dogeeseseegod

There is a very faint and very nasty smell permeating from somewhere in the therapist’s office. She noticed it as soon as this new patient walked in. It doesn’t seem to be coming directly from the patient, but rather from slightly above them. It smells like horseshit. The therapist chooses to ignore it as best she can. 

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“Good afternoon,” the therapist glances up from her clipboard at the patient sitting across from her on the light blue couch. “This is the first time you’ve sought counseling from me, and, according to your file, it’s the first time you’ve sought counseling at all.” The patient squirms a bit. “Yeah. It is.” 

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“What changed, then?” The therapist smiles warmly, trying her hardest to convey a sense of trustworthiness and comfort. “Why did you seek me out?” 

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“Because I’m very sad,” the patient says, without a trace of sadness. 

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“I’m very sorry to hear that.” 

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The patient considers something for a moment. “Actually, I’m not sure if it’s that I’m sad. It’s more like everything just feels different. Like the world has changed forever.” They glance out the window and the therapist sees their eyes dart around wildly, gobbling up everything they see. “The world is much larger than I thought it was,” they say, pupils dilating as they peer into the windows of each car, each containing a driver and passengers and the worlds inside their skulls, “and therefore I’m much smaller.” 

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The therapist considers the patient. There’s something different about them that is difficult for the therapist to explain. They aren’t anybody. That is, they aren’t anybody in particular. They are masculine and feminine simultaneously, but also they are something other than those two categories. Their face is somehow both strikingly beautiful and perfectly ordinary.

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It feels as though they are exactly like everyone else on the planet, all at once. The therapist shook all of these observations from her mind and focused back on her job. “What happened?” She asks. 

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The patient sighs softly. “You know about the old Greek stories where a god falls in love with a mortal?” 

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The therapist, having had an embarrassingly intense Greek mythology phase in middle school (and high school, and college), feels a pang of excitement. She keeps her voice calm. “I know of about seven million of those stories, yes.” 

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“What happens at the end? To the mortal, I mean?” The patient twirls a loose thread from the couch around their finger. 

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“Hmm… Well, the god leaves them, of course. A lot of the time they die. Occasionally they become immortal. Sometimes they get turned into some sort of animal, typically livestock or a type of bird. But mostly they just live a boring life from then on.” 

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The patient smiles for the first time. “I really wanted to be an armadillo when I was a kid. Maybe I’ll get lucky.” 

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“What do you mean by that?” 

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"I thought they were cute. I guess I liked that they could ball up and stuff. I used to curl up and roll around on the ground in public and my dad would yell at me. It was less that he thought I was embarrassing him or being too weird, more that he thought I would hurt myself. Which I did. My entire left knee was swallowed by a giant red scab for all of elementary school and my back was always covered with bruises and my clothes got so fucking dirty. I wanted to be an armadillo because they don’t get hurt when they roll around and their clothes don’t get dirty because they don’t have to wear clothes.”

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“I wasn’t asking why you wanted to be an armadillo, I was asking why you think you might become one, if you 'get lucky'.” 

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The patient is quiet for quite some time, to the point that the therapist becomes convinced they will not speak again for the rest of the session. She can see their eyes darting to and fro once again, but not, this time, to see the world. It seems as though they are debating with someone else within their own mind. 

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Finally, they speak. “My boyfriend broke up with me.” 

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The normalcy of the soft declaration shocks the therapist. “I’m so sorry," she says, still maintaining her caring tone. 

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“He loved me,” the patient says flatly. “His name was Sterquilinus.” 

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“I’m sorry?” The therapist sputters out, despite herself. 

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The patient’s eyes return to the window. This time their eyes move toward the sky, soaking up each cloud, a flash of something like disdain spreading across their face. “His name was Sterquilinus. He took me to Olive Garden and lit birthday cake-scented candles to cover up his pungent musk. I really should’ve been able to guess his true identity at that point. He told me he needed to continue to further his career, without me, as the endless breadsticks continued to flow toward our table and into my mouth. He poured a spoonful of chicken and gnocchi soup in his mouth and told me that he was the Roman god of manure." 

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The therapist chokes on a laugh. “Manure?” 

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“Well, yes,” the patient says. They meet eyes and their laughter bursts free. The therapist wipes a tear from her eye, and yet she feels she believes their ridiculous claim. “Did they really need a god of that?”

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“Oh, you know,” the patient giggled. “Rome and agriculture and stuff. I suppose the properties of poop that spurred crop growth were godlike and sacred to them. There’s something sort of beautiful about that, I think. Finding divinity in even the most disgusting and lowly and least traditionally divine corner of their society. I wonder if they also had a god of trench foot or a god of cockroaches or a god of locker room smell. What was I saying?” 

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“Your boyfriend dumped you, and he was the Roman god of manure.” 

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“Right. He was the god of cow pies, and he dumped me. 

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“Did you love him?” 

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The patient frowns. “I don’t think so. He smelled.” They ponder the question a bit longer. The therapist gets the feeling that she is only seeing the surface of the patient’s thought processes, and that they are thinking of so much more than they are letting on. 

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“Him being gone isn’t what bothers me, I think,” the patient says. “It’s more that I am now a permanent member of the Mortals Whomst Have Attracted Gods Club.” 

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“Why is that a bad thing? Shouldn’t you, as a mortal, be flattered to possess some inherent mysterious unique quality that caused a god to come down from the heavens to this inferior, messy earth just to make love to you?” The therapist is masking a jealousy that is growing more and more every time the patient speaks. The gods and goddesses of mythology are real, and they have never once revealed themselves to her? 

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The patient shrugs. “If the amount of stories there are about gods and their mortal lovers is anything to go by, the gods aren’t that picky. Being chosen by a god can’t really be taken as a compliment.” 

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“You feel insignificant, then?”

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“Yes. Maybe. Like, I’m a small detail in a mythology guidebook full of small details. Just an obscure little story they tell about one of the minor gods. It’s not enough to only be known as a single story in a minor god’s life, but I have to be a boring story. Why couldn’t I have been one of those lovers who turns into, like, a scorpion or something?” 

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“I recall that whenever a mortal became an animal in myths it was because a god who was jealous of their relationship with another god cursed them, or their godly lover wanted to hide them from a god who might potentially be jealous of their relationship. I don’t think you’ll need to worry about jealous gods anymore, so I’d forget about animal transformation.” 

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“Fuck that.” The patient squeezes their eyes shut. They begin grunting with concentration. 

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The therapist keeps her laughter and her annoyance in check. “What are you doing?” 

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“Turning into an animal. By thinking really hard about it.” The patient says this as though they were telling the therapist what temperature it is outside. “In my mind I’m on the cover of an Animorphs book, the ones where they’re slowly changing into an armadillo or something, and we can see each stage in the transmogrification frozen in midair. Fully human at first, then mostly human and slightly armadillo, then halfway human and halfway armadillo, then slightly human and mostly armadillo, and finally fully armadillo. I’m in that stage right in the middle of the transformation, half-and-half. I’m quite strange-looking at this point.” 

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The therapist briefly considers coming up with an excuse to end the session early, but allows herself some amount of curiosity into this strange individual. “Why, again, do you want to turn into an armadillo?” 

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“Why shouldn’t I? It isn’t illegal.” The patient does not open their eyes as they speak. They do not seem to break their concentration at all. “It sounds fun, too. My brain will be too small to remember how I felt before. The world will change again, but in a good way. The world will get even larger and I will get even smaller but then I’ll be okay with it because I won’t know how large it is and how comparatively small I am.” 

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The therapist’s frustrations reach a peak. This person wants to forget about the existence of the gods? They want to forget? “So the reason you want to become an animal isn’t actually about creating an ‘exciting ending’ for your story with Sterquilinus, because he isn’t in your life anymore. He’s gone. Those who record the myths have stopped including you in his story. You just want to stop being human, because then you wouldn’t have to deal with the possible pressures of another relationship, god or mortal or otherwise. And then, you wouldn’t have to open yourself up to the possibility of loving another person and ruining it, or trying too hard to love someone when you just don’t.” 

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The therapist takes a breath, as the patient’s eyes squeeze ever tighter. She continues; “Would you sacrifice every opportunity you might ever have to find someone who will love you truly and stay? You do realize that the best possible ending for the mortal lover in the myths is the one where they leave the relationship unchanged and are allowed to live the rest of their life in peace, fondly remembering their godly rendezvous every once in a while? Do you want to be another story about a poor soul who was seduced by a god and lost their humanity afterwards?” 

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The armadillo on the light blue couch opens its mouth and makes an armadillo noise. The armadillo is itself and nothing else. The therapist notices that the smell of horseshit has all but vanished. Perhaps it was blown by her office’s ceiling fan out of the open window and onto the busy street.