Tag Archives: god

a new god for a new time

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White doves rose from his breast in plaintive sheets. His fingers conjured rabbits, pungent blooms, captured coins, plucking the thin air itself to create.The blue hue of his unreliable features danced like surf crashing on a black beach. His limbs, stolen tree branches, curved into fragrant sickles. An ecstasy of alligators snapped at his toes. Whirling clouds orbited his golden temples, pouring salty rain. Sparks ran along his evil grin to set fields afire.

His eyes, perched low and beady on a wedged nose, supported the true eye, the all seeing eye. It nestled on his forehead, sending corkscrewing rays of sunheat from the blood red moat of an iris circling  the blackest pupil, a student of evil thoughts.

Undecipherable secrets dripped from his movement and spattered on the ground, sizzling.

Zombapocalypto: Coffee and Cigarettes

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Buddy made for the European style Bistro on Guppy Street. He was starving, and was still trying to recuperate from the disaster at the Oinky Wiggly. He pushed open the glass door and was startled by the sound of bells. Something moved in the gloom and he fumbled for his gun. A voice said, “Hey, it’s all right!”

Buddy relaxed. He moved to the source of the voice, warily scanning the premises. He found a middle-aged man seated at a table with a pot of coffee, a pack of Farbolos, and some uneaten cake. The table afforded a good view of the intersection of Guppy St and Canary Blvd.

“It’s safe. Here, have a seat. I’m Nigel.” Gold-rimmed glasses flashed as the man leaned over the table, extending a hand.

Buddy took the hand and exclaimed,”Christ, you’re cold!”

“I’m afraid my constitution isn’t the same. Age and disease, you know.”

“Disease?”

“I was dying of cancer before all this happened. Ball cancer!” Nigel made a face and laughed. It was a rueful sound. “Well, sit down, already! Coffee? Cake?”

Buddy nodded as he sat down. He was ravenous. Nigel poured another cup of coffee and pushed the cake at Buddy. He asked, “Who are you? What’s your story?” Buddy shrugged. He was new in town, fresh off the bus. He knew nobody here. He said so.

“Then it couldn’t have been as hard on you, this whole thing happening?” mused Nigel.

“I worry about my parents, my sister back home. I don’t know if this is happening everywhere else too,” mumbled Buddy through a mouthful of cake. He rinsed his palate with a sip of coffee.”It’s unbelievable.”

Nigel nodded. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that we might be characters in a b-movie or a bad novel?”

“That’s a thought!” snorted Buddy. “But we’re real. Aren’t we?”

“Authors,” Nigel continued, “are the worst sort of people. They’re cruel to their characters to move the plot or garner the reader’s sympathies.”

Nigel took his cup of coffee and brought it to his lips in a long draught. Hot beverage streamed, steaming, from his chest cavity. Buddy yelped, launching himself backwards, seat and all. When he got up, hyperventilating, he had his gun out. Nigel perused the younger man with calm eyes.

“Y-you’re one, y-you–,” stammered Buddy.

“One of them, you mean?” finished Nigel.

“Yes!” Buddy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Why aren’t you trying to eat me?”

“Isn’t that what a civilized man does, restrain his urges for the betterment of self and others?” asked Nigel. He leaned back, folding his hands on his belly, what was left of it. Buddy could see the greenish tint of Nigel’s flesh, marveled he hadn’t smelled the mouldy stink earlier.

“In fact, the very idea repulses me, Buddy.” Nigel held out a placating hand. “Now please put that down. It’s not polite to point a gun at your host.”

Buddy was paralyzed with indecision. Each fiber of his being told him to pull the trigger, for the love of God, pull the fucking trigger.

“Come on, sit down. I’m not going to bite!” Nigel smiled at this. “Not chuckling? Oh well. Would you care for a cigarette?” He pushed the Farlboros across the table.

“I was never a smoker,” Buddy said, taking the pack with a trembling hand.

“People change with the times,” said Nigel. He saw a small dog carrying a human arm across Canary Street. “Everything changes.”

“How come you’re not like them? What use is drinking coffee if you can’t enjoy it?” Buddy asked, taking the lighter Nigel slid across the table and  lit his cigarette. He coughed violently.

Nigel lit himself a cigarette too, and sat for a moment. “I don’t know. I was taking chemotherapy. That might have something to do with this.” He looked away from Buddy. “I smoke and drink coffee because I need something to remind me that I was–” He paused. Smoke purred from his ears. “–am human.”

Buddy inhaled. He was getting the hang of it. It was a time for vices, as it always is when death is around every corner. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“What is there to do? I’m not sure which is the worse, dying or being like this.” Nigel ground out his cigarette on the table and took another cup of coffee. “I’m rotting from the inside out.

“Buddy. Whatever it is you need to do, first will you stay with me a while? Please.”

Buddy nodded and helped himself to another cigarette.

They sat in silence and watched the day go away.

God in the Face of Infinity

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“So…” God threw the thesis on the table with a thump that resonated in the holy chamber. “This many worlds interpretation…it’s valid?”

The angel’s brow was lined with golden droplets of sweat. “I-it would seem so, O Lord.”

The Almighty sighed and settled heavily into his throne. “The first commandment.” He shook His radiant head. “I’m a fucking fraud. Now everyone’ll think I’m as narcissistic as the devil.”

“But my Lord–,” the angel cut himself short, the consequences of continuing the thought out loud evident in God’s glare.

“In an infinity of Myself, originality is dead. What point is there in continued existence?”

“Lord, if I may interject?” the angel trembled, averting his gaze.

“Go on.”

“Almighty, have you ever watched The Highlander?”

Softly It Falls

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It started snowing and never stopped. Fat and beautiful, the flakes came from the grey skies and covered our cars, our houses, our cities.

We dug in like rats in warrens. We crawled in tunnels of packed snow between buildings where the pale blue of the distant sun’s light filtered through the miles of snow. We built hasty, pathetic fires that burned just long enough to melt our meagre supply of frozen canned food, extinguished before the carbon monoxide could kill us.

In the moments between searching for food and fighting the cold, we sat huddled in groups, wrapped in rags, never talking, always watching the light drift to night and back. Soon enough, even that was gone, that slightly reassuring frost of pale blue. Then it was always night. Who knew how high the snow went? How deep we were?

There was a creaking sound. It was not that it was a single sound, but a symphony of structural readjustments, of the very ice shifting. I imagined the hand of God pressing upon us, as if raising himself up from a slumber. There was a tremendous groan, with a crushing thunder of finality about it. Now cold, cold, our world bleeds away with our breath, and the end comes, not with a bang, but the stillness of flies in amber.

Another Morning at the Diner

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“Do you really taste like buttercrisps, Mister Melvin?”

The short order cook named Melvin Buttercrisps looked crisply at the redheaded girl with her freckled hands on the edge of the counter. He brought a hairy forearm to his mouth and gnawed. “Damned if I know. Tastes like rancid grease, but then the tastes of gods are suspect.”

“How did you escape?” Her bright blue eyes shone with anticipation.

“I don’t know, little lady. Last time around, your mum was fit to murder me. And this isn’t a story for little girls.”

“I’m here with Daddy, he won’t mind, and I’m not a little girl! I’m seven and half!”

“Ahh, there he is.” He lowered his head consiprationally. “Your folks sure like to talk on the phone, huh? Well, here goes…” He cleared his throat, comfortably leaned an elbow on the counter, and gestured with his free hand. “Sometimes you just gotta take your congressional, know what I mean, little lady—look at my eye, wink, wink—” She nodded. “—ah, yes, I see you do, you’re seven and half, after all. So sometimes you just gotta take your congressional, just sitting there with the morning paper maybe, or a funny look on your face…” He paused. “…and you just can’t cut it! You go through the entire day grumpy and cramped and you try again that night. No such luck. Well, can you just now imagine good ol’ Melvin, little and sure pissed off, as one is wont after being eaten enough times, holding on for dear life for weeks, perhaps years,  in a god’s colon?”

The girl’s nose crinkled prettily. “What’s a colon?”

“Ah—”

“It’s the section between the intestine and the rectum, dear.”

“Thanks, Daddy!” Her pigtails bobbed prettily. “Wait… what’s a rectum?”

Melvin Buttercrisps smiled as the girl’s father patiently explained the virtues of the digestive system over bacon and eggs. His belly rumbled as the coffee kicked in, and winking, he picked up the newspaper.

Late Morning at the Diner

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The short order cook lounged with an elbow on the counter, idly smoking a cigarette while bacon fat congealed on a half eaten plate. A lisping little red haired girl with a pretty gapped smile whose name he could never remember came up to him with her freckled hands on the edge of the counter and said, “Why do you have such a silly last name, Mister Melvin?”

Melvin blew a smoke ring and said, “That’s a long story, little lady, but just for you I’ll start right in the middle. ” He daubed the cigarette in an ashtray and put both elbows on the counter and his cheeks in his hands. He started: “Once upon a time a god ate me, lifting me from a bowl of souls with giant grubby fingers. ‘Mmm, tastes like buttercrisps,’ he said, chewing. The next morning, he found me in his toilet. Delighted, he picked me up and washed me down with ferociously cold water and said, his stinking breath washing over me once more, ‘Yum yum Melvin Buttercrisps, down you go—AGAIN!’ After a while—this has been going on for half of eternity at that point—I forgot any other old name I ever had and knew myself always as Melvin Buttercrisps.”

“Eew, yuck, Melvin! That’s a weird story.”

“You think so? Ha ha! Just wait until I tell you how I escaped the god—”

“Don’t you be filling her head with filth!” screamed the girl’s mother, momentarily tearing herself from an angry phone conversation to harshly grab the girl’s wrist. The girl waved good-bye as she was hauled out of the diner. Melvin Buttercrisps shrugged and lit another cigarette, contemplating his cold cup of coffee.

A fly had landed in it.

Sasha

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Sasha sat in the crèche, a sprawl of connectors snaking from her shorn head to an outlet in the wall. She wore mirrorglass lenses swarming with halogen text.  It was a code read-out of the future, specifically that of the SecResCorp Inc. grounds. The spatial-temporal dimensions belonged to an agent in deep cover. The identity of the field agent, codename Janus, was deeply classified. The length and breadth of experience in space-time within his proximity was fed backwards through time.

It was a power of godlike proportions. A complete three dimensional data capture of a single spatial-temporal slice unfolded in her mind. It was a security complex. The higher aboves wanted an article from the desk of office space 24D in Complex HAZK8. These slices of space-time could be put in a containment field, the electromagnetic equivalent of an ol’ mason jar, and using this method Sasha was able to investigate all the possibilities to ensure maximum survivability rate.  In rapid fire she undertook several scenarios. Virtually, she experienced each iteration, died and lived through each failure and success until the options towards the best possible course consolidated. Ghosts of pain tingled where limbs were scorched off, slashes gashed, internal punctures ruptured. She finished these sessions feeling like a patchwork woman.

She was an artist, dancer, philosophizer, warrior, architect, general, and a woman. Sasha applied herself to her bloody art with finesse, rough-hewed when necessary, and ultimately outputted a scenario that yielded an 100% success rate. She downloaded a copy onto a datachip. She grinned with satisfaction and swept the nodes from her skull. She had even accounted for Johnny Kester. Sasha headed for the mess hall, jiggling the datachip in a hand.

Johnny Kester was a pilot, and relatively new with the company. It would be his first time working with Sasha. His specialty was the Cricket, a small thopter, capable of flying with payloads under a thousand kilos. Any heavier, it would still fly short distances, hopping long parabolas from point to point. Johnny was supposedly the best. He probably was, Sasha surmised. The superiors never half-arsed on help and resources when it came to Sasha. She found him just leaving the mess hall. He stopped when he saw her.

“It’s just like a dance.” She pirouetted, tossing the chip to Johnny who caught it with the reflexes expected of a pilot. She grabbed him by the coat and slammed him against the wall. “Don’t fuck it up.” With slackjaw amazement he watched her ass recede down the hall.

Final Scenario:
She always felt alive in free fall. Clouds rushed past her. When she was a little girl she dreamed of angels, little plump baby cherubims flitting among the downy clouds. She would frolic with them, leaping from puff to puff, and they would have snowball wars. Snowballs like small comets shedding chlorofluorocarbons and ice in the thin cold reaches. She remembered catching God square in the face, his smile of shock. The wind tore the chuckle from her lips.

Ka-chump! Firing downwards the marshmallow canister, she tucked her knees and straightened into a dive. The canister impacted and exploded in a rapidly expanding bubble of translucent gelatin. She punched through and the gel absorbed her mass velocity, bulging, spreading it along its circumference. She tumbled slowly, turning to land in a crouch. She could see small impacts bursting small bubbles in the gel. They were shooting. Wait, wait, wait. The gel destructured and foamed to the ground. She slid, her guns haloing. In a smell of carbine smoke, she had dispatched an entire squad.

The layout burned bright in her mind as she unerringly traversed labyrinthe corridors, squeezing off bursts of her rifle with heavily rehearsed rote. She fired at empty doorways and danced past falling corpses whose rolling eyes showed they didn’t know they were dead. Running, wild and fast like in the green fields of her childhood where butterflies kept pace in a squall of grasshoppers and crickets, her trigger fingers blazed tracers of bullets thin and deadly. She dashed into a stairwell, shedding a mine as she ran steadily upstairs.

A miniature rocket launcher did the job, punching the door inward into a flurry of burning splinters. She ran into the smoke with her eyes closed, her trained legs flawlessly navigating every obstacle. At the desk, she stopped, knelt, and looked at the framed picture. The frame was brightly coloured, as if painted by a child’s hand. The picture showed a little girl with a beaming smile, tongue sticking through the gap where her baby teeth had fallen out. So the higher ups had a heart. Usually it was money or damaging information. Sasha brushed an unexpected tear from her eye, and grabbed the picture.

The thopter whirred into her line of vision. “Right on time. Not too bad of a chap, after all,” she said as she placed her foot on the edge of the roof and threw herself into eternity.

After the mission she took him in the locker room and fucked him until the cartoon sunshine of a thousand megatons filled her body with incandescent ecstasy. She dressed and left him in a gasping heap, smiling cruelly as she pushed out the locker room.

Deus Ex Machina

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She walked in the middle of the road, trying to know her own name.

Her world was slathered with broad strokes, with just enough detail to expose a bare minimum of information. She felt unfinished, like a badly developed photograph, as if, when her story ended, everything else would be sucked into her wake and just disappear.

She was a genie in a bottle.

A thunderstorm crashed the air above with alarming rapidity. Lightning flung their light among the green eaves of the oak-lined street. Hail raced across the asphalt. She turned and ran, determined not to scream like a  b-movie extra. The tattoo of her frantic steps led her up the drive of a house she knew to be hers. The world had melted into a strobe of shadows. She pushed through the front door and rushed into the livingroom and  threw herself onto the green velvet couch. Why wasn’t it so strange that the room and the house, but for the lamp on stand and the couch, was bare? She huddled in horror on the green leather couch. She imagined cackling deities straddling the electric arcs of thunderbolts swarming into her life like so many hornets. How wrong she was!

There was only one god and he watched her in his mind as he crafted her story. He hadn’t decided whether she would be a blonde or a brunette. She clutched at the cycling hues of her hair and sobbed, “What is happening?!” Perhaps it didn’t matter. Was she plump, or is anorexia her way of life? She knocked the lamp over in her panicked oscillations of mass. Haphazard silhouettes camped and leered across the livingroom wall in a precession of devils. She collapsed in a heap on the lush carpeting and, as soon she saw her skin shifting through the ethnicities, sobbed some more. She felt like a flesh-colored prism, no—did she really think that? “Stop it!” she screamed, knowing she wouldn’t be heard, but told. “Stop it…”

She slept the ragged sleep of exhaustion that those teetering at the brink of death or madness welcome. She awoke on a floor smooth as marble and lay for some time in a bare and cold cone of light. She could see nothing in the absolute darkness ahead. Tears sprang from her eyes and pooled on the floor. Her livingroom flickered into existence, then a local pub with regulars laughing through foam flecked lips, then the house of the parents escaping fluid memory, and it was quickly like a rolodex thumbed through at an incredible speed whirring through scenario after scenario until she started screaming.

A river of obscenities churned through her larynx like a niagara, pummeling her own eardrums. Did he want her to say that? Did he hate her—no, himself—so much? He felt uncanny pity for the figment. He soothed her tears, closed her eyes, and when she came to she was seated in front of a warm fire. A mug of hot chocolate steamed on the coffee table and a novel lay splayed on her lap.

“I must have fallen asleep,” she murmured to herself as she watched through a window the snow whitewash the land.

He smiled and clicked save. He would leave it at that.

The Green Philosopher

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Olympos Mons split open like a god vagina and magma crept over its labial cleft. Martians ran in panic while the green philosopher perched on porous stone, pointing his finger skyward, swept by and said, “I told you so.”

The river of fire poured on, throwing up great slow heat shimmers and bursts of steam from extinguished bodies. The green philosopher on his stone watched the glass cities crumple with slow grace to rejoin the earth. His large purple eyes blinked slowly.

The lava was sluggish, almost stagnant. On his stone the green philosopher, antennae drooped with thought, chinned his hand. He saw the burning now and the wasteland his land would become. He looked at the pale sky and said, “So this is the price of being right.”

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Perspectives

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The Wall: From wherever you sit or stand, face a wall. That wall is now down, indicating bottom. You have changed your orientation by ninety degrees.

Say we are on a bustling street in some major city, perhaps New York, and the street continues for a couple of blocks to the facade of a great hotel. You stand on the street as if you are standing on a wall, and the hotel defines bottom. Take a step, tentatively at first, if you must. The street teems ahead of you, Jack striding down the beanstalk; buses crawl like caterpillars and the taxis are nervous yellow aphids. You might fear you’ll fall and crash through the hotel lobby doors in a rain of shards and concierges. The sky blue condensates with clouds the space ahead, and it is as if you are in a tube, or on the side of a cube.

You take another step, and soon you are confidently walking down the wall street, falling through the flood of pedestrians that surge upwards past you. The spirit grasps you and you start running, becoming exhilarated when the world exists only on the soles of your feet and the inexorable accretion in your field of vision. The door man swings the glass doors open in a glittering arc with a smile and a Welcome! as you plunge through.

A Bowl of Water: A pond. Find any pond. Smaller is best, at first. Lakes are all right. Oceans are cathedrals. But for now, a pond. See. It’s a pool of water that collects in a dip of earth. (Next time you go splashing in the rain, take heed where your carefree steps displaces the water. Just a thought: the Great Lakes after God decided to wash his feet in the Atlantic).

Leap into the pond. Splash about, revel in the sensation of being given slack from the reign of Gravity. Now, swim. Surge into the water, try to touch bottom. Only it isn’t bottom you’re trying to reach; you’re Icarus, trying to touch the sun. Up, up, up through cool brown reaches. Plunge your hand in smooth mud and you’ve touched the roof of the world. You, at the very vertex of a bowl that brims with a thin atmosphere that protects it from the sucking emptiness of space. Lake: ascend through the blue waters to grasp the pebble that floats on the dome above, like a balloon trying to attain escape velocity against a ceiling. The ocean: sea green awash on white sand to rocky flats that give way to terraced cliffs that fade into a darkness more unfathomable than the cosmos; swim deep enough and you drift in the void, under the cathedral of the world as strange creatures ply the currents that carry you.

Footsteps: Close your eyes in a draftless room. Preferably large. Move not a muscle. What do you feel? The floor pressing against you, nothing else. Stay. Wait. Tell yourself that there is nothing else in the world but the thing that presses against your soles like a pair of poles stretching into infinity. Take a misstep and it’s like falling to China, but plumb forever. Is it real to you yet? The danger? Starvation before you even hit bottom. Now take another step. Don’t be afraid. You will fall upon one of those poles. They appear under your feet magically, but hold in your mind that there is nothing else in the world but you and these poles that court eternity. Run. Your steps are like musical chimes, notes in some mad ballet. Leap. Bring the orchestra of feet to a frenzy, for you are rushing across a void stippled with these beams without missing a step.

The Blank Slate

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Darkness, the blank slate. Pop pop pop: White-boned skulls flash, of cattle, fish, frog, dog, human, a multitude of calcified blooms on the slowly greening tree that is greeting the light. A neon skeleton of ash flashes solid and boils with leaves and keys that keen in a high wind. Picture this. The disembodied skulls swing in the teasing wind, as if hung from rope… and they are.

Golden hemp, noosed at the necks of rotting corpse bodies slowly fading solid like a photographer’s darkroom trick. Bull’s head above a half fleshed ribcage, cobra vertebrae hissing raspily against paperdust snakeskin, a weasel writhes a facsimile of life under its dead-eyed glare, shark teeth grin at the irony of deathdealer dealt its own card, a man without a face but for a skull wears his skin like a loose robe. The skulls gain a light of their own, red and green and blue and purple and yellow and orange, in soft, blinking auras.

Ornamental tree. Raiments of diffuse death hung on the worldtree, coat rack of the dead gods; the gods have dusted, turned into the very earth the ash roots in, and the goddesses have splashed, a monsoon from which its root suckle greedily.

O Domina Mea, Sancta Maria

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Enter the one-eyed bishop, bobbing gently through the zippered doorway, to inquire after the soft scent of the holy sacrament. Dei Genetrix, intercede pro nobis. Passing upon the tongue of rolled carpet red to shaft of light upon crossed altar, the upstanding faithful, fervently basking under the benevolent embrace of the Virgin Mary’s gaze, utters hotly a hoarse ejaculate of praise. Ave Maria! The bishop bows at the sanctum, a  joyful teardrop clinging glutinously to his single eye.