I was standing in a field. A healthy, picturesque, kite-flying and picnic meadow. Noting the private reserve blend of temperature, humidity, and bug-free skin, I decided that, under different circumstances (and if I had possessed even a partial, malformed inkling of appreciation), I could have surveyed the surroundings for a minute then nodded my approval. I felt like me. I felt corporeal. But a whisper tickled the nape of my awareness, speaking dread with a cold, cold brevity that could not be ignored. While the scenery hummed at perception's edge, borrowing tinnitus from a dream, it forced me to pinch the back of my hand. Pound on my thigh. Shake my head in that childhood way, when inertia bails water from the ears. Confirmation denied each effort. Thoughts gelled into a theory, and a ripple of paranoia uppercutted my body hair. Had dehydration discombobulated me? After conjuring the discipline to die of thirst, had I been welcomed by the afterlife? Disbelieving its standards, I turned my head at the sound of an animalistic huff. Then probably flinched.
A bear, translucent and glowing and cut from cerulean gemstone, facets polished and gleaming, stood on all fours about ten paces from me. Its head swiveled. Its crystalline body shifted with the idle movements of a living thing.
I was looking at Bjorn Prime, and a womanly shriek rattled apart the moment. Zoe (speed lacking had there been real danger) ran away through the open grassland. Away meaning farther from me and the deity.
"Greg," the bear god said, suddenly much nearer to me. I couldn't tell what produced his voice.
"Is this revenge? For me killing your people?"
"No."
"Is she going to be--"
"She'll die before walking the necessary miles to reach civilization. We'll find her after this."
I looked around for what he might have been referencing, saw only the green and blue unoccluded by right angles. "This?"
"Greg," he said, ignoring the question, "may I propose--"
My knuckles, sent from a lead left hook, bashed him directly on the chin. An overhand right clobbered his eye socket. A spinning back elbow cracked him on the snout. When I looked at my arm as though I could eyeball the reason for its impromptu dying vine act, a cloud of mist--tinted blue and sparkling like hoar frost--engulfed me, made the new world disappear. A voice roared through my skull.
"The man, rising from the level of shit, dares to attack?"
Stuck in a thunderhead's belly, I pawed (maybe with no effect) at the glittering enclosure itself. Blurry constructs popped out of the god-cloud to swipe back at me, smacking me to and fro, one time knocking me down then lifting me by the ankle to smash my head on the ground. Disorientation, a million hooked fingers, ripped at my brain from all directions as I ran, jumped, and flew. As the mist kept me in its one-man dimension. Vaporous tendrils strangled each of my limbs, and a moon condensed to basketball-size crashed into my face. All four ball-and-socket joints cried out as axial force threatened to separate their lifelong unions. I screamed at the prospect of being torn asunder. I screamed, imagining that the cone-shaped rage blasting from my lungs could hurt, melt a hole through, the murderous fog. Thousands of grievances, held in for so long that they had crystallized, had shuddered loose, became the god-piercing shrapnel spraying from my outcry. The mist began to part, dropping me from its hold as it dissipated. My back hitting the grass triggered an escape flight. I didn't know the direction to home, but a vague "away from here" strategy fit the situation. After ten seconds airborne, a ball of gemstone, that fucking bear, had caught me, clutching his body around me. We tumbled from the sky. From an unknown altitude, after a series of predictive propulsion angles, I gained control of our descent, diving at the ground at hypersonic speed with my foe as a shield. The bear god broke on impact, a hunk of ice on pavement. A boy, maybe twelve years old, sat up in the grass, surrounded by prismatic shards.
"You're not--"
"A fake bear made from see-through rocks? Is that observation for my benefit? Never mind."
He wore a dark blue soccer jersey, black gym shorts, and black gym shoes. I didn't recognize the team. Wouldn't have recognized any team.
"A parley, first, and if you hate what I say, we can fight again. Please."
I shrugged. "Yeah, okay."
He turned away from me, began to slowly pace. Although he presented as a child, an affectation--rehearsal--sharpened his movement. "When I created the universe, it was out of boredom. I didn't have a plan, I just...put all the components into motion then hoped for something worthwhile--"
"So you're not bear god, obviously. You're...God? Like when people say 'goddamn it'? Or, like, pray?"
"No. I never demanded worship. Never dispensed a single prescription about morality or finances or...diet. I scrounged a few people for demon-hunting."
He had stopped his meandering walk, looked at me as though he expected a certain response.
"You don't have any questions? About life on other planets? Or maybe--"
"I'm still waiting for the goddamn fight, thank you."
"Of course," he said, resuming his pace-around. "Tearing open nothingness then shoving inside it the entirety of everything, of everything that will ever be, caused an unforeseen reaction, caused an accidental realm to splinter off. This realm contained--contains, emanates--magic. A byproduct of creation. The eons passed, and biology arose on Earth--"
I swung the hardest kick of my life into his pre-pubescent thigh. The boy, God, spun to face me with a punch to my chest. I flew back then bounced off the ground a few times, rolling to a stop, face up. God crouched by my head, his hand on my throat for the purpose of crushing.
"Demons and faeries mastered magic, and even a couple human lineages were able to wield their own version. Magic can hurt me, and I can't use it. In their mission to destroy The Originator of All Suffering, which is what they call me, the demons have built a monster that is--due to its magical nature and overkill design--strong enough to kill me. Kill this monster and you get paradise. Paradise to populate as you wish."
"Why...didn't you--"
"They concealed it. Demons quickly evolved to channel magic at the level of cell structure. Their population, their works, all of it is undetectable to me, because they make it so."
"Hey bud, I'm suicidal. I'm not accepting any quests from God right now."
God thought about this. "If you're suicidal, why did you fight to escape me?"
"Because I didn't want my arms and legs torn off."
"Huh."
"Why dismember the guy you want to hire?"
"My temper, mainly."
"Fuck it. If you're planning to torture me, inflict pain on a scale inconceivable to mortal minds, fuckin' go ahead. Stretch my entrails to the end of time and tell your made-up fuckin' monster that Greg was rooting for him."
God battered my face. A knuckle blitzkrieg tore my mouth and eyelids at the corners, knocked flaps of skin off my forehead and scalp. I spat teeth, felt a chunk of alveolar process hanging by a gum tissue thread. The boy’s body grew; he had to be at least six-foot-five (and wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and suspenders) when he scooped me off the ground then drop kicked my tailbone. My trajectory made the long, skinny curve of a fly swatter handle and boasted an eight-second hang time. Before I hit the ground, God intercepted my skull with another kick.
I woke up on the grass. My arms itched.
"I told you he was alive," God said.
"That’s crazy," Zoe said.
They stood over me. Zoe held a foam cup, the kind for fountain drinks, and sipped orange soda through a straw.
I sprang up, squished Zoe’s beverage in my hand. Soda, predictably, splashed on her white shirt. The extent of my planning had been achieved.
God, as a reminder that our conflict had not resolved, grabbed me in a waistlock then tripped me to the ground. He knelt, trapping my lower legs in the crook of his arm before bashing my stomach with a backfist.
"Jerk," Zoe said. "God gave that to me."
"Okay?" I asked, fighting from my back, trying to elevate history's all-time nuisance off me. "Look around you. Are you under the impression that I'm under the impression that you synthesized a carbonated beverage and its fucking container? Why the fuck--"
That sentence--and my air supply--ended simultaneously when God punched a concerning depression into my throat. Zoe, I think, rolled her eyes at my ordeal (or I imagined her doing so). Pawing at my trachea, I confirmed that the cartilage there had already rebounded.
"Should I pants him?" God asked.
"Tickle him."
"I’m going to pants him," the Creator of Everything said. He then pulled my pants to my ankles.
"Now the boxers," he announced.
Because he had knocked the flight out of me, I sat up to pound him with hammerfists. An elbow to my jaw put me flat again. When he tore my pants apart then tore my boxers off, Zoe looked at me. Without scorn, without glee, without pity, she looked at me. Which I fucking hated.
"Kill the monster," God said. "And all the demons, so they can’t build another one."
"I don’t care if you die."
"They plan to exterminate the human race."
"You mean those two guys from the bus? Or that check-writing slowpoke? No objection. In fact, I hope the only guaranteed outcome is a demon cock splitting open their fuckin' heads--"
God slapped me across the cheek, put me under a full mount. His face had aged. I saw a regular, brown-eyed man.
"Do you like music?" he asked Zoe, pretending he was oblivious to the struggle beneath him. His unnatural weight deflated my ability to fly, to even bridge. My cheek throbbed, seething in a silent scream under the casual oppression.
Zoe answered. "Certain kinds."
"Well, I like music. How about you, Greg? Do you like this?"
Without a speaker in sight, Roger Music played, once again aiding in the creation of a formative memory. I tried bucking. I tried pushing. A headbutt shattered a layer behind my forehead, destroying whatever matrix produces the will to fight, to index will at all. God stood up again. While posing like a monument to his own greatness, he crushed my sternum with his foot.
There's no sun, I noticed, rocking my head from side to side. So much yellow, but no lemon pie above, radioactive egg yolks baked into its heart--
"Zoe, dear. Get him hard for me."
God's foot creaked my bones farther. Seconds dilated, gave birth to a scale model eternity of silence. She could not have been sure about what he said. What he meant.
"Um. What?"
"The Creator commands you to give Greg an erection. Or we can see just how far your slowly-understanding head flies from an uppercut from God."
Tried bucking. Tried pushing. Hoped that she would refuse, would pick death over obedience. She had been my antipode at breakfast, which meant that possibly--
"Greg! We are duplicating previous conditions."
Previous conditions. Like Roger Music. Or someone on top of me. Zoe, trapped in anti-paradise because she demanded a stranger's apology, resembled a statue, meaning I envied her rebellion or welcomed her paralysis.
God's gleeful face looked down at me. Paroxysm wracked all my tissue simultaneously, and I jittered like a bacon strip, mid-fry. I could have killed everything. Air. Light. The ground beneath me. My eyes and ears. The saliva in my mouth. Each became an adversary unfit for tolerance.
"Greg! Oh, Greggy Boy! I'm kidding. I promise. Maybe we're the same. Maybe all of that served as a commentary on our overlapping natures."
"Yeah? Well, maybe--"
The cosmic being raised his leg, took his foot off my chest. A heart-bursting stomp punctuated the lesson. I gagged. I sputtered. The most urgent "Fuck You" of my life got stuck.
Zoe stood over me, crying. I could feel...tears and snot landing on my forehead. Then I began to feel nothing. No itching. No shame. No diaphragm trading in air.
#
Greg stood in the toy aisle, looking at the action figures. The gallery of cardboard, plastic, and garish color called out to him, even the characters he didn’t recognize from cable television broadcasts would have been assimilated into his well-worn playtime assortment. Blister packs containing pure joy hung inches away from him but also hung in a different reality, one where the toys are guarded by Zeno’s Dichotomy, no hand could ever reach them--
"You can get one," Greg’s mom said, gently swatting his butt.
#
That sound, water beaming into other water from a certain height, lasted for only half a second. Any longer would have meant negligence, a possible alteration of color or taste. Greg peed in the iced tea pitcher once every few days. He also squeezed a drop of pee into the toothpaste tube every week (which was accomplished by urinating in the usual fashion until less than a trickle of pee remained inside the urethra. From there, a dollop of meatus dew could be easily aimed.) It was retribution on a scale that kept him safe. Of course, he had to brush his own teeth using that same toothpaste, and, were he ever put in a situation that required tea-drinking, he absolutely, without hesitation, would have done it.
#
The three boys sat at the kitchen table, playing a map-and-dice RPG of their own creation.
"And now my character uses Payback, which deals back to the enemies all the damage he took during the battle."
Greg, the youngest player, scoffed. "Plus he can teleport? Plus the enchanted harpoon? That’s not fair."
"You put that your guy can lift two hundred thousand tons."
"But he’s not doing that in the game. It’s just on the paper. He’s stuck at maximum strength for the game."
"My guy is below maximum strength."
"But you gave him like forty different abilities."
"Then give Zain more abilities, stop being such a crybaby."
Greg pondered. Then he obliged. "Okay. More? Here’s one," he said, writing with a pencil on his character sheet. The words "CAN’T BE KILLED CAN BEAT EVERYONE" defiantly slanted across the ruled paper’s lines.
The older boys looked at the upgrade, then at each other. Smiles broke through deadpans. Giggles broke through smiles. Greg, acknowledging his own rashness and absurdity, laughed as well. Tears and red-faces took over the group.
His laughter subsiding, one of the older boys had a question. "Hey, Greg. Why did you think about this now? It’s kind of a random memory."
Greg shrugged. "I don’t know."
#
God screamed. My index and middle fingers joined my thumb to puncture his flesh, form an asymmetrical ring around his clavicle. With this grip, I threw him off me. Black blood wet the skin that had poked through him."Your blood tastes like shit," I told him, spitting a mixture of his and mine onto the grass. On the whiteboard hanging on the wall in my psyche, beneath the words "Days Without Actualizing an Intrusive Thought," was the number zero.
God was nine feet tall, dressed in armor so bulky I would have figured it to immobilize its wearer.
"Turn. The fucking. Music. Off."
He flew at me. I side-stepped from his path. I timed a spinning back elbow to bash the side of his helmet. As though summoned by an elastic tether, he returned to my personal space, arms and legs heaving a flurry at me. Metallic thuds rang out as he landed blows. Even when I blocked in time, the impact depressed my bone tissue like so much waterlogged beechwood. I wobbled, chased by the barrage. The ground wobbled, too. My t-shirt fell off, so tattered it no longer functioned. Cuts and scrapes and avulsions covered me--I was a tuber pulled from the garbage disposal, mid-thrashing.
As he punched me across the jaw, I trapped his gauntlet between my hands then yanked, trying to remove it. When he maintained a fist then chose tug-of-war, I ripped off his arm. Keeping the two-handed grip, I swung the arm at his head, shattering the helmet. He backpedaled then fell. I jumped, raising the limb overhead, slicing it through the air on a merciless arc that ended on his face. The music stopped.
"If I got hard before, what was your plan?"
He sputtered, spraying black blood from his mouth. "What explanation of mine could ever console you? Your obsession with answers--"
I resumed clubbing his face with his detached arm, and each individual blow could have sent a wedge through the heart of Yggdrasil. Stopping only when I thought he might be knocked out, I tossed the arm to begin peeling off his armor, which was really Step One in disrobing him, in rending his body like a rotisserie chicken. Metal groaned in my fingers as it tore along unpredictable lines. God gasped, and a series of balls of light with streaking tails flew from his mouth toward the sky, bursting against and illuminating the invisible dome above us.
"God, what did you do?"
He sat up, spat more blood, laughed. "You don’t get to kill me, you piece of shit. I told them where to send the monster."
The music had stopped. He was a boy again, sitting in the ruins of quite oversized armor. Cuts and blood and swelling had become his face. Nothing had become his arm.
"Where are we?"
"Paradise."
That should have been his last word, but intrusion in the form of a theropod’s head rammed away my plans. This head, along with the body that followed, was a living resemblance of all the Tyrannosaurus Rex illustrations I’d ever seen. The creature was scaly and shiny black, fucking huge, and instead of tiny arms that made no sense, I saw forelimbs attain a length beyond "vestigial." Its open mouth descended on the boy.
I dove, pushing God out of danger’s path, placing myself in the monster’s jaws. Dino-breath rippled skin across my naked body, and my penis recoiled from contact with a dino-tongue. I shifted to a squatting position as the god-killer tried to chew me. Extending both legs downward simultaneously, I kicked off--all the way tore free--his bottom jaw. Staying airborne, I ripped my claw-formed hands through his snout, knocking away chunk after chunk of teeth and scales and flesh and skull as I alternated my swings left-right-left-right. His roar probably translated to "What the fuck is happening to me?" I uprooted his tongue, wrenching apart the quavering flesh then tossing it away. I punched my arm through his eyeball, breaching the orbit up to my biceps, crushing in my fingers anything I could reach. Hovering down to his dinosaur hip area, I tore apart muscle and sinew, crunched bone in my hands, to pre-sever a leg before kicking it off him. The "whump" of the partial-head, one-leg monster falling down shook paradise, signaled the battle’s end.
Gore slicked my entire front. I approached God, who was standing up to greet me.
"I promise you, I would have clapped--"
"How does this work? You gave her a pop, I need to bathe--"
"Paradise means all your needs are fulfilled."
God pointed behind me. I turned around, saw a lake that definitely wasn’t there before.
"Drinking pop is a need?"
"It was in that moment."
"Okay. That kind of makes sense. Question. Unless thwarted, demons will attack mankind with the goal of exterminating it? Because you employed human beings as demon hunters?"
"Yes. Their princes vowed revenge on the entire species."
"Well, if that happens, then it’s happening. But if I can guarantee that the demons will stop endeavoring to build an anti-god weapon, can I stay here? To populate as I wish?"
"Yes."
"Forever?"
"Until heat death."
"You promise?"
"I promise. Why do you--"
I pulled his chest open like a double-door cupboard. Streamers and pinwheel tops and five-point stars, ephemera made from gelatinous light, erupted from the al fresco cavity, glowing like store signs and zig-zagging at the sky.
"Wait," I said. "I thought of a question. What does it feel like to insert your penis into someone's laryngectomy throat hole?"
God, smirking through the wad of hematomas that buried his face, answered. "Heavenly."
"I'm kidding," he amended, right before my hand crushed his heart.
The lake was nice. I scrubbed everything off me. Three types of blood disappeared into the clear water.
Zoe, hundreds of feet away from me, sat on the grass--head down, eyes closed, hands covering her ears.