Bathroom Monologue: Previously On #002

A girl went to a diner because she was hungry, not because gravity had disappeared.

And some gods formed a poker group.

And now...

Wendy waited for her pancakes. She spent the time playing with the slack in her tether. She hardly needed the whole chord and found she could bunch it up to practice shoelace knots. She’d need that skill someday.

Up in one corner of the diner was a TV, tuned to the news. There a female reporter in a plain suit was clearly trying not to freak out as she interviewed a man whose entire house was covered in cushions. Apparently he’d built expansions, too, so that he could get the mailbox. How the cushions and the expansions were linked, neither Wendy nor the reporter could figure. A belt fastened a pillow to his head, making it difficult to hear the questions, and so he kept returning to his declaration that he had seen something like this coming. He blamed it on an underwear company.

The man who entered was easily the most interesting one Wendy had seen today, passing even pillow-man from TV. He looked like he had been spray painted gold and was very proud of it, for he wore only a white thong and some leaves behind his ears. His blond hair looked downright shabby next to his flesh, so toned he could have passed for a giant Oscar statue.

He passed Wendy’s table with his nose turned up, walking regally, as though he weren’t doing something wrong by being naked here, but that everyone in the diner was experiencing the privilege of seeing him. It was like he owned the world, and maybe he did, because he didn’t have any trouble staying on the ground today.

The door to the kitchen opened and the waitress with one eye stared at him a moment.

“Honey,” she said with a light blush. “We're a free-thinking diner so you can wear whatever you want, but the floor is a little grimy for bare feet. Might want some sandals."

He waved her off with a gilded hand, and she returned to the kitchen muttering something about how he could wait for a menu.

He stopped by the group of old men in battered clothes, placing his fingertips on their table. The crow on the old man’s shoulder hopped off, flapping to the windowsill. It eyed him. So did all the men.

Wendy struggled with her tether and crept a couple of booths closer to eavesdrop.

"I want his account," said the golden man in a voice that made her ears feel warm.

"You want all of our accounts, you glory-whore," said the man nearest to Wendy. He had long, white hair and a beard like Santa Claus. The rest of him was un-Santa-like. There was what looked like chain mail under his jacket and he wore a patch over one eye, though the scars of whatever had taken it were visible around its edges. Wendy wondered if he was related to the waitress.

The golden man curled his fingers into fists. Wendy didn’t know if he knew this, but when he got angry his butt clenched in an unflattering way.

"I've been working with the sun since the world began. Attractive forces were never properly claimed in the Greek pantheon as it was. There’s an opening and I can handle it."

The raven kawed in the golden man’s direction. Everyone in the booth looked at it intently. A man further down the booth, this one black and very thin, nodded as though agreeing with the bird.

"Raven’s got a point. This is why no one likes you, Apollo. Athena is out there trying to get him some therapy. Demeter and that nymph-boy son of hers are covertly rescuing people from floating into the ionosphere. You? You just want to serve yourself."

The man with the eye-patch added, "You're pretty much the god of serving yourself."

The black man straightened so he could look the golden one at eye level. “If anyone is going to take over his account, it’s me. I pretty much designed this universe.”

“So you say.” The golden man sniffed. “But Gaia, Jehovah and a Peruvian fisherman all make the same claims. Bottom line is Gravity gave up.”

"He has not given up on the world entirely. The planet is still clearly in a fixed orbit around the sun. This is a punishment against men."

"And women."

"Gravity's been punishing women ever since they lived to hit middle age."

The raven kawed and they all chuckled guiltily. Even the golden man laughed, then looked around like he was worried someone had seen him do it. Wendy ducked behind the booth.

“We’re being watched,” he said in his warm voice. Even scared of being caught, Wendy felt that cloying warmth. It ran from her ears to everywhere.

“Humans always watch our work,” said one of the men. Wendy thought it was Eye-patch. “It’s how the mythology gets going. Now settle in or bug out, Apollo. If you want to be the new God of Gravity, play him for it at the next poker meet.”

“Gravity doesn’t play cards with the universe.”

The raven kawed and all the voices of the booth laughed. All but the warm voice of the golden man. He turned and walked away. Wendy saw his scowl come around the edge of the booth.

“You’re lucky,” he said, eyeing her. Now his words weren’t merely warm. They were a fever. “If Odin wasn’t around, I’d turn you into a plant.”

“This isn’t that kind of diner,” came a female voice. The waitress came over with a tall stack of pancakes on one arm, the other hand clasping the counter near the cash register. The lack of gravity was still giving her trouble, but a lifetime of handling trays had given her a good sense of balance.

“Why don’t you leave the underage girl alone and get out of here before I call the cops?”

“I think they’re busy today,” he answered, but he was already leaving. When he exited the door Wendy looked out the window for him. He was nowhere.

The waitress set the plate down before Wendy. A few pancakes drifted up, but the waitress skewered them on a fork and pushed them down. She handed Wendy a knife to go with the fork and asked, “You want maple or strawberry syrup, honey?”

On the TV, the man with the house of pillows was offering the reporter a throw cushion.

Bathroom Monologue: Noun Challenges You to Up the Ante

They skipped the Kentucky Derby that year, for the first time in twelve years. Twelve years ago Clarissa had come down with measles. This year there was a special poker game between high-stakes rollers of a stripe called the “P.P.G.”

There were four players, all impressive. The first as nearly a giant of a man with one eye and a Santa Claus beard. The second was a man all in black, his dark hair shining like bird feathers – and indeed, he wore some from an earring. The third was the most beautiful man Clarissa and Pete had ever seen, with hair of gold, not blonde, but rich and lustrous stuff. The last was an African with a bizarre accent and a bipolar disposition – one pole incredibly depressed over some lost job, the other jubilant, and thankfully, both with expert poker faces.

A hushed audience of ninety-nine ticket-holders was allowed to sit in on this rarest of games. There was Nexus Hold ‘Em, a form Texas Hold ‘Em played with tarot cards. When the big man with one eye won the first round two girls in the front sprouted wings. The African won two people on opposite sides of the room inexplicably fell in love. They were wed at intermission.

There was a game played not for chips, but articles indigenous to the homelands of the players. The one-eyed man actually gambled away bones of arcane creatures. The African had gold embedded in the pores of volcanic pumice, claiming they were born from the first belches of the world. They let out an ethereal shine from their holes that filled the audience with a lust for money. The beautiful man gambled teeth of unknown origin. When one accidentally fell onto the floor a dragon sprouted and nearly ate the bystanders.

The oddest game was straight-up five-card draw, where the man in black, who someone called “Raven,” drew an infeasible hand of five jokers, all wildcards that he claimed constituted a “divine flush.” Raven won the game so hard that he not only took home all the rocks and chips, but broke the entire world economy.

When all was said and done, Pete agreed that this was worth skipping the Derby. He preferred watching the horses to watching old people play cards, but any money he might have won at the track would have been worthless by the end of that final game. Pete was prudent in his aesthetics.

Bathroom Monologue: The P.P.G.

The Pantheon Poker Group meets every third Thursday. They wanted to do it on Wednesdays, but Odin claimed some sort of holiday, and he gets his way since he provides the hall. Sometimes they put off poker altogether and get drunk on the rainbow bridge, but mostly they play. Apollo is in because he's the god of poker (according to him, anyway). Obatala always sits in to complain – a would-be creator god never gets over those cosmic blue balls.

Complaining is as much a part of the deal as the dealer, because poker is a crutch for the Pantheon Poker Group. It's a means to converse without their respective worshipers going to war. In the case of poker only little chips need to be sacrificed, and if those mattered at all the game would be canceled on account of Raven’s perpetual cheating. Yet Odin is fond of Raven – he likes that type of bird and that type of deity, even if Raven refuses to fly himself and demanded first class airfare to the game. Apollo always springs for the airfare since he was the first to claim being god of cheaptickets.com. Apollo's newest divine franchises make up most of his chatter.

Odin likes to talk about what’s on TV, or how there should be more positive one-eyed characters in modern media. It’s humble, fraternal chat laced with the vernacular swears of three continents, becoming more voluminous as the night goes, on and Apollo and Odin argue whether the Norselands were on a separate continent from Europe. The drunker you are, the more confusing continental shelves become. When the discussion gets violent, Raven calls a random Celt for an unbiased opinion. The resulting opinion is always disqualified on value of it coming from yet another European aisle. Raven calls anyway. Two lords of the sky arguing technicalities always cracks the group up. Then Obatala opines how he would have made the islands part of the continent if only he’d gotten the job of creating the world. And while Odin and Apollo try to shut him up and console his highly intelligent design of the human body, Raven comes up with a royal straight flush.

Why, it must have been a miracle.

They’d pluck and cook him if it mattered, but the game is about the chatter, and the company.