The Dark Corner

In my house, we kept our god on a chain in the shed. It was frowned upon in other families, but my mother insisted we do it that way. She was too scared to let him roam freely, too afraid he wouldn’t return.
She also insisted that I stay behind to feed the god while she went to the market to see my father.
So it was me who went out to feed our god that morning. The bowl of vegetable soup was dangerously close to spilling over with the way my hands were shivering.
I hated feeding the god. Out of all the shapes he could have taken when my great-grandfather captured him, he took the form of a skinny human boy of around fifteen. Most of the other gods I had heard of would sport horns, tails, or shiny scaled skin.
Not our one though. Our one had corn-coloured hair and golden skin, albeit fading since he rarely saw the sun. The way he looked at me, with that deep-set, relentless human stare of his made my skin crawl.
“Come on, this is ridiculous.” I took a deep breath to steady myself and pushed the shed door open.
He was sitting there, in his usual casual stance: back leaned against the wall, chin tilted up, the collar around his neck exposed, eyes closed. One eye cracked open when he heard me open the door.
“Hello, chicken.”
The hairs on my neck stood at the mere sound of his voice.
“Don’t call me that.”
He tilted his head to the side, the chains rattling with humiliation. “But it’s fitting. Don’t you think? I thought you looked like a featherless chicken when you were born.”

“I don’t know what a chicken looks like, I’ve never seen one.”
I put down the bowl of soup in the corner where he would normally come to eat, pausing when I noticed that yesterday’s dinner bowl was still there. Full.
“You didn’t eat.”
He clicked his tongue. “I’m sick of the rabbit food.”
“You have to eat.”
“That’s where you got it all wrong.” He leaned forward slightly, flashing a predatory smile.
“You have to eat, that’s the whole point of you keeping me here.”
I stuck my chin out, biting down on my lower lip to keep it from quivering.
“There’s no honour in starvation.”
They were my mother’s words, not mine. The same words she used to tell the story of the day my great-grandfather went out into the woods to catch a god to save her family from hunger and certain death.
“So stop starving me and bring me proper food.”
“We don’t have anything else.”
“Do you know what we used to eat? Before you destroyed the world and started hunting us to fix it for you?” he growled and I resisted the urge to flinch. “Chickens. Plenty of chickens.”
“There is no meat anymore, because there are no animals left.”
He tilted his head toward me again. “If there’s nothing left, then what’s the point in you eating at all?”
“We have to survive, or else everyone who came before us died for nothing. We have to persist.”
“How honourable.” He shook his head and leaned back against the wall, his lips curling. “Here’s my honourable proposition: If you want to eat this winter, you will feed me what I want. Or else I’ll starve myself before your mother returns from the market.”
My nostrils flared and my voice climbed an octave higher at his arrogance. “Our crops will fail if you’re gone. There’s no blessing on the land if there’s no god around. That’s not honourable, that’s blackmail.”
He shrugged. “You want to persist? So persist.”

By midday, our god still hadn’t eaten. The dinner I brought out to him, I poured back into the soup pot in the kitchen, untouched.
I spent the rest of the evening bent over the animal encyclopaedias my great-grandparents had salvaged from our old house during the wildfires. I tried to find any trace of species that could have withstood both the fires and the Great Famine, but other than woodlice, no animal was resilient enough. From what my mother had passed on to me from her time in public school, woodlice had gone extinct after the mishaps with the new power plants.
With a sigh, I slammed the books shut and rubbed my temples. There was nothing left except for humans and our gods and the wasteland we desperately tried to grow food on.

The idea that would save our entire farm came to me in a dream. I woke up with a startle, my face crumpling the encyclopaedia pages. I shot up and ran down to the kitchen, taking two steps at a time. The vegetable soup was on the stove, as always, and I poured a bowl of it to take out to the god. But this time, I took a knife from the kitchen counter, made a deep cut down the length of my arm and let the blood trickle into the broth. I winced in surprise at the fact that it actually hurt unlike it had in my dream. After applying a makeshift bandage, I ran to the shed, almost spilling half of the soup again. Even our god woke up with a gasp when I
came barging into the shed like I was being hunted.
“How much more of this awful soup are you going to waste? I told you to bring me a proper meal, chicken.”
I sat the bowl down in front of him, stumbling back a few steps when I heard the chains rattling. He stared at the soup, his legs crossed.
“Why is the broth that weird colour?”
“I put meat in it. As you wanted.”
He licked his lips and lifted the bowl, taking a sip from the broth. My triumphant smile almost split my face in half.
But our god gagged and spat out his mouthful of soup on the floor. His eyes flashed to the bandage around my arm and he kicked over the whole bowl, the rest of the contents spilling onto the straw floor.
“Blood isn’t meat. I admire your creativity but this is just gross.”
The smile slid off my face and existential dread slowly weaved itself back into my spinal cord. I picked up the bowl off the floor and the god snorted.
I whipped around just in time to catch him furrowing his brows in a mockingly sombre stare.
“You will eat. I will make you eat,” I spat and slammed the shed door shut.

My mother always said that anything you don’t get done before eleven o’clock, wasn’t going to get done at all that day. She mainly said it to remind me that farm chores came above all else and that I should be tending to the crops first thing in the morning, but I came to think that maybe she got it wrong. Maybe it meant that anything that was going to happen in your favour, was going to come to you before eleven o’clock, before the day ended and bled over into the next.
I was so engrossed in the encyclopaedia that I almost didn’t hear the knock on the door. Gingerly, I put a bookmark on the woodlice entry and went down the stairs. The door chain snapped into place when I opened it but there was enough space to peek through and see who was on the other side.

It was a man with long, shaggy hair and a gaunt face, not unlike our starving god.
“Don’t be scared.” His voice broke and he licked his blistered lips. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
Godless people frightened me. My mother said they were unpredictable in their willingness to be cruel.
“I saw the corn field and wanted to ask if you had something to eat? Some food to share? Please, I haven’t eaten in days.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Please,” he begged “If you don’t let me in, I’ll be dead meat by morning. I’ll do anything. Help out on the farm, you name it.”
“Did you come alone?“
He nodded and I feared the movement would snap his neck like a twig. He was so scrawny, no more than skin and bones. I figured he was too weak to pose any real threat, so I invited him in. My hands started shaking again when I gave him a bowl of soup, but he was so fixed on the warm broth and vegetables, he didn’t even notice. I had never seen a person eat so fast.
As if the food could be taken from him any second.
“Where are your parents, kid?”
“My mother will be back.” I grabbed the knife from the kitchen counter, carefully tucking it into the hem of my dress, so he wouldn’t see. “She went to the market to speak to my father.”
I turned back around to face him. “Where‘s your camp?”
“Nowhere.” He finished the soup with a slurp. “There were a couple of us but we’ve been on the road for weeks. I’m the only one who made it.”
I cleared my throat to keep my voice steady. “Do you want another one?”
The man put a hand over his heart. “God bless you, kid. You saved me from starving tonight.”

“There’s no honour in starvation.”
He offered me a weak smile and I handed him another bowl of soup. My fist clenched around
the knife so hard, I was scared that I would never be able to let it go.

By sunrise, breakfast was ready to bring out to the god. My hands weren’t shivering, they were numb. But I didn’t drop the bowl. It was time to end the hunger strike once and for all. I made it all the way to the shed and sat down across from the god, placing the bowl between us. I didn’t think it was right to keep him chained up in the shed like that. Only animals would do that to a god. But my wife insisted we do it that way.
“Here.”
The chains rustled and he leaned forward to look at my face. “Are you crying?”
I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt, trying to compose myself and sniffled
audibly. “I’m just so sick of it.”
“Your wife liked this one, I can tell.” Warily, he looked down at the bowl of soup in front of him and smacked his lips. “She waited a long time before she went out to get you.”
“Eat, god.”
He lifted the bowl to his mouth, curiously sniffing at it, his eyes flicking up to mine.
“A clever one, inventive even. But almost over-farmed, I fear.”
I did not answer. My wife and I had made a promise years ago not to speak about our children.
“I prefer my chicken tender, you see.” The god grimaced, chewing on a particularly tough piece of flesh. “You’re lucky I’m starving, too.”

Eileen (she/they pronouns) is a non-binary writer and visual artist who creates to alchemise their fears. For spiders it worked quite well – through a heartfelt apology that turned into a declaration of love. Let’s see what else is out there. Their work has most recently been shortlisted for MONO Poetry Prize 2023 and Globe Soup Horror Prize 2024. Linktr.ee: https://linktr.ee/eileenstltr, Instagram: @eileenstltr