[image description: The starkly black and white profile of a gorgeous Black woman lit very brightly from the front, but looking toward the viewer. She's seen against a white background and surrounded by a sharp black border with thin gold lines. Text reads, “16, QUEEN QATAR, the small god of SIDE EYE”]
She is with you even now. It is rare for a small god to be omnipresent; their limitations keep them confined to their own spheres, unable to act outside them, save in the most extreme of circumstances. But for Queen Qatar, that sphere is vast as the scope of human experience. Even when you stand alone, she is there, watching, assessing, and judging what you do.
She is with the novelist who writes of woman as if they are nothing more than a delivery vessel for their luscious, bouncing, perfect breasts, untouched by any gravity. She is with the suburban mother as she brags of the “ancient secrets” that she learned from her health food store, allowing her to “lose the baby weight” faster than her doctor thought was possible. And she is with that doctor when he refuses to treat another woman’s actual complaint, focusing instead on her weight, claiming that her sinus infection will clear right up if she just starts an exercise program and loses fifty pounds.
Queen Qatar sees it all, and she very rarely approves.
She is judgmental, but she is kind. She does not turn her eyes on those who do their best, even when that best is by any objective standard terrible. She is here to judge, not to oppress. Children are not exempt from her sphere, and can attract her attention long before their parents believe them capable of such malfeasance, but neither are children her primary burden.
She is with the bigots and the racists, with the homophobic and the fatphobic and those who stand in their own glass houses with arms all full of rocks. She is with us all, and if we err, she will turn her eye against us, and she will remind us that we are only mortal, while she is so much more.
Do not fear her wrath. Fear her disapproval.
Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.
Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:
