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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... cc&d magazine (v211) (the August 2010 Issue) |
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Idle Idol
DM Morales
I had a vision of how the world is going to end and this is where it starts:
Much to the chagrin of everyone who’s suffered in the last two millennia, God’s been on vacation all these years. Somewhere, circling the sun, circling the universe, finding out the meaning of life, he left us and before he turned his back, he thought, “It’ll work itself out,” and I don’t know what he expected or if he even cared, but times were at their darkest and they always had been. We were in a refugee camp, maybe I was aiding the tired, poor, huddled masses, playing out some pained fantasy of American guilt or maybe it was my turn to suffer, and maybe I was the one who was homeless, humiliated and beaten. We were hungry and tired and cold and destroyed, everyone was oppressed, but we just couldn’t die.
It was your standard refugee camp and this meant that it was hot, and we sat blazing under the sun, in what could have been a tropical paradise if only we’d had water, soap and an ocean to swim in, free of diseases once thought extinct. This was probably Africa, and I imagine the Sudan, this most beautiful and painful and tragic land with its thick smell of soil and shit and dander of large animals, and just as the human race began here, this is where it was going to end. I was sitting on an overturned, collapsed basket and some woman was sitting beside me, a black woman with full cheeks and short hair and a faded orange shirt rubbed her back and said, ‘oh my God,’ and I said that I didn’t believe in God. Her eyes caught mine and for a moment they lost that faded look that all starving people seem to carry, they became bright and intense and slowly she said, ‘No, there is no one here but us is there?’
In the middle of the camp, there begun the faintest buzz, as though one fly were circling our heads, then two, then a dozen and then the atmosphere became heavy, seemed to dampen. Then there in a cloud of midst and smoke and pyrotechnics, God appeared. He was scrawny and small; blonde haired and blue eyed and had an arrogant, weaselly look about him that made you already dislike him before he even began to speak. “Behold, my children, I have returned after 2000 years. Bow before my omnipotent presence, keeper of your fate!” He cried out. He was dressed in a purple out of style, 1920’s mafia suit that was too big for him and this irritated us further.
We all stared for a few minutes, everyone interested, but no one impressed. The woman sitting next to me turned ever so slightly and caught my eye, raising her eyebrows (which had once been perfectly shaped but had fallen to the wayside like everything else about her). “Can you believe this motherfucker?” She sneered through rotting teeth.
I crossed my arms over my chest (which once held the most beautiful, firm round breasts in the world, that now were small and emaciated and looked like deflated balloons). “Is he kidding us?” We then looked around the camp, this shrine to human misery, catching each other’s glances, no dignity left, no room for pride then one by one we approached Him.
I don’t know who it was that started it, but I’m sorry to say that it wasn’t me. Someone hit him in the face, throwing him on his back. He stared up at us, stunned and confused and indignant, but too shocked to move. Then someone went for the ribs, kicking him roughly and I almost felt sorry for him until he cried out, “Servants - bow down and worship me as your master, tremble before me - be like the dogs you are!” And my empathy kind of dissipated because I couldn’t really sympathize with someone who wasn’t even smart enough to stop pissing off the people who were beating him. Apparently I wasn’t the only one irritated because someone went for his eyes, and I heard God yelp and then luckily that’s the last thing I saw before it became a free for all and I don’t think anyone knew what was going on. We beat that rat until he was nothing more than a bloody pulp, we ripped his arms and legs off and then, just to be assholes, we ate them. After all these years of misery, it was almost easy to deal with the things that people do to hurt and humiliate one another, but somehow it just seemed wrong, just seemed too insulting to try to inflict that egomaniacal bullshit on us now.
When we were done, we looked around at each other, expecting to feel proud or relieved, but really just feeling more tired and still without any water to wash down the taste of murdered sentient being. Maybe we felt regret, but it seemed to me like he wasn’t that interested in helping us out anyway. Everyone just seemed to stumble around aimlessly for a few minutes, looking bewildered and wondering what our next move was. Nothing had really seemed to change much except that on top on everything else; I now had God guts in my hair. So we continued standing there in the middle of this barren desert, this womb where all fetuses go to die and we stared anxiously at one another, wondering, hoping, waiting.
