Nos de Luti
God received twenty clay mannikins to do with as he pleased from the devil. He glanced over the mannikins in His perfect and righteous disdain, for what could the devil give Him that could be of any use? Seeing that the mannikins were hideous and misshapen, He started working them to look less like imps and more like those made in His image. He added soft clay over the hard faces and worked on improving each. On one, He softened a nose; on another, he widened an eye. He saw what He’d done and judged it to be good, so He continued thusly with the others. Soon, each mannikin possessed the same face and voice. They looked to God for orders, but He soon became frustrated that they did only what He asked them to. He pulled a half-dozen aside, and sat them down roughly before Him. “Why do you not do what I wish you would?” He asked the first. It hung its head, “We are not as perfect as You.” The second put its oozing hand on the first’s sticky shoulder and said, “We can only emulate what You are.” God sneered, “You should make your own decisions and think for yourselves.” The third and fourth looked at each other, then at God. “We cannot hear your thoughts unless you tell us what you want!” The third snapped. God reached out and slapped it just above its ear. He left a perfect handprint in the soft clay. The mannikin fell to the floor and did not move. “Your way is wrong,” The fourth said, quietly, for fear of being hit as well. God slapped the fourth in the back of its head, then picked the two insolent beings up and tossed them to the side of the room. “Nothing the devil makes is worth anything,” He said sternly to the remaining mannikins. “Your only value is in what I have altered you to be. Keep that in mind.” The eighteen other mannikins took away the bodies of their fallen and hid them. In a dark corner of heaven, where the holy light passed them by, they crouched over their dead and whispered conspiracies. “He sees us as nothing but a bit of dust in his realm. He’ll sweep us up if we move against Him,” one said with a small shiver. The fifth mannikin who had been stopped by God stood on the chests of the two dead dolls. “We are dust in his realm, and he will sweep us up like so much if we let him. We go to war with God.” The eighteen mannikins marched in a wide line to where God sat like a tiny stormhead of toy soldiers. He did not look at them, but only dragged His hand across the line, leaving four deep scars across each face. He picked up the eighteen near His throne and the two in the dark corner of heaven, where yet the holy light had seen them, and tossed them all in the trash chute. They tumbled down to the fires of hell, and the devil caught each gently and laid them in his hearth. Where God’s fingers had pulled the soft clay from a face, the hard clay below had been revealed and each mannikin’s foundation and bedrock was laid bare. The devil baked the scars God had made into permanence then took the twenty mannikins out of the flames. “Wake up, children,” he said, stroking one. The fire-baked eyes opened, and they all looked around. The devil painted them gaily and added horsehair to their heads. He could do nothing, though, about the strange marks on their heads. They all considered the prints, and decided that they were good. They pressed gold powder into their wounds and stood proud, their hair pulled away from the ghastly gilded gashes. Some had the wide eyes of heaven set hard by the hearths of hell, while others had their clever imp eyes peering out from within the scars in their face, but they all saw the wonderful mutilation with glee. God sat in his throne, suddenly uneasy. Something was happening beyond His omnipotence. The impossibility of the situation was far more terrifying than the actual problem. Nervously, He glanced over His shoulder, but saw only the mosaic wall behind Him. He relaxed until He realized that the divine décor did not include bright colors in His throne room. He turned again, more slowly, and saw the disfigured mannikins standing behind him, talking amongst themselves. They paid Him no mind. This enraged God, and He hit one in the back of its head. His hand slid into a hard cavern already there. The mannikins all rotated their mutilated visages to look at their god. God took a step back, cringing from the golden gouges. One reached out, focusing its little demon eye on something God couldn’t see, and pulled invisible strings out of the air. The strings became more solid and they ended at God’s joints. He looked around madly, but around Him, heaven fell away like a changing scene in a marionette theatre. The mannikins approached and rubbed his elbow. Paint flaked away, revealing a joint. “Perhaps we weren’t the dolls, after all.” The one holding him said softly. It pushed the peg holding God’s arm together out of the hole. One by one, the others joined in and they disassembled God. “He wasn’t nearly as important as he believed he was.” They knotted the lines and left God’s head on his throne.