedroom. Her bed was made. He took two steps, did a slight twist, and suddenly she lay on the bed and the comforter lay one the floor, like he was a Vegas magician and she was his bewildered, but extremely turned on, assistant.

He reached for his shirt, and just as May was going to say this was going too fast, the shirt came off. Every part of him rippled.

And May wondered if this could, in some way, go faster.

She scrambled to take off her sweater, only for it to get caught in her hair with her shirt. For a brief and terrible minute she worried that it was stuck. That this extraordinary man that seemed dead set on ravishing her was instead going to watch her struggle with cotton and wool and eventually lose interest. Possibly in women altogether. He'd find a butch farmer type and they'd grow organic beans on a cooperative farm in Upstate New York.

She felt his warm hands on her sides, rising up against her arms, bringing up the sweater and her undershirt with it. When the sweater collar rose over her eyes he was in front of her, so close she could feel the warmth coming off of him. He smelled like the beach on a rainy day.

He wrapped his arms around her, and with the aid of a small miracle unclasped her bra on the first try. His body was hard and tan and she could not take her hands off of it. He pulled her against him, putting his thigh between hers and pulling her close. She ground herself against him and felt herself just let go. This was what she had been missing. This was what that kind of girl got to do. She could feel every muscle of his legs through her jeans, as she pushed against him to try to satiate the pressure between her legs.

Hi kissed her on the neck, then worked his way down, reading every gasp and sigh. She felt his hands encircle her waist, fingers searching for a button. She felt the waistband slack as he found it.

She knew what was going to happen next. And she wanted to have some control. She scrambled to find his button, to unzip his fly, but he just slid away from her, taking her pants with him.

And there she was. Naked. Except for her socks. Her back on the bed, her legs hanging off it. "Another fine mess I got myself into." she thought.

He started to rub her calves, working his way up to her knees with caresses and kisses. It was unexpected. It was interesting. The rubbing got stronger on her thighs, the kissing grew more forceful. His hands were gentle, but they could not be stopped. The kisses moved past her knees, tracing the inside of her thigh. She bit down on her lip just to keep in a scream. It would not do to have the neighbors come in now and save her from this.

Not that she needed saving. Or wanted saving. She knew exactly what she wanted, and as his kisses and licks and teases got closer she was pretty sure she was going to get it.

His breath was warm on her thigh, so close now that she could feel it on her lips. They were wet and hot and he was right in front of it. What was he waiting for? Why was he waiting? Had she forgotten something embarrassing?

May should be forgiven for spending so much time in her own head. It was where she generally felt most comfortable.

The first gentle flick of his tongue against her lips sent a chill up her spine. It was the beginning of a gentle reconnaissance. Every reaction she had, the quickening of her pulse, the lost breaths, the tightening of the muscles in her thighs, he saw them all. He worked over every single millimeter of her, leaving nothing unlicked, unrubbed, untouched. In minutes he had found every single erogenous zone she had between her legs, a list that would have seemed intimidatingly long and frighteningly unfamiliar had May seen it on paper.

And then, with an artist's grace, he began to perform for her. It was as if he knew everything about her, his tongue beat a steady rhythm on her clit, bringing her ever closer. One of his fingers gently worked inside her, rubbing and warming her from the inside, exploiting folds she'd never know where there. His other hand traveled along her body like it was a cello, finding just the right notes to hit at the right time, a rub on a nipple, a stroke of her neck, running along the top of her hand as she grabbed a fistful of bedsheet and lifted herself to meet his tongue.

When she let herself release, when all the frustration and weariness and general tedium of being a mortal in a mortal world, she exploded.

Her back arched so hard the bed squeaked, her hands wrapped into his hair and pulled him in, trying to get every single bit of pressure she could against her. Her pussy, wet to begin with, suddenly shocked her by becoming what felt a hundred times wetter. She screamed, an incoherent thing that would have made everyone who heard it feel a primal need to fuck.

When she came down she wondered if this is why people do drugs. To feel that good. That much better than normal. That was a dragon worth chasing.