Specialists

The gods. Love and jealousy. Specialists. Qualia. Drugs. The Archangel Michael.  

The gods are unable to love unconditionally. They each have a job to do. They are specialists. They’re always asking for something, wanting to cut a deal, cover a risk. Conditional love begets jealousy, a kind of anti-love. Having bestowed on humans the gift of qualia (i.e. feelings and the ability to think about those feelings), a bit of a battle ensued when it came to dispensing drugs to humans. Why, it was argued, now that they have consciousness, give them the means to tamper with it? When the gods get together, as for a quarterly offsite conference, for example, there’s often hell to pay. It came as no surprise then, when I stopped at Smith Cove to hand off my small package to Archangel Michael, a World War One vintage sloop-of-war converted for a tourist outings enterprise in the San Juan Islands and housed in the Elliott Bay Marina, I saw parked in a long term lot the candy apple red Corvette.

“Specialists”
is episode 6 of
Ball Lightning
a Novel in Progress
in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads