4-19-05 11:07 PM
OK, So I Died
by Ryan Munevar
Word Count: 1,054
OK, so I died. World of shit, right? No, it wasn’t really that bad. It’s warm, like lying in a bath with the lights off. Not quite silent, not quite loud, but you can hear this roar coming closer. Gets really loud, and suddenly the roar stops, and I hear a drop of water hitting a pool.
The lights go up slowly, and I’m there.
It’s a doctor’s waiting room. Oil paintings of a boat on the wall. Nice calm music playing.
A receptionist looks up.
“He will see you now.”
I look at her and give a smile.
“Who will see me?”
“You know who!”
“But I want you to say it.”
She stares into my eyes and gives a cold smile before saying it.
“God,”
“Cool, man.” She twitches at the word “man,” and I walk through the only door.
There’s nothing in the room except for a chair next to a bed with this fat guy on his side watching TV in it. Pillow under his head.
“Close the door,” he says.
I’m just standing there. He doesn’t seem like God.
“I’m going to pretend I don’t know everything about you, everything you’re going to think, everything you’re going to say, for the next few minutes… Why? Because I’m just so fucking bored.”
He looks over at me.
“How’s it going, man?” he asks with a low chuckle.
Pause… Then. “Are you fucking with me?” I ask.
He starts laughing.
“Fuck yeah… That’s the spirit! Come on boy, we’re going for a ride.”
He stands up, naked; his fuck stick was huge. I don’t mean to say God had a hard on, but His was a bigger limp than any porn star’s blood-filled and purple robe I had ever seen.
“Toss me my bathrobe.”
I looked around and saw it hanging from the chair. I picked it up and handed it to him.
“Yeah, the ladies like it too.”
“That’s cool, man, that’s cool.”
“Serious, they tremble.”
“I don’t doubt it, man.”
“Like a fucking stallion!” He belched and motioned for me to follow him.
We walked through another door into a garage with 20 different sports cars and 3 sleek spaceships.
“Wait, you thirsty, man?” he asked.
“Urgh… Yeah, a little.”
“Gin and tonic, right?”
“Yeah… Sounds good.”
“I like Sake myself, one of the few good things to come out of Asia after I squatted it into existence…”
He walks over and makes the drink for me. Then pulls a bottle of Sake out and opens it.
“Toast,” he says to me, holding up his bottle.
“To what?”
“To the Japs,” he laughs evilly, and we clink, throwing back a fat gulp each.
He leads me to one of the sports cars, and we get in. A red one.
“Yeah,” he says. “I like this color. Red is life; haven’t you noticed it yet? Blood, fire, sunsets, shit, I even colored magma, the earth’s blood, red. Nobody ever seems to understand. That’s what I like about you. You seem to get it… Sort of. Don’t go getting an ego now.”
“OK.”
“Get in.”
“We start driving, through a tunnel, then out along the coast; it’s California, at night, light traffic.
“See, I think I might’ve fucked up something fierce this time. I’ve got all this power, but I have more questions than answers. One day I woke up just floating out there in the darkness. Literally, no stars, no gravity, no physics, nothing. Then I feel something separate off, and then more split from that. But I can control it. A while later I start putting worlds together.”
God grows silent as he drives.
I take another sip of gin and tonic. He should have been a bartender.
“I know you got questions, but shit, I’ve got my own. I don’t know what made me. I want to know why I was made. Fucking women, and I’ve had them all, is like masturbating to a charcoal sketch of some girl you imagined one late night. I made you, what you are, hoping to get some kind of clue. But I don’t have one yet. It was that thing you said before you put it into the skinny girl with big tits and the nose ring in Olympia. “Let me stir it around in you like God’s dick in the sea monkey jar.” Fucking struck a chord, man. You got it, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, shaking it up.”
God threw another swig back. The car swerved a bit.
“Don’t worry, man, I got it.”
He stayed in the lane, but I could see him tearing up.
“I don’t know who made me.”
He cracked his neck, first right, then left.
“Are you alright?” I ask him.
“No… No, I’m not alright. I’m tired, I’m…” he trails off.
The wind roaring by the car grows louder as he pushes the pedal down harder.
“For so long I have made and watched a billion creatures live, die, and pray for me.”
“What do you want?” I ask.
“Fuck it, man… You want to die with me? You think you’re ready for that kind of leap?”
“No.”
“Fuck it, man… Let’s do it!”
And the car crashes off the end of the road through the metal railing and into the ocean.
God screamed as we flew into the ocean.
So now God is sitting in a straitjacket. His hair is all fucked up and wild.
I’m next to him in a black suit, black shirt, and dark blue tie.
I don’t even know how to tie a tie.
We are on a bench in a garden. With plants I’ve never seen before. They wave and undulate in the air. But then I realize they are alive, like sea anemones. It’s weird, but I don’t think of plants as alive even though they are.
“Where are we?” God asks me.
“I don’t know, but if you don’t know, then I think we got problems.”
A giant blue snake. About 10 meters long and a meter thick, it slid out of an anemone. It slithered right up to us and raised its head; at least I think it was a head.
“You are now in the garden of space… This is the afterlife for world creators.”