I am God's Ventriloquist

"Hello, is this James Dobson?"

"No."

Hang up.

Ring! Again the three sirens.

He picked up the phone.

"I'm quite sure it is, or at least he must be close by," she spoke assuredly.

"Well this isn't, and he's not. When are you going to stop calling?"

"Once I tell Mr. Dobson what I have for him."

He exhaled his frustration and breathed-in clarity.

"Alright, I'll be honest, this is him. Now tell me," Alfred Trope spoke brusquely.

There was a pause.

"Well...Mr. Dobson," she said slightly confused, but with absurd belief. "I found your pregnant wife drunk on my doorstep. I took her in, but it's about time that she should go home."

"Jesus."

His wife was not Mrs. Dobson, but she was pregnant, a liar, and did know the home number by heart.

He flew across the black streets in his blue BMW to the address that she had given him.

He arrived ten minutes later: 1374 Orpheus avenue.

The house looked as every other house does in Southern California at night. Lawn, trees, cars in the driveway.

Mrs. Cassandra Trope walked out, and stumbled to the car. The woman who he had spoken to on the phone watched horrified from the window. 'At least it wasn't the hospital and with someone he knew. Still,' he thought drearily, '...How embarrassing."

His wife opened the door and sat in the passenger's seat. He waved in shameful gratitude to the woman in the window, and drove away.

"So, when you went to visit your mother tonight, you ended up drunk and wandering?"

"Mmmmm....I don't know."

"What the fuck is wrong with you. There's a child living inside you."

And she started screaming.

"Oh my god!!! Owe! God, Ouch! Shit! Oh my....Ahhhhh!!!!! What's happening!!! Ohhhhh!!!! Eeeeeeee!!!!! Shi.......! Owwwwwwwwwwwwww."

And after the first infliction, he began shouting, "What's wrong?! Cassie! What is wrong? Is it the baby?! Tell me?! I'm going to the hospital!"

And she held her stomach, pressing her face against the cold glass door-window, moaned continually, with short shrieks of pain and terror. Panic words violently streaming out of her. Her legs pressed against the ground, and her body twisted in total strain and crisis.

"IT'S eating me! Oh my God it's eating me!!! What is this?!!! It's fucking eating me Alfred, it's tearing apart my insides with its claws."

"It's OK! It's OK! We're going to the hospital." He grabbed her hand, praying for reassurance, preying upon her for love, which she violently pulled her's away from.

"I'm filling with blood! I can feel it. I'm hemorrhaging fire, I feel it, the liquid coming together, weighing me down, it's pressing against my lungs----I can't breathe!! Alfred, help me!"

Left turn. And then quick right — the car almost looses control. The hospital is on the other side of the town. They are coming up near their house where Alfred had just been sleeping less than thirty minutes before.

As they approach their house, which sits on the corner on the right of the street they happen to be driving on, she stops and turns silent.

"Um, I think I'm OK now. We can go home. I want to go to sleep. I think I just need to go to sleep."

"What?!"

"Yeah, let's just go home."

"No, we're going to the hospital," Alfred says uneasily. After such a disturbance, his mind is racing in every direction. With the lack of sleep, he is easily naive.

"No, it's alright. Really I'm OK. I just want to sleep."

And suddenly realization settles into Alfred.

"You weren't serious? Oh my god..... You're disgusting."

And he went silent.

She had just about fallen asleep by this point, for her performance had been the last of her energy and she was very tired. But she managed to let out,

"I'm not even pregnant. I've just been eating a lot . . . .."

She was clearly pregnant, it seemed as though she had been carrying a growing globe for the last six months. And he wondered why he married her. He pitied the child that would enter earth from out of her womb. He wondered what existence it would have with her as a mother.

And then they both began laughing uncontrollably.

This was my wife. I am Alfred Trope, occasionally called James Dobson, and the fetus, the baby — whatever pleases you, it is of my seed.

Before all of this, my wife was at the bar, demanding the bartender to give her drink. "Pregnancy is a sickness, the baby needs it, you fucker! I am God's Ventriloquist. Give me what I want." Skin reeking of cigarette smoke and piss mixed with cheap beer. Her cat like breath spitting laughter, translucent glass-shards into everyones ears, splitting through their drunken dehydrated brains. They were perfectly amused. Our child incubated silently.

And now: Peacock feathers covered her naked body. This is how she slept.

Blonde strayed hair. Eyelids pulled shut by the gravity of her ego. Blue lungs exhaling only the most uninhibited air. Her skin did not show her many sins, her face was terribly innocent. But her will pumped black conceit.

Our child continued silently — as always, immaculate.

But I couldn't sleep. No, I was ruminating . . .

Upon my current life blending with the perfumed air of our bed:

My wife lived without rules, severely delighted with life. It overwhelmed her. But at the same time she often couldn't handle it. Other people, including her different personalities, tore her down and led her into deep waters. But these drownings were always forgotten by morning, and not ever reflected upon. Conscience is the opposite of joy. Pleasure leads to life. Pleasure is the essence of worth. What is consummate pleasure? I did not know.

My child was the object of my envy. Both my love for him and my jealousy escaped me through my hatred and devotion to my wife.

I plotted my departure from them, as well as my death. But all this was melodramatic vanity. I was helpless.

While I spun and knotted stale recollections, she dreamt her body was covered in sugar crystals. And here she thought that, though the majority of men enjoyed sugar far more so than women, she wallowed in sugar more than anyone else in the entire world. Her body was covered in white. She was paid in it, she was rich of it, claiming it more valuable than heroin or gold. "It is a, necessity of, life," she declared with a deriding confidence of aesthetic and scientific authority. "You are addicted,' they told her. "We all are," she scoffed, drifting in aleatoric emotion. "Without it, you would die as I myself would too." Laughter would circle unto weeping, and come round and round again. The marriage of the two temporamental gods, joy and sorrow, composed minutes of polyamorous splendor — she loved every fictitious character of her dream, and she delighted, for they were all mirrors of her soul, they were all of her creation. It was an orgy of self: What I, Echo, saw when I gazed into the pool beneath her eyes . . . . She, Narcissus, the prostrate assassin, preforming with eighteen other replicated bodies of herself, fornicating endlessly. Melting identical waists into one another, composing mirror pornography. Through sodomy creating new animals of doubled limbs, which used them so in lecherous ingenuity. She dreamt this every night, in different forms of course, and they continued and were connected as sequels.

This is what I saw in her. And I eventually would turn away from her sleeping body.

Laying in bed beside her, alone, with only the reptiles crawling out of the stagnant water of my mind: Unchanging, I would never die.

The only voice I heard was my own, repeating rules and praises of piousness. Swimming through time's hypodermic needle. Between past and contingency. Locked in. Uncomfortable as though waiting in a cell, but without motivation to be released.

Apathy is hell. Luke-warm water suffocates the soul, or rather infinitely dilutes it.

And it buried me. I could not escape the poisoned water.

My child will never know me. It is my gift to her.

Sleep eventually falls to everyone, and I in turn fell to dream.

Pulsing in my somnolent fancy, I dripped blindly of mud, and screamed it onto others. Deceived, I did not know why, nor what I did.

Yet it failed to touch them. Instead the mud returned to my own eyes, building layer on layer on layer. My tower to heaven, my tower of Babel, fabricating to reach a level higher than God.

I came upon my wife, she was an angel. White wings spread wide, dripping of crystal light.

I opened my mouth to sing accusations, questions of why she did not love me---only herself, and only the mud flooded out, returned, and thickened over my eyes.

I believed the mud to be of her. Discharging out of her pores.

What I took as her lack of love, of her own self glory, was my desire to be God. I craved her worship of me.

This was my pining away. In reality, her lack of worship was her gift to me.

She adored Beauty. A daughter of Love, she delighted in Life.

As she approached me, I crippled. Her essence was vanquishing.

I was vanishing.

I awoke.

As did she simultaneously. Her eyes opened with mine, and for the first time in years I saw the world outside of myself. I seemed to be floating above the bed with her in honey seraphic-tingle. My towers crumbled, I shattered and tore to pieces by the light that emanated off of her.

I became a flower, her flower. Hermaphroditical and growing towards the sun, away from the center-gravity of this world.

We gyrated in unaffected harmony, indulging in whatever liquid that presented itself. God's peaceful children of folly. Thankful, meek, and drenched of love. No worries, inhibition, anxieties, nor pride.

From laughter, our idle gods fell.

By laughter, light was shown onto our idol devils' shadow.

With delight and love, our sorrow was shaped into our idyll world.

And our child born was the resurected Christ, who carried peace for one thousand years underneath His rule.