A winged buddha sits among empty plates and full cups of tea, watching the world. His world is grand, it is colourful, it spans across the stars, holding in it the laughter and loss of his gods.

If you ask him about his world, he will tell you everything, should you be willing to sit by him and listen. But he will tell you everything else before he tells you about his gods.

He will tell you about the weapons, great lances of incense burned in offering to him, becoming warm-scented spirals and piles of ash at his feet. He likes these, as they show him that even though his world has gods, he is still its master.

He will tell you of the mighty wonders that line the edges of his world. Of the first wonder, a great glass sea that reflects, creating a second world on its other side, one ruled by a second winged buddha. The real winged buddha is not worried; he knows his counterpart could not exist without him. He has nothing to fear.

Next to the mirror hangs the second wonder, a painting of another universe, skyscrapers surrounding a steepled building set against white canvas. The buddha is glad he is not responsible for that world, because it looks dirty and bleak. Sometimes he can almost hear the clanging of bells and shouts and the screeching of tyres, and he can almost smell the rubber burning.

The buddha is glad the only sounds he has to listen to are the ones that come out of the speakers against the wall, or from the kitchen that marks the outer reaches of his world. He enjoys the crackles and simmers that come from that far-off place, along with the scents that waft across the aeons to finally reach his perch, scents that remain a mystery, coming from substances he will never eat.

The third wonder of his world is the table on which the buddha sits. It is third because it does not befit the father of the world to name the first wonder after his own need. He lets the honour of the first two wonders go to the other worlds that hang on the walls.

The table holds the plates and cups that are the buddha’s subjects. They rise and fall in irregular supplications, and clink and murmur with the scatterings of worship. Sometimes the candles lining the table’s edge are lit, and the buddha dances with the flames.

The buddha’s favourite wonder is the fourth. It is a ship spun from gossamer and woven with light that sits upon the fifth wonder, a wooden bookshelf. When the room is lit, the buddha can see the silk ship’s nimble wooden skeleton, illuminated from under its skin. The fourth wonder is lined in purple, gold, green and crimson, and sails along the buddha’s dreams as it would the tides.

The fifth wonder, the bookshelf, was built by one of the gods’ servants. It has poetry carved into the edges of each shelf:

Would that knowledge fell

Like rain on fertile earth

And washed clean the stones

That bind us to our birth

The fifth wonder bears on it countless marvels that are too plentiful for the buddha to give each of them the honour of wonders. They include, but are not limited to, six decks of cards, a series of seven mismatched shot glasses, a broken lamp, and an incense bundle that never seems to deplete.

The last wonder hangs above the entrance to the buddha’s world. It is a stave of wood, three metres (practically infinitely) long, painted a sickly flaking grey-green. Carved into one side of the wood and then painted in cream are the words ‘BUG WORLD POPULATION: 20 000 000 000’. The wood is snapped off after the third batch of zeroes, which is fortunate, as the buddha is terrified enough trying to imagine what the number looks like – if it was any larger, he would have to condemn the wonder for its eldritch threat.

Nonetheless, the buddha loves the sixth and last wonder almost as much as the fourth. He loves bugs. He loves the flies that land on his wings and clean their hands, loves the ants that crawl over his back carrying their weight in food. He even loves the worms that he gets to see every time one of his gods takes him to the world’s edge, to have the ash in his lap thrown into the Grand Com Post. The buddha does not know how twenty thousand thousand thousand bugs could fit in his world, but he knows that the sixth wonder cannot lie, as it is not alive.

That is the other reason the buddha loves the sixth and final wonder. It is not alive; despite having been brought to the world by his gods, it did not have life breathed into it, did not become aglow with passion and heat. Paige did not instil in it the power to challenge the buddha’s throne.

Paige is the buddha’s first god. Paige wears a red leather jacket on her best days and works too hard. Paige bought the buddha from an opportunity shop, a hostile limbo-world that contains the corpses of many of the buddha’s friends. She saved him, breathed life into him with her incense and intention. She is Mother, Creator of Worlds.

The winged buddha worships Paige in his calmness and serenity. He is a fair ruler, and ensures his supplicants know he loves and cherishes them, even if they are his lessers. He administers recrimination with silent looks of disapproval rather than outbursts, just as any reasonable guardian does.

The second god is Maitland. Maitland is Paige’s sibling, two years older. Maitland greets the buddha with a little bow every time they see it. They had been the god of another world, until they brought its wonders to Paige’s world and combined them with hers.

The winged buddha worships Maitland in his curiosity and ambition. He cannot move to investigate the mysteries of his world, so in the shadows and nooks that are hidden from his view, he imagines libraries catalogued by ants, colosseums of skirmishing rat-gladiators and arachnid trapeze artists flinging themselves along webs of quicksilver. He knows that though he cannot see them, he is their benevolent ruler all the same.

The buddha bore steadfast against the incoming tide of wonders and servants from Maitland. He remained the lord of the table, overseer of the world. He knew this was his right because he was the first servant Paige had breathed life into. If you were to ask him what the greatest challenge he’s ever faced was, he would keep his smile unchanged and direct his gaze across the room. A bold iron statuette crests the summit of a mountainous sound system like a chrome dancer atop a wave of sonic currents, posturing with gleaming metallic chest and shoulders. The winged buddha will tell you how this dandy sought to vie for custody of his world, and how he – its rightful ruler – stood strong against the prideful onslaught. Now, the statuette still postures, but only within his station.

The winged buddha will not admit it to you, but deep down he knows he does not rule this world. On the nights where the air is tight and the silence cold, when Paige sits by the buddha with her bottle of wine and long tapering joints, eating away the time with the tired self-immolation of her senses, the buddha understands he has no power over this Place. When she clutches at the emptiness buried in the recesses of her stomach with teary despair, and the whole room seems to heave inward as though dragged toward the vacuum within her, the buddha understands he can never hope to have such power. He may be the watcher, placed upon the table to experience the world, but it is not his world.

These moments of humility are the hardest for the buddha to bear as they happen. He struggles, cries, rages at his inability to enfold his outstretched wings around Paige and reassure her of the inevitability of the universe’s apathy, that constant that reassures him and rocks him to sleep.

In peaceful retrospection, the buddha will pull you in with a whip of silent confidence and whisper in absolute secrecy that those moments have been his favourites. The times when his god, Mother Paige, Creator of Worlds, opens herself to him and confides in him, not with words, but with sobs and silence.

The buddha will not age, will not die. He may change, he may break, he may end, but he does not grow, not like his gods do. He treasures their mercury, their light which brought him and his subjects to life, for without them, he is nothing but an ashtray on a coffee table.