Debut day isn’t easy for anyone, even a god.
Newly minted, coin-bright, the god called Hark waits backstage. He’s about to go out to perform his first miracle, and he can hear his fans murmuring in front of the altar. They don’t know they’re the lucky ones that’ll get a visitation to enliven the community pop-up event held to celebrate his official debut day. Dreamily, he strains to catch their words—my aircon broke, I’m a sweaty mess—my husband didn’t want me to come today, but it’s the first time I’ve had energy to leave the pod in weeks—look at how shabby the decorations are—I thought Hark would have deserved better.
The god’s fingers itch. He wants to repair the aircon and give the man strength to go out into the sun every day. That is his purpose, his calling, to fix things for people. But his priest wants a big revelation, so he can’t let anyone know he’s here yet.
“Almost show time.” An acolyte comes toward him and gently turns him around, with the confidence of reverence, to thread a length of wire through the back of his shirt. “A lot of people turned up. Some brought signs, and nearly all of them have cameras.” Smiling, the acolyte turns the god around again to attach a small bud to the god’s ear, so that anything he says will get picked up for the press release. The acolyte’s movements are neat, soft, and never once disturb the pristine nap of the god’s platinum hair or brush against the god’s glasslike skin. “Are you nervous, Hark?”
The god smiles back. He’s been practicing. “Sure. First miracles only come once.”
“You’ll be brilliant. They’ll love you.” The acolyte’s nails are painted dark red, and his robe resembles the one popularized by last year’s rising star, Paladin. The god wonders if the acolyte would like to be a god, too.
“Courtesy call!” says the white-robed priest, hurrying in with a headset pulled over his freshly shaved pate. The priest bustles the acolyte away with no particular courtesy at all and rubs the god’s shoulders. “This is it, Hark. Remember now, big movements! Play to the back of the temple, like Paladin. Bright colors! High wattage! Bring the house down. Not literally, please. I don’t think this building is insured.”
The god lets the words roll over and off him. He’s mostly still paying attention to the acolyte, who watches with big eyes as Hark steps out through the altarpiece and into the chancel.
A chorus of gasps and shrieks greets him as the god opens his hands and unfurls a banner of light. Up and down the dingy walls of this old temple, he paints in swaths of neon and varnish and happiness. Camera lenses click and capture. Surprise swells into euphoria, drowning out anything he might be able to say. He can’t speak. The light goes out of him like a wave, but he braces himself against the adoration that flows toward him in its wake. The acolyte was right. They love him.
He never would have believed how terrible it feels to be loved like this.
Before he was a god called Hark, he was a boy called Avery, who went through life with an emptiness under his breastbone that stirred occasionally with rage and helplessness. He volunteered at shelters for the homeless, and brought groceries and prescriptions to the elderly neighbors, and sometimes wished a hovercraft accident would happen outside his house, so he could rush into the street and snatch a bewildered child out of the way. But even these efforts toward altruism left him frustrated. The shelter was well funded; the neighbors took the bags from his hands and then went out spryly to the pickleball courts; the streets of his gated neighborhood had speed control barrier beams every fifty feet, and its toddlers remained firmly under their nannies’ watchful eyes. From sheer annoyance, Avery wondered how illegal it would be for him to set fire to something, so that he could have the pleasure of putting it out again.
The agent found him when he turned thirteen. By thirteen, he had honed his talent for altruism into a peculiar subliminal instinct. Wind-caught plastic wraps—he caught them with a quick dart of his arm and found a garbage can. Loose coins and food tokens—his keen eyes glimpsed them in sidewalk cracks for deposit in donation boxes. Free water bottles at a corporate-sponsored meet and greet—he walked unseen past chipper marketers and tired interns to snag a handful for the drifter who hung out at the intersection. A fifty-credit voucher on the floor of the café—he picked it up, and when he straightened, looking around for its owner, he found a bald man stooping right beside him.
“Is this yours?” Avery asked indifferently, holding the bill out. If he paid more attention, he’d have noticed the sharpening behind the man’s watery blue eyes.
“What will you do with the money if I say no?” asked the man. Avery snapped his gaze up, but he missed the adjustment to the man’s posture, the deeper contortion of the spine. “What will you do with it if I say yes?”
“I’ll return it if you dropped it,” said Avery in confusion. “I’ll buy some burgers for Craig and his buddies if you didn’t.”
“You wouldn’t keep it for yourself? Buy yourself a VR game, a hoverboard, a date with the cute redhead in your math class?” With lightning-fast fingers, the man snatched the bill from Avery and began folding and unfolding it into a sequence of shapes. Avery caught the square game box and the curved wave board, but he couldn’t figure out how the bill pleated into the exact shape of Tyler Lawrence, down to the high quiff of his flaming ginger hair. “A lot of boys would.”
Avery shrugged, trying not to show that he did kind of want the bill back now that it had become a Tyler figurine.
“What’s your name?”
“Avery.”
“Avery, how would you like to become a god?”
At the top of the agency building, the god called Hark lies awake in the dark. He tells his priest this helps him focus on the prayers read aloud in the autocantor’s soothing mechanical voice. The truth is more complicated. It’s because he gets tired of holding onto so much light.
Finally, the autocantor falls into static, broken by an intermittent chime as the PrayerLine app refreshes. The first day after his debut, the app crashed, overloaded with messages ranging from omg ur so hot! to u r fake unles u get my dad out of jail to can you do a show in our temple?
“How do I respond to them all?” he had asked, bewildered.
“You don’t.” The priest gave a hacking laugh as he swiped through and deleted half the messages with the same nimble fingers that once made an origami Tyler. Avery hadn’t thought about Tyler much over the five years of his training, but he kept the fifty-credit voucher, for luck. “You reply to some to show you’re listening and make people more desperate for you to notice them. It increases engagement. Say something funny and memeable. Pepper in some heart emojis. Quit before you get to the bottom of the list. Tell them you’re going to sleep or something. Flash a little skin.”
The god called Hark tries his best. That first night, and many nights after. The live chat opens once a week, but prayers come in at other times, the soft chime reassuring him of his fans’ existence while he practices rearranging atoms or plans his touring schedule. Most temples still book Paladin, but everyone wants a taste of something new, and his priest has the right contacts. If only Hark’s popularity didn’t make him feel so lonely, as if Avery is shrinking, smaller and smaller, to make room for the god that blooms under his skin.
His room door opens. Hark squints against the sudden fluorescent bar that slides across his face. “Is prayer hour over?” asks the acolyte. His name, Hark has learned, is James, though he wants to debut as Mars. Hark calls him Mars to get used to it ahead of time. He sometimes wonders why the acolyte hasn’t picked a date. The past spring had been a great season for theophanies.
“Yeah,” Hark replies, the word a mere aspiration, a softening in his chest like the sigh before a miracle. He wants to hold onto that sensation of possibility, so he adds, “Do you ever think about how much misery there is in the world?”
Mars pushes the door further ajar, and the dark silhouette of his body falls across Hark’s. “Sometimes,” says Mars. “That’s why people love the gods so much. You take a little bit of the misery away. You listen to people, you’re beautiful and understanding.”
“I can’t heal everyone’s diseases. I can’t free the incarcerated or make abusive spouses treat their partners well. I can’t give starving children safe access to food. In fact, if the kid’s a fan of mine, I’ll probably make them hungrier. You see how much they’re charging for my key chains?” Hark turns away and switches off the autocantor. Looking at Mars, these days, has become the same as lying with the lamps on.
“But you make people believe they can be healthy, or free, or fulfilled.” He hears Mars come in and shut the door. The light still hovers in the room, somehow. “Isn’t that a blessing?”
“So then I’m lying to them all?” The question comes out raw and crackled. The silence oppresses him. He should have left the autocantor on. He could get lost in the mindless web of white noise that meant no one was asking him for anything.
“A promise isn’t a lie.” Mars sits on the edge of the bed and straightens the corners of Hark’s shirt with his acolyte’s precision. Or is it something else? The hand moves up to the base of Hark’s neck. “Have you thought about what color you’ll do your hair for the new era? I heard Paladin’s going bubblegum, so they’ll probably want a more muted shade for you.”
“Bubblegum? You mean, children dancing in the sunshine on gentrified jungle gyms and racial colorblindness? That kind of thing?”
“Maybe you could choose a storm grey.” Mars’s fingers go through the strands, examining how the debut platinum dye has nearly faded out to its original brown. Hark, imperceptibly, relaxes. “Lightning in the clouds. One patient’s cancer in remission. One free spouse. One fed child.”
Hark wants to roll over and touch Mars in return. He has never felt how Mars’s shirts fall from his shoulders or explored the texture of his hair. “Do you have a prayer for me?” he asks instead, as an excuse to keep facing away. Mars knows his habits of avoidance.
The hand on the back of Hark’s head stills, then drifts lower and becomes a warm, cradling pressure at his nape. “I’d like for you to be happy, Avery.”
The weight moves an instant later. The light from the hallway flashes against the wall once again, and then Hark is lying awake in the dark, alone, alone, alone.
• • •
The fans see through Paladin’s rainbow capitalism, so Hark’s guerrilla goodness campaign garners unexpected followers. Video after video of his miracles goes viral. The lenses don’t capture the strain around his eyes as he heals a cancer patient in a ward well-enough funded to save the woman anyway, or encourages a husband to try therapy who had already decided to go, but chosen for the cameras because of his handsome, tragic face. The priest strictly forbids any prison releases. (“Too much red tape, Hark, come on, now, be serious.”)
The hungry child, at least, is appropriately hungry and goes home with a full lunchbox. But the cameras don’t capture how the child’s older brothers beat her, afterwards, until she shares some of the food with them. Hark sees, but her miracle is already done with. The lightning has moved on. No second chances, no take-backsies. It makes him feel like Avery all over again.
He lets Mars wipe the make-up off afterwards and hang up his costume (dark blue silk, spangled with silver accents, his boots polished to a shine) and wonders what use any of it has ever been.
There’s one user on the PrayerLine that Hark recognizes. Among the handles like CutieAngel15 and ThiccGoddexx and CallMeStJudas, it’s just a name: Lou. Lou always logs in late, right before the chat closes. Just a single line, every time: I’m making soup for dinner. All the city lights and smog are blotting out the stars tonight. My dog is potty-trained at last!
Hark doesn’t know why he pays attention to Lou. Maybe because these snippets of an ordinary, happy life strike him like a softer, kinder lightning. He treasures each glimpse, thinking about them as an offering instead of a demand. After all, no one ever asks the gods what miracle they need. He even likes to imagine the autocantor uses a different voice for Lou’s comments, as though it knows they’re special.
Until, one night, he hears: My sister tried to kll herself today.
Usually, the app censors words of violence. Dying is allowed, but kill isn’t. Hark realizes it slipped through on the misspelling. He opens his tablet and types into the text box: Is she all right? Is she safe?
Annoyed at the explosion of comments in response to his appearance in the chat, he goes to Lou’s profile and taps the direct message bubble: I heard your prayer. Is your sister safe? Do you need help?
For an agonizing few minutes, he waits for a reply. He can see the number of messages on the main board bubbling higher and higher, but the autocantor is on pause, holding its breath, too. Hark paces to the wall and switches on the lamp. It’s even more awful to wait for this in the dark. Then—
She’s in a coma. They’re bringing her to emergency medical. I don’t know what to do. I’m all alone.
Hark types five letters. Not even types, really, just smoothes his thumb across the characters on the screen, and the cursor follows. Incredible what little things can ruin a man’s whole career.
Where?
8:35pm: The security cameras of the New Earth General Hospital catch him striding through the front doors and down the hallways. The facemask and baggy tracksuit can’t disguise the sharp bones and long limbs of the god called Hark. The images circulate from guard to nurse, checking for who’s expecting this high-profile visit. A bored resident, waiting for the end of his shift, saunters up to the emergency ward, phone on the ready. The red light blinks, recording, as the god Hark goes up to an unknown girl with her face full of tears and puts his arms around her.
9:06pm: The resident’s video has 500,000 views in the first twenty-five minutes. The god called Hark starts trending. Everyone wants to know who the girl is.
9:16pm: Three people on the PrayerLine app that night have screen-recorded the chat. The snippet where Hark replied to user Lou gets as many shares as the original video. Some of Hark’s fans start following the resident and say he’s good looking enough to become a god himself. The comments roll in: Is he a surgeon? I’d let him rearrange MY guts.
9:40pm: The netizens find Lou’s social media profiles, school sport stats, town of birth, and childhood pictures of herself and her sister, Lila. The comments flood in: Ugly bitch. Why her? Just because her sister tried to k*ll herself? Did they already know each other?
9:42pm: Lila D’Angelo comes out of her coma and asks for her sister, Lou. The doctors attending her look at each other in amazement. One is heard to say it was a miracle.
9:52pm: The videos get slowed, zoomed in on the exact trajectory of Hark’s hands, the expression on Lou’s face as she tips it up to him, played and replayed. The comments warp: Look at the way he touches her. Did she ASK him to come? He’s abusing his fame. That’s so invasive. That’s so rapey. That’s so weird.
10:25pm: The fans are divided on whether Hark is a creep pushing himself on a stranger or whether Hark has been lying about having dated Lou for years. The comments battle on: Of course he’d answer his girlfriend’s prayer. Of course he’d use the excuse to get some action. He’s just a man, after all.
10:40pm: Avery, who hasn’t checked his phone for the past two hours, receives increasingly agitated messages from his priest. Have you SEEN what’s trending?! What is going on?! What have you done?! Exhausted from bringing Lila back from the edge of the land of death, he powers off and looks at the crowd amassing outside the hospital. Even from seven stories up, behind the thick glass windows, he can hear them yelling for him to come out and apologize.
10:52pm: The priest, who wishes he had some hair left to tear out, fields cancellations from temples and TV stations. Fans demand an explanation from the agency. Because of the police detail posted on the front steps of New Earth General, the resident leaves by the back door. Two fans spot him and chase his car down the street, yelling, I love you!
11:10pm: A blacked out van arrives. The priest and a different acolyte, newly hired for his burly size, climb out and go inside. The mods of HarkHeralded4Ever, a fansite with 100,000 subscribers, film themselves burning their merch, key chains and photobooks and posters. The views climb some more.
11:25pm: Avery slips into the van, but before the acolyte can push it away, a camera lens still manages to catch the corner of his forehead. Anger, shame, defiance, and depravity are all projected onto a four-inch triangle of skin. The van pulls out from the hospital, and the heavy doors muffle the priest’s shouts from inside.
Midnight: The police detail accompanies Lou back to her apartment and stands guard in front of the door to manage the mob. The building’s other inhabitants complain that the cops are lowering the tone of the neighborhood. The explanations make no sense to them. They’ve never heard of the god called Hark.
In the spheres Avery moves in, he has seen gods with no afterlife. They’re crucified online where everyone can watch, and no one cares about what happens afterwards—what happens to a god when you take the power of adoration and belief out of him.
Some fans come to his defense, loudly and uselessly in hashtags that never trend. Lila and her friends protest she would have died if he hadn’t saved her, and Lou puts out a very carefully worded statement (vetted by a lawyer and Hark’s agency) that satisfies no one.
Because a miracle without the world watching in the right way isn’t a miracle. It’s just a strange thing that happened in questionable circumstances.
Hark is delisted from the PrayerLine app. The priest sighs heavily (“You were supposed to be my big hit, Avery, you really were”) and suggests that the agency and sponsors won’t want to renew his contract when it runs out next month. No more miracles. No more diadems of light. Avery packs his suitcase and starts looking at housing in another district.
Avery finds a strange peace in all this. He watches Mars training to take his place, due for a debut next season when Paladin takes military leave, and knows he will burn as bright and hot as the new golden streak of his hair. He’s seen the concept art. It’s beautiful.
Mars comes to say goodbye before Avery’s contract expires. Already he looks different, honed sharp and powerful on the edge of the world’s anticipation. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” he says, leaning in the doorway like he used to. “I’m sorry it had to turn out this way.”
“Are you nervous about your debut? You’ll be brilliant,” says Avery.
“If I could grant you a prayer,” blurts Mars, looking Avery straight in the eyes, something neither of them had permitted before, “would you ask to become a god again? Would you take it all back, if someone could give it to you?”
Avery sits on the bed and lets a small glim of light spring into his hands. The luminescence wavers, two months out of practice, and he lets it die. “If you had only one prayer to grant me, no, I wouldn’t ask for that,” he says. “I’d pray for an afterlife. For me. For you, when you retire. Maybe it can be the same afterlife.”
Mars trembles. Avery hopes he hasn’t frightened him by talking about the end before the beginning—but the end is also a beginning. Every god knows that, as he moves out of reality into myth.
“That sounds like something I can manage,” said Mars. He flashes the charming little lopsided smile that will soon beam at an adoring public from billboards and posters and phone wallpapers all over the country. But for now, it belongs only to Avery, and they both know it, and that is its own kind of miracle.
Cressida Roe is a multiracial writer of literary and speculative fiction, with stories appearing in Apex, Lightspeed, Fusion Fragment, and others. Recent work has been nominated for the Best Small Fictions and selected for the Wigleaf Top 50. More can be found on her website, cressidaroe.wordpress.com.
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