The offering was a Jolly Rancher. Watermelon. Still in its wrapper. Set down on the corner of my stone with two hands, the way you would put down something heavy.
I had been asleep. Sleep is the wrong word. A god without worshippers is not asleep. He is grammar with nobody left to speak it.
The stone is mine. A threshold stone worn into a shallow smile by four hundred years of feet, pulled out of a doorway when the house above it came down. It travelled far and slow. Ballast, then a crate, then a merchant, then a long sleep in a yard in New Jersey, and at last a groundskeeper who liked old things and set it into the flowerbed beside the side entrance of an elementary school, as decoration, twelve feet from the kindergarten door.
The girl who found it was called Nora. Five years old, one front tooth missing, laces done in double knots by somebody who loved her and a smile as bright and wide as a summer sky. She decided the stone was special. The reasoning of a five-year-old is the oldest theology there is, and it is not wrong any more often than the other kinds. She put the candy down and said, this is for you.
And I was. Again.
I could not remember my name. I want that understood from the start. I remembered what I was, which is different. I was the god of the place where outside becomes inside. A small god. A household god. Nobody ever built me a temple; I was the doorway of the temple and of the house, and of the byre. People touched my stone going out and coming in. Brides were carried over me so their feet would not stumble on the day. The dead were carried over me feet first, so they could not look back and find the way home.
Then the new god came, the big one, the one with three faces who needs no doorway because he is already everywhere and people stopped touching my stone. The last man to write my name down was a saint and he wrote it in a book in order to laugh at it. He listed us all, the little gods of the Roman house, the god of the door-leaf and the god of the hinge and me, the god of the threshold, and he asked his readers why one god could not manage to mind one door.
He thought the question was the joke. He had never tried to hold a door.
Nora told her class about the rock, in confidence, which among five-year-olds means everyone knew by lunch. The offerings began arriving like rains in spring.
A crayon drawing of the stone with a smiling face on it, which is how I got a face; they make you in their image, they always have, you take what you are given. Dandelions, daily, in grimy fistfuls. Half a cookie, the better half. A plastic stegosaurus, on loan, with terms stated aloud: you can borrow him but he lives at my house. One shoelace, red, whose significance was never explained to me and which I treasure.
In return I did what I could do, which is doors. The kindergarten door had a hinge that screamed; I quieted it. It liked to swing shut on small fingers, and it never did again. The supply cupboard that stuck for every adult in the building opened for Mrs Reyes as if it loved her, which, by then, through me, it did. In January I stood in the gap and kept the cold on my side of it.
Small works. I am a small god. But the prayers were small too. Keep the dinosaur safe. Make it pizza day. Let my mom not be sad at pickup. The books balanced. My Romans had bargained with me, an offering against a safe journey, terms and conditions, the whole household economy of heaven. These ones just assumed. It was the finest congregation I have held in three thousand years and it paid in sugar.
One morning a voice came out of the walls and said certain words and the children did liturgy.
I know liturgy. I have watched it invented twice. The lights went out. The blinds came down. The children folded themselves into the corner beneath the coat hooks, smaller than I knew children could fold, hands pressed over their own mouths, practising not existing. Mrs Reyes turned the lock, tried the handle, and stood with her back against the door doing the desperate arithmetic that priests do, the count of souls in her keeping. Over and over.
I waited to hear which god it was for. The dark, the kneeling, the silence, a room of children rehearsing their own absence: somewhere, I assumed, a god was being petitioned. No name was spoken. No name exists. They had been given the kneeling and the hush and the dark, the entire architecture of worship and in the place where the god goes their country had put a door.
So I inspected the door, since it had been revered. The lock was older than Mrs Reyes. The frame was pine. The gap at the latch was wide enough to take a credit card, or worse. I noted all of it the way you note a crack in the roof you live under.
Afterwards the lights came on and the children sang a song about the days of the week, and the day in the song was Tuesday.
It was a Tuesday.
I feel everything that enters the building, because every door in the building answers to mine, the way the far provinces once answered to Rome. The front doors stand propped from 8.40 because the office is busy at drop-off. I felt them open and I felt what came through, the way a stone feels frost: not knowledge, exactly. The threshold is the oldest checkpoint in the world.
There was a sound like the building clearing its throat, and then the voice in the walls said the words and this time the words were not practising.
Here is what a small god can do with a cupboard of dandelions and half a cookie. He can hold one door. I chose mine and I poured everything into it, the hinge, the bolt, the pine, the gap at the latch. Mrs Reyes turned the lock and I turned with her, and then she put her back against the door and I put three thousand years against it and beneath the coat hooks nineteen children practised not existing and this time they were very good at it, because this time they meant it.
He came down the corridor trying handles. I will not describe him. He does not get a description; that is the one power I hold over him and I am keeping it. The handles turned one by one, and held and he moved on, and then it was my handle. It moved a quarter of an inch and stopped, because I was the handle. He put his shoulder into the door, and I was the door. He fired into the lock, and the lock held in a way that locks do not hold, and I will not tell you what that cost, because there is no word for spending yourself. The nearest human word is bleeding and it is not near enough.
And on the other side of my threshold, in the corridor, which is to say in my own country, in the very space between outside and inside that I have governed since before Rome had a wall, there were men. Armed men. Shields. Radios. They had come quickly; I will say that for them, and let nobody say otherwise. They stood in my corridor, eleven feet from my door, and the radios asked questions, and somewhere a man asked another man for permission, who asked another, and the State stood in formation behind ballistic shields and held a meeting, while a forgotten god held a pine door shut with dandelions and the promise of a summer smile.
He stopped hitting my door.
That is the part. That is the part I will still be carrying when your sun goes out. He stopped, because a door that will not open is somebody else's problem, and he went three rooms down, to a door I was not holding.
First grade. They had never left me anything. They did not know there was anything there to leave it to. That is how it works with gods like me, the local gods, the bought gods, the gods of one stone and one street: we keep our own. That is how it has always worked. If you want to know what is wrong with gods, it is that. If you want to know what is wrong with men, it is the corridor.
I heard the other door open. I held mine.
My name came back to me under the coat hooks. Nora had her eyes shut and her hands over her mouth and she was praying through her fingers to the rock, please please please, and terror is the oldest prayer there is. It is older than thanks. It is older than candy. It is the prayer gods were first made from, before we were given our better manners, and on the third please I remembered what I am called.
Limentinus. Of the threshold. The saint spelled it correctly, for whatever that is worth. He was laughing at the time.
After, there were the rituals of after, and I will grant this people one thing: they are better at the rituals of after than anyone I have ever been worshipped by. Flowers woven into chain-link. Candles in the rain. Teddy bears in their thousands, an ocean of plush laid at the gates of the place, offerings on a scale I never dreamed of in Rome, every one of them arriving too late by design.
Thoughts came in from everywhere, addressed to the parents and the children. To the victims and the survivors. Perhaps they helped.
Prayers came in from everywhere, addressed to the big god, the one who needs no door. Perhaps he heard them. It was not his door that held. No one asked why that one god could not manage to mind one door.
Men on the television said the word doors a great deal. One of them, a senator, said the trouble with schools is that they have too many doors. I have been a god since before the alphabet reached Italy and that was the first prayer ever offered to me by a senate, and he did not know he was praying and what he prayed for was fewer of me.
Nothing else was asked for. Nothing else was given.
The kindergarten came back in May. Nineteen of them. I counted them in over the threshold, one by one, the way my people once counted brides, the way they once counted the dead, and I have learned that I am the only god in two thousand years to have kept any children at all, and that I kept mine, and none of theirs, and that both of these facts are mine to carry, because a threshold faces two ways. That is the whole of my theology now. It used to be longer.
Nora stopped at the stone. She put down a Jolly Rancher, watermelon, with two hands, and said thank you, and went in.