Some folks see prayer like turning a dial, or so I’m told.

Like on an old fashioned tv set; the churning two-tone static of their lives resolving into crisp, clean clarity. A sanctuary from the real, quiet and still aside from a voice telling them what to do.

That’s the trouble with seeing the divine as a one-way broadcast, a news anchor from on high with you as the squishy mortal receiver. It diminishes you, and my transient gods don’t hold much truck with that.

They’re more like pirate radio - you catch a word here or there, a crackle of music over laughter as you tease that dial between finger and thumb like you haven’t rolled your own in twenty-eight years but the tang of nicotine’s in the air and you could just…

And then they slip away, and the static’s in your ears again; it prickles your skin like a fresh-born thunderstorm. Perhaps you’ll find them again, when the hurly-burly’s done, or lose yourself along the way.

So, maybe we go back to turning a dial.

Not a whisper-smooth rotation, but a clunk, the clatter of currency and the bind of gearing. You see all the gods, opaque in their capsules; they jostle and scramble, plastic primordial eggs on the verge of birthing new worlds, winnowed away one by one by sheer entropy until you fish a single survivor from its dispenser.

They’re not always the god I wanted, and they never stay long. But while they remain, they lift me up.