The Flying None

by Cody Goodfellow

  One might credit the possibility of an otherworldly, advanced civilization attempting to manipulate us by way of our religious beliefs, before naively accepting anything so trite as an actual message from God.

  Oddly, the world’s religious leaders remained conspicuously silent, while fringe cults and lay-busybodies strove to outdo each other with claims of secret knowledge or conspiracy theories. By the close of Thursday’s news cycle, the consensus seemed to be Probably Aliens, Maybe Actually God.

  None of this was of any consolation to the average person in the street, who was by turns explosively gleeful and utterly unhinged, their minds running wild with unanswerable questions. The only answer was one that used to give solace, but now took on terrifying new meaning: It’s in God’s hands, now.

  One big answer fell heavily on Friday morning when sectarian fighting in Kashmir, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria and Venezuela ground to a halt amid reports of systemic ammunition sabotage. Soldiers, police, freedom fighters, terrorists, militias and angry, disturbed white individuals everywhere found themselves shooting flowers at each other.

  Images proliferated of men and women who should have been dead displaying poppies, carnations, roses and crocuses pinned to their uniforms in lieu of bullet-holes. Fairy-rings of assorted wildflowers bloomed on city streets where improvised explosive devices had been detonated.

  Hostilities were awkwardly called off worldwide as investigations were launched, ordnance was inspected and uncontaminated munitions were hastily sought out and sold at staggering panic prices. Chinese occupation forces were forced to resort to tear gas and rocks to put down spontaneous revolts in re-education camps across Tibet.

  By the end of the day, global media spin chased its tail in a cyclical debate between those who hailed God’s new hands-on approach and those who rebuked the supreme being’s forceful negation of free will with such stunts; the latter group was not eager to gloat when, on the morning after the disquieting holiday, all the bullets went back to killing people.

  As thousands worldwide perished in the Flower-Gun TikTok Challenge, even the most passive observers had to ask themselves, Had God made a mistake, or was this stunt a passive-aggressive way of demonstrating His absolute power, while leaving humanity to save itself?

  All but lost in the shuffle on the day God went public, an older Caucasian woman in a white robe and purple veil declared on a well-produced YouTube video that all of this had been prophesied. She also foretold the interruption of the world’s wars on the following day, and hinted at more and harsher miracles to come, if humanity didn’t awaken to the truth.

  God’s reawakening was in response to the self-sacrifice of a troubled but saintly young Californian girl named Gala Murowski, who’d penned a poignant and prophetic diary that would soon be available for purchase, pending a three-way bidding war between the world’s largest publishing houses.

  Gala could listen to them gnawing mindlessly at the ontological bones of the chaos she’d wrought if she wanted to. She could even hear them praying to her, feeding her fearful worship like coins in a collection plate, but she quickly got tired of it and tuned it out. An unborn fossil in her asteroid cocoon, she tumbled and marinated in doubt.

  Retracing her steps didn’t get her anywhere, but it helped to pass the time.

  1) She went looking for God and found nothing.

  2) She went on a rampage against those who’d lied to her.

  3) She became God, or some kind of god-golem cobbled together by a cabal of self-righteous old ladies hopped up on pop spirituality and blunt-force antidepressants.

  And what had it cost her? Her life, her body, her sanity, because how could she deal with these things, even if they were really happening, and not go utterly out of her mind?

  Her body, at least, she could live without. Her gangly, ectomorphic vessel of sufferation with its endless allergies, outbreaks, congenital defects and maddening fragility, was just a vehicle to convey her soul from one embarrassing heartbreak to the next, so she wouldn’t weep if she never found herself inside it again.

  But to be this thing, this all-powerful monstrosity . . . clearly, the new season of her life she’d hoped to begin by entering the nunnery had already jumped the shark.

  This new body didn’t have a belly-button, but it had a big floppy dong, what was that all about? It didn’t eat or excrete waste, it didn’t reproduce . . . Would it be more logical for a deity to have no genitalia, or both? To be a hermaphrodite, capable of the ultimate self-fulfillment, would be pretty cool, but even she wouldn’t want to see that in church. These women had baked their own repressed fantasies into their creator, which, behind the flickering masks it wore in public, looked more like Fabio than the author of all creation.

  She hated all of it. The asteroid-prison, the public appearances, the angels . . .

  She hated the angels worst of all.

  The angels had been at her all morning, using her as a tool to tweak the world with a laundry list of Rube Goldberg miracles and signs and portents to stampede the human flock in the right direction. See Gala the Miracle Cow, Metaphysics’ Cruelest Mistake!

  None of her suggestions, from abolishing plastics to letting her defend Earth from meteors and befriend all children as a giant flying turtle, got a moment’s consideration from the angels who milked her.

  They looked like real old testament angels, with thousands of eyes and wings and hands bestowing blessings and brandishing swords all over them, but their heads were honeycombs with tiny, wizened librarian’s faces peering disapprovingly out of every pore, and their wings said, shhhhh, even in the vacuum of outer space.

  When they finally left her alone, she found herself unable to stir from her prison, let alone snap her fingers to spontaneously combust every living rapist, though she could see and hear anyone at will.

  So naturally, she spied on her exes.

  She saw the ex-boyfriend who wouldn’t get off the fucking couch if it was on fire when they lived together, now working two jobs and racing home to cook dinner for his sick girlfriend.

  This other one who could never talk about his feelings, pouring his heart out in a clanky, swooningly sincere song he wrote for a girl he’d only just met, played on a guitar he’d stolen from Gala’s mom’s houseboat.

  The guy who knocked her up and couldn’t bother to hold her hand for the abortion tearfully singing a lullaby to a newborn baby in an incubator with tubes up its nose and down its throat.

  She saw all of these and more until she couldn’t bear it. She realized that she’d hated them because they couldn’t put in the work to show they loved her, when she was offering nothing like love in return. She thought they were going to save her, and hated them for failing.

  That was what she was missing, why the universe felt so hollow and empty, just like the world, just like her heart. She’d hoped as only someone who’d lost all other hope to find love, the thing they always said, without any evidence, that God was full of. To feel something touch her heart that couldn’t be ruined by a stupid boyfriend or the Fire, or a bunch of nutty nuns.

  She’d never really felt it herself, aside from fleeting sparks of it when she was drunk and watching giant monster movies. She’d always known what was missing, but she blamed everyone but herself. Her absent father, narcissist mother, the aforementioned jerk-off boyfriends . . .

  How was she supposed to love others when no one had ever really loved her? How was she supposed to feel something that the world had denied her, and that she’d come to suspect was just a conspiracy to sell dead flowers and gross chocolates and yoke people to each other so they’d be easier to control?

  It was this issue that made her the perfect pawn (or whatever the pointy guys on either side of the king and queen were in chess). She was so powerful and so dangerous with her rampaging resentment and fuck-off attitude because she had no real connections to the world, nothing to anchor her when they transplanted her into this fucking abomination. In her
loveless, unexamined bitterness, she was a perfect wrathful Old Testament sky-daddy.

  But even if she didn’t know what love was, she was still way out in front of the angels holding her leash.

  Physicists are saying the whole entire universe could well be one gigantic neural network, and all the stars just synapses in a brain.

  Why would the ingenious author of all of this stomp around on one planet? Why would they get involved in the lives of the insignificant people on one infinitesimal speck of dust out of billions? Maybe they’re just busy being God somewhere else, but he’ll be back some day and we’d better be ready, right?

  It was so tough not to end up stuck in the same insane rut that had trapped her captors and most of humankind, not to think of God as a reflection of us, or us as his defective, shameful offspring.

  Even easier to see all of this as an accident, a botched simulation signifying nothing, destined to sputter out in universal heat-death, collapse and start all over again, only dumber. It set one free of any blame, any responsibility to try to fix it.

  But if those dope-smoking physicists were right, maybe God was all of the stars, all of the void itself, and we were tiny but critical elements in its awakening.

  Maybe the whole universe was alive but asleep, trying to wake up and get it right just once in the fleeting eons between bang and collapse, waiting for us to somehow initiate that transformation. Its awakening would be an unthinkable state-change for the whole universe, not a bunch of dumb theological pranks and special effects to coerce good behavior and sell books. Maybe she and these boomer grannies deserved each other. But maybe there was a way out.

  Love.

  If it was her job to fill the world with love, the world was in deep shit. She was a seething cauldron of Green Gargantua energy. She’d tried faking it for most of her life and knew it was futile. She couldn’t pretend long enough to buy her mom a decent Xmas present, so how could she fake it so hard that the universe resounded with the zinging of her broken heartstrings?

  That was impossible, as impossible as finding eternal love with another haunted meat-sack. How could she unconditionally love a world of assholes? She could play the part she’d been cast in and say, okay, I fucked you up, stacked the deck against you from the beginning, so let’s start with a clean slate . . .

  And then . . . what?

  She hated all of her ex-boyfriend Eoin’s stupid superhero toys, but maybe it was because, for all their loud, dumb underwear-outside-the-pants he-man bullshit, they told the truth.

  Take the Hulk, with whom she felt an uncomfortable kinship. Bruce Banner was a wallflower until he lost his temper, and the angrier he got, the stronger he got. So it was with Gala as a god, which was essentially an animal that fed on worship like mold feeds on bread.

  The belief, the begging, the prayers flowed into her like air and sunlight, like Popeye’s spinach or stolen prescription meds. She thrived on it, grew more powerful and sure of herself. It was almost worth being imprisoned to feast on the world’s blind, idiot love.

  And then it hit her. Something her mom told her once, when Gala asked why she never talked about Gala’s father. Didn’t they love each other at least a little, or at least more than once? You can’t love until you forgive. Mom was using it to rationalize being a cast-iron bitch, but she had a point.

  And the Lord Gala looked down upon the face of the Earth and spake, I forgive you all. And then she repeated it, because she hadn’t even convinced herself.

  No, you’ve got to mean it. God’s word isn’t so because they say it. It’s true because they speak the fucking truth. So make it true.

  She looked down on the world and revisited her exes and forgave each of them in turn, from what quickly became a pretty rote script, because they all tended to run to a type, as did her breakups. I can’t hate you for not giving me what I couldn’t give you. We weren’t right for each other, and I hope you find what you’re looking for.

  Eoin was caught red-handed masturbating over pictures of her taken the one time he convinced her to try cosplay in bed, as Phoenix from the X-Friends, or whatever. The only vaguely romantic thing he’d ever said to her was that he always crushed on Jean Gray because to him, the perfect girlfriend was someone who could read your mind and still love you. I forgive you for not being what I needed you to be, and for not being the superhero who could transform you into a functional adult. Whoever promised you that didn’t do you any favors.

  She felt a weight lifted, and her ex seemed to feel it too. Tucking his penis in his Underoos and looking around shamefacedly, he saw with new eyes the toy dungeon which he’d accepted in lieu of a life outside.

  Just then, the water heater burst and let loose a flood that would destroy his entire collection, but he would go on to spend the insurance check on a van and set out to see the world he’d neglected, and maybe even find someone special to share it with.

  At St. Candy’s, Mother Mildred, Wanda and Galadriel watched The Masked Singer. Gala entered the television and caused the former NFL running back in the platypus costume to remove his head in the middle of “Please Come To Boston,” and address them in Gala’s voice. Mother Mildred licked her greasy bifocals clean and put them back on, then screamed.

  “I forgive you ladies for not believing me, and then for locking me up when you did. I didn’t mean to cause all this trouble, and I didn’t mean to upset the safe space you’ve managed to find in the world. I didn’t appreciate your hospitality, and I resented you for not accepting me right away, and I am sorry for that. Do you accept my apology?”

  “Will you get out of the television?” Wanda asked.

  “That’s not in the spirit of an apology . . . ”

  “We accept,” said at least two of them.

  “To be honest, I thought you were all assholes, but I got jacked by some real industrial-grade assholes who have a secret lodge or whatever on Angel Island, and they made me kill myself, and they’re making me do all this shady god-shit. I know I wasn’t the best team-player, but I didn’t know how to ask for help. I’m asking you now as a sister, in the name of universal love and nothing more, to help me royally fuck their shit up.”

  The TV turned itself off. The sisters looked sidewise at each other, each waiting for the others to speak. In the end, not one said a word, but none of them reached for the remote.

  Gala embraced each of them with a healing wind that cleansed the entire nunnery of its persistent flea infestation and disintegrated the leaf-blower before making her last visitation.

  She saw her mother sniffling over her third bottle of wine as the local news covered a candlelight vigil over Gala’s body lying in state at Marin City Hall, and reviewing the terms of a contract to ghostwrite Gala’s diary.

  I forgive you, Mom. You got a bad hand, but you thought you were giving me better than you got. You’re probably convincing yourself even now that forging my diary is just your way to protect and nurture my aura, or whatever. I love you.

  Mom spat her wine back into the brandy snifter she’d been guzzling from and looked around, then began crying in earnest. She hugged herself to catch the ghost of a scent of her daughter’s hair that had wafted through the room.

  That was amazing, Gala thought as she returned, exhausted but exhilarated, to her womb. She’d just done that. She’d touched them all by forgiving them, by letting herself love them for what they were, not for what they could have or should have given her.

  How stupid I’ve been, she thought, but she let it go. Love and forgiveness were a power unto themselves that she could have wielded like an archangel’s flaming sword all along. And these old women were powerless against it.

  Now she was ready for the hard one. She could forgive, but did she deserve to be forgiven?

  Far as she knew, she was all-powerful, but she still had no Internet access. But Google be damned, she had only to say the girl’s name, when she heard a voice praying. Though it was not her voice, it repeated that name, over and over.

/>   A girl lay in a hospital bed surrounded by beeping machines. A man sat beside her, head down, hands throttling each other on his trembling knees. “Lord, I haven’t asked for much but I’m asking you to spare this girl. She’s not my blood, but she’s my heart. I was hard on her and I bear some fault for driving her to this, but she sat out all night waiting to talk to an angel which caused her flare-up, so maybe some of this is on you, too . . . ”

  She drew nearer, close enough to hear the tears falling onto the sheets of the bed. “Tammy’s a good girl, she’s her mother’s only joy in this life, so you . . . you take care of her, and I’ll try to do better. I’ll try . . . ”

  She leaned in close and whispered into his ear, “I will if you will.”

  Time to go. Only a fleeting glimpse of the wondering, fearful look on his face as he searched the otherwise empty room, and she wondered if he heard the angels singing, their golden-throated voices ringing out through the stubborn void.

  It was all she could do to return to her rocky cocoon before they came knocking. “We have some preliminary sketches for a nondenominational afterlife,” said the Archangel Esme, her prim compound-face of librarian faces simpering with seraphic self-satisfaction.

  Esme, I forgive you, said the Lord Gala. I was lost and you thought you were saving the world the only way you know how when you did what you did. It’s some next-level twelve-issue crossover blockbuster shit, by the way, if you’d written it as a comic book and put Phoenix in it, my ex would have spank bank material to last a lifetime.

  But I forgive you. And I love you.

  Did the impact-scorched surface of her asteroid prison begin to crack just a little? No, that was just gas, which was weird, she’d never eaten anything, like it was Old Testament gas from when God used to eat those goats, what kind of asshole demands animal sacrifices and doesn’t literally eat them, anyway? I mean, who makes these rules, if not God?