Young Writers Society

      It was Superbowl Sunday, but there was nothing super about another miserable day of work at the city Burger King. This was no ordinary Superbowl. Not only was my team in the game for the first time in thirty years, but I had tickets. I was going to go. It was going to be the greatest day in my entire life.

      But then my shrew of a boss called me into work that night at the last second, meaning those five-hundred dollar tickets were going to go to waste.

      “You don’t always get what you want,” she egotistically told me over the phone. “Give those tickets to someone who could use them.”

      Fat chance. My night shift got even better when I was scrubbing tables, and a fat black woman waltzed into the eatery.

      “Hello! Hello!” She cried out at the top of her lungs, dressed in an oversized violet dress, her thick black hair braided into yellow ribbons. “I am here to preach the heavenly word of the Holy Spirit!”

      “Oh, please,” I muttered to myself, rolling my eyes.

      “God has spoke to me!” She belted, a gleaming look in her round, green eyes. “He told me to preach his word right here in this Burger King!”

      The whole thing was so ridiculous, I couldn’t help but laugh. “What’s so funny?” She asked in return, placing her hands on her hips, turning her droopy face towards mine. “Why are you laughing? I don’t think there’s anything at all humorous about my God.”

      “Your God. Right,” I scoffed, continuing to scrub down the same table. “Let me ask you this. Are you stupid?”

      The woman’s mouth dropped as she raised one thick eyebrow to the top of her forehead. “I don’t think I am.”

      “Then why are you here?” I asked. “Because some man in the sky told you to preach his word in the local fast food joint?”

      “He did!” The woman assured me. “He told me to speak right here!”

      “There is no God!” I yelled. “And you’re a retard. Anyone who believes in God is a complete idiot. It's all just a scam for fat preachers to sell books and make money. You know what? Screw it. I hate this stupid job, I hate my dead-end life, and I hate this Earth. And I hate Christians. I want to go kill myself.”

      I dropped the washrag back on the table and stormed out of the restaurant.

***

      My only concern on the drive home through the dark and gloomy night was one thing. The Super Bowl. I was going to get to the stadium that night, even if it meant the stupid traffic laws would have to be cut around just a little tiny bit.

      The light was green, but the truck in front of me stopped anyway. “Come on,” I scoffed, repeatedly honking my horn. “Move your stupid truck, you moron!”

      Finally, the car moved, but it was too late; the light was already yellow. No you don’t! I said to myself. I was finished. I was done. I was done being bossed around that day. I was done being tossed around by the feckless thing we call life each and every single day.

      The light was red.

      I gritted my teeth and slammed down onto the gas pedal anyway.

      A white minivan crashed into the front side of my used sports car.

      I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

      *Crash*

      I saw my dead body on the street down below, blood spurting from my head, and I wanted to cry, and I wanted to feel the pain but I felt nothing at all. I drifted further up, phasing past the trees and the grass and the city streets, past the buildings and taking to the clouds.

      I could see the whole city from there and the place I once called home, as slowly but surely I rose past the sun, expecting to be burnt but not even feeling the least bit warmer. I looked to my left, and then to my right. Two angels held warmly onto me as I looked down below, but there were no feet. I had no hands. I tried to breathe but I had no lungs.

      I ascended to a bright blue and green oasis. A gargantuan temple made of silver stone laid before me near a bed of roses. A mightily earth-shattering sound rumbled like an earthquake, as a blinding light appeared in the distance.

      “Who am I?” A gravelly, comfortingly booming voiced cried out. “Tell me who I am.”

      I couldn’t look at the light. I looked at the angels, who weren't looking at it either. But I tried to do it anyway and I just couldn’t! I couldn’t move, like he was holding me down without laying a single finger on me. “You’re…you’re…” I muttered, not knowing how I was able to speaking without a human body.

      The earth-shattering noise rumbled again, as if he heard every single thought I had. “Say it!” He roared in an eternally powerful voice. “Say my name!”

      “You’re God,” I responded in a feeble voice.

      “I’m your God,” he responded. “And do you know who this is?”

      The blinding light consumed me even further, until I could see nothing else. It then turned to darkness.

      The woman from before appeared in the light. “That’s…that’s…”

      “She needs no name, but I call her my child,” God said. “A flawed child, but a child at that. The only difference is that she embraced me, while you only mock me. For twenty-one years, you did nothing but mock me! Try to turn my other children against me!”

      “So what are you going to do?” I shouted. “Send me to Hell? Good! Satan doesn't torture people like me, Satan makes people like me his king!"

      God cackled in exchange, a single strike of lightning going off with a thunderous roar. “That would be too easy,” God said. “You aren’t going to die. Not today.”

      “Not today? So what? You’re going to send me back to Earth?”

      “That’s right,” God responded. “You’re going to stay on Earth forever!”

***

      Two-hundred years have passed. Glaucoma took my eyesight so I can’t see anymore, while my legs and muscles have become so weak that I can no longer walk. Cancer ripped me apart when I was eighty-years-old, so for the past one-hundred and twenty years I’ve done nothing but breathe from a tube lying completely comatose.

      But I’m still alive. All my family is dead. All my friends are dead. But here I live, and I still feel the pain each and every day. Every beat of the heart hurts, every breath I take a swelling, blistering pain. Never again will I feel the warmth of a radiant sunshine, the smoothness of the sand from a walk across the wonderful beach. The kiss of a true love, the joy of taking home a paycheck every other Friday afternoon. All the simple things in life I once enjoyed are now gone forever.

      I don’t deserve this. Nobody does.

      God knows I don’t deserve this.

      I know you can hear me, God.

      I’m sorry.

      Please set me free.