keyword "gift" title "maps to the stars' homes" in misc. flash fiction

Atlas didn’t shrug, at least the times that Ms. Rand said he did. Atlas didn’t need to shrug from exhaustion or despair, anyway, Atlas was very rarely actually the one holding our earth up there in the sky. Atlas only held the planet on his back for the occasional photo-op with god-friendly journalists, a couple of times a year, to put the picture on the front page for some major holiday.

Atlas mostly just sat up in the splendor of some Titanic ivory tower or another, getting fanned by nymphs and telling tales about himself, like any other privileged godling, picking at mana from a jar while idly watching the over-one-billion peasants enslaved to the task of holding the ancient world aloft in the dark night’s sky. They were the ones who knew almost no rest, whose spines and trapezoids burned endlessly, keeping the dream of an Earth rolling along, knowing only for momentary rest the three times on a given calendar when a monster born into a nearly-limitless abundance would acquiesce for just an instant. When a distant spirit would take up this wee blue world’s burden, just long enough to take all the credit for it, would pretend to strain his mighty shoulders in a pose for sculptors’ reference, would fake a pained grimace for the painters in the white-bright robes, then immediately return the awful weight of all this to the people, to huddled tiny things draped in filthy rags, hefting our fragile overwrought existence in a shabby obscurity.

That is to say, of course Atlas shrugged from time to time, of course, Atlas shrugged, we all do. Everybody shrugs, even spoilt and erroneously-lauded godlets but no, Atlas never once shrugged under the crushing relentless weight of the world, he left involuntary responses of exhaustion up to the normal down below. There was no reason for someone so strong and so gifted to get tired when he only held us in the heavens for a grand total two minutes a spin around the sun, anyway.

No, Atlas mostly did his shrugging while in private conversations with the Olympians or other Titans or with the chosen few humans deigned special enough to temporarily commune with the magic giants up above. Once in a great while, someone would ask Atlas how he felt getting all the credit for keeping the world up in the sky when nearly all the real work was done by masses of nameless replaceable moral humans, yearning to be free of that awful toil.

That’s when Atlas shrugged. That’s when Atlas would shrug, laugh a bit and remark how little concern he could manage to muster on the topic of their… on the topic of our suffering. Atlas would shrug and say something like “Who has the time, let alone the inclination, to worry on the petty lives of peasantry when you are a god? If I bothered caring, I would not deserve the gift of godhood.”

That’s when Atlas shrugged, Ayn, you heartless moron.