Tchotchke

Vetteboy. The god Tchotchke. Big Pharma sales. In the evening when the sun goes down.  

I might have known Vetteboy was a god by the way he could not hold his temper. I spent the day at the Seattle Library researching contemporary minor gods. You have to know where to look. And he was a corporate god. That also made sense and helped explain the candy apple red Corvette with the id vanity plate. Tchotchke was involved with Big Pharma sales. But he hated his job, so there was still some hope. What did he do, exactly? He was a sales cadet specializing in promotional payoffs. He was, quiet literally, a little head. He designed, had made, and distributed gewgaws to the winners of global corporate sales campaigns. He was in charge of baubles. He was a whim-wham man. It wasn’t a bad job, though, really. He got to travel and enjoy exotic settings, even if artificially created and catered for the rich tourist and corporate convention goer, and he had an impressive expense account. It seemed though that Tchotchke had always wanted something else. He thought as a god he deserved something better than keeper of the knickknacks. He did not understand the nature of godhood. He did not get along well with humans. He didn’t get the symbiotic relationship. As Sylvie put it, what good is a god who can’t sit still in the evening and watch the sun go down?

“Tchotchke”
is episode 9 of
Ball Lightning
a Novel in Progress
in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads