Playing God

It’s an odd experience to wake up in the morning and be surprised about it, but nowadays, that’s how everyone does it. Sitting around the breakfast table is no longer a disconnected experience: there’s no more rushing to finish your cereal, or grabbing a bit of toast smeared with jam and ducking off to work. Everyone sits and eats together, talking about their plans for the day, and the news, and what was on TV the night before.

Before leaving for school/work/wherever, there are choruses of “I love you”s and “be careful”s and “I’ll see you tonight”s, all spoken with more hope than conviction, and with more feeling than most are used to at 8 o’clock on a Tuesday morning.

So why is this happening? Ask anyone on the street, and they’ll just shake their heads and stride past you hurriedly. Some might frown and shrug, maybe throw in a ‘what do you mean?’, but the response is, in essence, unvaried. That doesn’t mean they don’t know the answer, though. Those head shakes are replacing knowing looks, the “I don’t know”s covering up everyone’s urge to whisper ‘Bella, it’s all Bella.’

If history has proven anything, it’s the fact that the most effective method of control is fear. Hitler knew it. Stalin knew it. Pol Pot hadn’t had a shadow of a doubt. None of them, however, had the power Bella has. None had the reach, nor the ability to get things done so efficiently and effectively. And, perhaps most importantly, none had Bella’s immunity.

The name ‘Bella’ is most likely making you thing of a girl, probably a teenager, and that’s exactly why the name came about. Nobody’s ever seen, spoken to, heard from or been signalled by Bella. For all we know, Bella could be a 70-year-old man with 16 cats who wears his slippers on his fortnightly grocery shop. Most men like that, however, don’t act like Bella – not even a little bit.

Bella is vindictive, and she holds a grudge like only a teenage girl can. She’s manipulative, and narcissistic, and proud, and jealous, and so mercurial you’d scarcely believe it. Bella spares no sinner, nobody of an ill word, and if you’re a pretty young woman, you can just kiss your life goodbye right now.

Her people live in fear – constant, nagging, immeasurable fear. Nearly everyone has a permanent crease in their forehead from the continual effort of choosing their words oh-so carefully, and a crick in their neck from watching their back. Bella knows all, she hears all, she sees all, she does all and she is all. If she doesn’t like something, it’s gone.

And people wonder why nobody likes teenagers.

The people’s idea of Bella isn’t far off. She’s seventeen, upper-middle class, with wealthy parents and a bitch of an attitude. Well, she did have parents. Then there was the strange incident when they refused to let her go to Ben Isaacs’ party, so she’d killed them. Typical only-child syndrome, don’t you think?

She hadn’t known she could do so at the time, though, so it was a bit of a surprise. One internal wish that they’d ‘just die’, and suddenly Bella’s got two corpses to deal with. Her first thought, however, was ‘I have to get rid of them’, and lo, her problem was no longer.

She’d always liked the name Bella, so she didn’t object to the moniker. Her real name’s Jo Thickett, and she lives in a nice little town called Norval, but she likes the stories her people cook up about her. Stories involving blood and guts and mountain caves, and usually a birth from fire. You can’t really blame people for thinking these things, though. After all, you’d hardly expect a well-off family from the heart of suburbia to birth the most powerful being to ever walk the Earth. And they didn’t, really. Bella may be all-powerful and all-terrifying, but she wasn’t always like this.

Before this whole shemozzle began, Bella was normal. Just Bella. When she was younger, she ate grass because she thought it was good for her, she pulled her arms into her jumper and pretended she’d lost her arms, and she tried on her mum’s high heels, despite the fact that her feet were nearly half the size of the shoes. She had thirteen stuffed animals, and she slept with all of them every night so that none of them felt left out. She’d pour her Coke into the bottle lid and pretend she was taking shots, and whenever she accidentally swallowed a black watermelon seed, she’d spend the entire day gnawing at her fingernails for fear a watermelon plant would start growing in her belly.

Perhaps her most humanising characteristic, however, is the way she used to idolise her father. He worked a lot, and he often only managed to get home after Bella’s bedtime, but he’d always come into her room and tuck her in all over again. If she was already asleep, he’d just sit and watch over her for a while, watching his baby girl dream so peacefully in her bed. Bella was a daddy’s girl, no doubt about it. She used to sit on her dad’s knee so that he’d play pony rides with her, and she’d grin and giggle and pretend she was in a field somewhere on the back of the most majestic horse in the world.

The most tragic part is, her father idolised Bella just as much. When they pulled into the garage after a long drive, Bella would pretend she was asleep so her dad would have no choice but to carry her inside himself, and he would do it every time. He’d slip an arm behind her back while the other gathered up her legs, and he’d hold her close to him like she was the only thing that mattered.

And really, in those moments, she was.

They say that when children become teenagers, they lose touch with their family – their parents in particular. Seeing as Bella lived such a normal life, it’s only natural that this applied to her. She turned fourteen on the 13^th of October, three years ago, and suddenly everything changed. She stopped telling her parents how her day was, or asking them about theirs. She hated going shopping with her mum, and just being with her dad became the most embarrassing thing in the world. Her parents sucked, her house sucked, and her life was just one big ball of crap – the only person she’d ever talk to was her best friend, Cass. Give that attitude three years to fester and putrefy, and this new, omniscient Bella is now the deity nobody wants, with a vengeance nobody deserves.

Yet somehow, amidst all this new-found power and ability, never once has Bella questioned exactly what has happened to her. A year ago, she couldn’t even get her crush, a boy named Jared Austin, to remember her name for more than an hour. Now, she can eviscerate him with a single thought – which she did, by the way, when Jared chose to look at the wrong girl in the hallway.

The truth is, nobody really knows how it happened. Not even God, which annoys Him somewhat, because He is currently a powerless 30-something-year-old living in a crumbly apartment building in Providence, Rhode Island. He’s never even liked Rhode Island, really; the clams are definitely not what people talk them up to be. Without His power, God feels so useless He’s contemplating just giving up. He doesn’t even know if suicide will work – is He even human now? More importantly, is that a chance He’s willing to take?

So now, we all just wait and wish and hold our breath, hoping Bella’s woken up in a good mood.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As it turns out, Cass never answered the phone call. Nobody really knows what happened – not even Bella. Maybe the voicemail never recorded, or Cass’ phone never got the message, or maybe Cass just didn’t care anymore.

The only thing anyone knows is that Bella is gone. We don’t know how, or why, but she’s gone.

Have you ever been in a sauna? If you have, you’ll know the feeling of that oppressive heat all around you, clinging to you and monitoring your every move so closely you can feel it within. You breathe it in, and it clings to your lungs, and you breathe out but the feeling stays. You start to sweat, and it clings to that too, and you start to panic and it grips you tight and leads you on. You start breathing heavily, which just means you suck more if it in, and soon enough it’s all over you and around you and you can’t get it out, no matter how hard you try.

Then you open the door, and you walk out, and all of a sudden you’re all you once more. You take that first breath of clean, crisp, icy air and you can’t help but smile, because it’s over. The flood of fresh air roils around in your lungs and you push out all the heat you’ve just swallowed, and the coating of sweat shrinks and dries and your skin feels tight and new and clean, so clean. That’s how we all feel nowadays – clean. Our thoughts are now our own, and we smile as we walk down the street because freedom is such a beautiful thing.

 I met God on a street corner in Lawrence, Kansas. He was smoking a cigarette, His cheeks hollowing as He took a long, deep drag from the killing stick. It was dark, just like the streetlamp He was leaning against, but I could see the ember creep up and up towards His fingers, leaving the ash in its wake to fall unceremoniously to the pavement, as clearly as if it were in cinema definition. Some of it landed on His shoe, but He didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t even seem to notice, really, He was too busy staring up at the lamp. I didn’t know what He was thinking, or if He was even thinking at all, but I’d never seen such focus in my life – and I haven’t since.

From the cold, slightly damp bench I was sat on, I watched as He pushed off of the pole and dropped the cigarette, grinding it into the pavement with the heel of his polished shoe. I couldn’t help but be awed by this man’s presence – I had no idea who He was, but He held himself high, showing no sign of discomfort, even in the cold which cut deep into the bones and gripped them tight. I shivered just looking at Him – to this day, I’m not sure if it was a sympathetic reaction to how cold He must have been, or something else entirely.

He walked over to me, confident and serene and just a little bit smug. I looked up at Him, and something about His face … I really can’t explain what happened. It felt like stepping under the shower after a stressful day to find that the water is the absolute perfect temperature; like waking up after a long sleep and feeling nothing but awake – alive. The moment our eyes met, I felt … pure.

The night was black as the pit, so cold that everything shimmered with the kind of fine mist you read about in poems about rainforests and love and Heaven, and the mist clung to everything it could reach. He stood in front of me, blocking the streetlamp he’d been leaning on so casually, and He smiled; I couldn’t help but smile back. Something about Him held me still, drew me in, had me hanging on His every movement like the fine droplets that clung to His blue dress shirt.

“Bella’s gone.”

His voice was like nothing I’d ever imagined, but everything I’d expected. It was deep and slow, with an almost lyrical feel. I found myself smiling.

“Seems that way.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Him nod with certainty. I don’t know why, but something told me He knew something I didn’t.

“What makes you so sure?” I asked, my voice tiny and tremulous compared to His.

He smiled, a tiny curl of the lips that I would have missed if I’d been able to take my eyes off Him. “The only thing that can make anyone know for sure.” His voice was quieter now, less imposing, and I had to lean in a little to hear Him, even as He turned his head towards me. “I felt it.”

Then He winked – quick, but oh so obvious – and the lamp on the corner flickered on.

In the mist and the cold and the pitch black, all I could see was the silhouette of a man in a light so yellow it was gold – it shimmered with the moisture in the air, and made the silhouette seem to grow and grow until it was all I could see, and all I could feel, and all I’d ever known.

Then it was gone, and so was He, and the feeling of pure happiness that had washed over me not moments before was replaced with the all-too-familiar feeling of cold that reached in through my skin and settled in my chest. It had ended, and there I was, alone on that street corner in Kansas, sitting on a slightly damp bench with my eyes so wide they were in danger of drying up inside my skull.

Because the streetlamp was still alight, glowing happily. It was so bright I could almost feel its heat, and the longer I looked, the more I thought I could see a shadow in the glow. And as I looked, I knew who He really was. In the dark, on the pavement of a little town at the ass-end of nowhere, I could have been anyone, and so could He. But in the dark, in that little town, I knew who I was, the same way I knew I’d just met God.