The bingo hall, where apathy and desperation peaked at the highest altitude, was not where one would expect to find an ex god and yet there Hodr — now known more plainly as Hodge Arnold — sat out of place like a greasy burger among cucumber sandwiches, huge and burly compared to all the little old ladies with their cups of tea and surprisingly vulgar mouths. They smelt of sugar and death and didn’t care, so fed up with life they were ready to croak and meet their makers— perhaps that was the appeal. Hodge knew all too well the proclivities of being sick of it all, of the hurry up and wait for the end. Gods know, he’d been waiting for his centuries longer than the mortals that surrounded him, those merely in their eighties and nineties whose flesh stank of rot. Surprisingly the smell wasn’t overpowering. Mostly the air reeked of stale cigarettes and bad breath that even for him (who only saw in fragmented light and relied heavily on his nose) was a fair trade-off for not having to pretend to be happy. He liked it here, it was an easy compromise to fight off the loneliness with nothing more expected of him than stamping blots of colored ink against paper and yelling bingo if he won. That latter was irrelevant. He wasn’t here to win. Didn’t even blob the right squares. Couldn’t. The numbers too fine of print. It was the change in chatter that caught him, the slippery discourse between discussing the comparison of hearing aids to talking about that fine young ass (that’d apparently bent over at just the right time to become the fodder of old ladies eyes and depraved imaginations), more so than the ass itself. An ass he couldn’t see, but the sheer enthusiasm behind the chorus of hushed tones had him turn his head in that general direction anyway, nearly falling off his chair, mouth gaping. Near blind eyes squinted as if assaulted by light— It couldn’t be.
He was dead.