Punching God simply seemed like the only reasonable response.
I had closed my eyes for the last time, then opened them again to see the big bearded bastard standing there, looking all beneficent and peaceful, smiling like he expected me to be happy about being dead. Just chilling out in front of those huge, obnoxiously ostentatious pearly gates.
So, of course, I punched the smug fucker. I balled up my fists, walked up to him without saying a word, and as he spread his arms in what I think was meant to be a paternal gesture of acceptance, I knocked him right on his holy arse with one solid right hook.
Lying there, holding his jaw, he didn't even look surprised. He just stared up at me, while I shook with rage, sweat beading on my head, which was still bald even here in the afterlife.
"You absolutely atrocious piece of shit," I snarled at his white-robed form, spitting the curses like they would cut him.
"You sadistic, cruel, vicious arsehole," I growled, standing over him still wearing my hospital gown. I could feel the spaces in my flesh where the cannula had been. There was a ghostly sensation of monitors that had been attached to my skin since forever ago, but were now suddenly absent.
I glared at him, eyes blasting rage from beneath an absence of eyebrows. But I wasn't really seeing the ambivalent, bearded face. Instead, her face was burning bright in my mind. Her lovely, loving, youthful face stained with tears I once thought she would run out of, but that hadn't stopped even after however long it had been. Every visit, there had been more tears, and I knew there would be more, so many more, now that I was gone.
God didn't try to get up. He didn't try to argue, or protest. Something in his eyes seemed to accept this. It was almost like he expected it. He stopped rubbing his jaw, looking up at me with a horribly agreeable expression.
"I forgive you," he said, his voice reverberating deep and resonant, like gentle thunder.
"Fuck you, you rotten cunt," I snapped back, pulling back a bare foot and kicking him in the guts with a satisfying thud. I did it again, and again, not stopping until my foot ached from the impacts. He had curled up into a defensive ball by that point, and I took a step back, breathing hard.
As my breath slowed, feeling my lungs working in a way they hadn't for years, I heard a strange sound behind me. Something like a drain emptying, or mud sucking on a shoe as you pull it out of a bog. Turning, I saw a massive hole in the blank white ground. A black abyss, several meters wide, filled at first with nothing but absolute darkness. Then, as I watched, eyes fixed on this perfectly circular hole carved in the smooth floor, a flicker of light began to dance in the bottom of it.
"Please, don't go," came God's voice from behind me. It was softer than before, gently pleading, a protective note at the edges. The resonance, the depth, the authority were still there - but there was something else underneath them that felt oddly wrong. It was so confusing that I thought for a moment it couldn't be him. I turned to face him again, and found him standing on the spot where I had left him curled into a ball, looking just as disgustingly peaceful as before.
"You don't get to ask anything of me, you shitstain," I told him, my brief curiosity fleeing at the sight of his beatific features. "You don't get to ask for anything more from me," I declared, blood boiling as I stepped towards him once more, my fists two burning orbs of rage.
"It's ok now, it's all over, you can rest," he tried to reassure me, voice full of that supernatural authority that I couldn't trust, with a kindness that felt awfully practiced. He raised his hands in a somewhat awkward attempt at a calming gesture.
I stopped. I stopped and stared at him incredulously. I could rest? I could fucking rest?
I looked down at my hospital gown. At the marks on my arms. At the lines that showed the traces of every dose of chemo, every drop of morphine that I had to lower the dosage of every time my family visited, just so I could be something like lucid.
"I don't want to fucking rest, you turd," I growled, eyes snapping back up to glare daggers into that wrinkled face and benevolent expression. "I want to rip your damned legs off and beat you to death with them," I shouted, voice cracking from my bubbling emotions. I moved towards him again, fingers flexing as a part of me wondered if God could bleed.
He held out his arms as though to keep me away, but I batted them aside and smashed my fist into his nose. I wasn't sure if the crunch came from him or my knuckles, but I didn't care. He didn't go down this time, only stumbled back a little. So I grabbed his stupid robe and pulled us together again, bringing his face back into hard contact with my fist. I could feel my face contorting into a bestial snarl, punching him over and over again, until I felt a wave of rage and horror and despair tear itself free from my aching chest, and I let out a scream like nothing I'd ever heard before.
It felt like my throat ripped asunder as I cried out, releasing my grip and dropping to my knees, tears flowing down my face as all that I had held onto for so long finally overcame me. There, at the gates of heaven, I wept like I had never wept in all my life.
I don't know how long I sobbed for.
When I breathed in deep, sucking up all those feelings and drawing myself back together, ragged and worn though every edge of me was, I felt his hand resting gently on my shoulder.
"It's ok now," he said, soft and kind once again. Like he understood. As though he could ever possibly understand.
I shook him off my shoulder and stood up. I stumbled forward at first, but I managed it on the second try. I wasn't used to using my legs any more, and that initial surge of rage had subsided into something that couldn't quite keep me from noticing how my body felt ill-fitting.
"It's never going to be ok again, you flaccid prick," I told him, the embers of my rage still burning behind my reddened eyes. "It will never be ok for her ever, ever again. How the fuck can you say that? How the absolute shit can you have the gall to tell me it's ok, when she had to watch her mother die when she was just twelve years old? When she had to watch me fucking waste away in agony, she had to watch me become a little less myself with every visit, while she tried to go school and do well on unending exams, and deal with everything else kids have to fucking deal with already?"
I felt tears still running down my cheeks, but slower now. My eyes were sore. I couldn't look at him any more. I couldn't look at the lie of his compassionate face for even a second longer. So I turned and looked down at the yawning chasm in the floor again.
A warm light flickered there in the darkness, and I walked with unsteady steps to the edge of it. I lowered myself onto my knees and looked down, peering past the brilliant whiteness of this place into a very different space.
The light was flickering fire. Looking straight down I could see a dry, rocky road extending away from me, leading to a huge pair of iron gates that stood wide open. They didn't look like they could even close any more, they were so rusted. It was clear no-one was spending their time making sure the gates could keep anyone in, or out.
Beyond them, the darkness ended. Warm light glowed from fires that burned everywhere. Huge bonfires, little campfires, massive blazes in the distance that I couldn't see the source of. And all around them, were people.
People huddled around each pyre, in great crowds. They were indistinct, as was the sound of them that reached my ears. There were so many I couldn't possibly count, gathered in groups and wandering between them in ones and twos. So, so many people. Huddled around for warmth and comfort, collected in crowds that moved gently back and forth like a glittering ocean.
"Please, don't. You don't have to. I forgive you," came that gentle voice me from behind me, rising above the growing din of conversation that spilled up out of the hole.
With a sudden flash of revelation, I realised what I had missed in his voice. I realised what note I hadn't registered through the fog of my anger.
I turned to look over my shoulders, and scanned his face. I looked hard at the lines that creased there, and he seemed to realise I had seen something different in them. Something about him changed. Maybe it was how he was standing, or a little detail of his expression I couldn't put my finger on, but there was something desperate about God.
I looked past him, eyes narrowing. I looked again at the pearly gates of heaven, taking in the sight properly for the first time. I looked at the ornate details, the great banks of clouds on either side. I looked at how they were very firmly closed.
I looked past them. Past the vertical bars wrapped in golden filigrees, up to the rolling hills, the green pastures, the white lights shining from the brilliant blue sky.
I saw what wasn't there. Not one person. Not a single one.
"Won't you forgive me, too?" he asked, his voice tiny, pleading. There he was, all alone, the little man who made it all, begging for someone to forgive him. To forgive him for everything. Literally, for every single thing.
"Go fuck yourself, shithead," I said, as I pushed myself forward into the darkness, towards the constellations of campfires, and all the people who came before me.
They were waiting for me, smiling.
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