In the Eyes of God
by S. Nara
God loves all of her creations, but I am not one of them.
Which is why she’s looking at me the way she is. Her beautiful, unearthly face frozen, her eyes wide and brows perplexed. I can see it in the curl of her mouth, the imbalance of me. I’m a cuckoo in her nest.
She may have long since abandoned said nest, but she’d put it together with so much love. She’d balanced the Sun and the Moon, picked the trees and flowers, arranged the layers of the soil. She’d made every bird and every worm by hand, carefully calculating how they’d fit into her terrarium. She knew every face she’d ever designed, every name she’d never been told, and she’d never made something like me.
“What have they done now?” She says.
God knows all and sees all, so she knew when she saw me, how I had come to be and at whose hand.
“You barred every man, every woman, every animal, every bird from your court,” I say.
God accepts all, but she stopped wanting to see her children even as they cried at her doorstep. She closed her gates to us, closed her ears to our prayers, and curled her hands away from our offerings.
She was tired of us. Us with our infighting and rage. Us with our chaos and noise. Us with our constant suffering.
Which was why she was here now, soaking in a hot spring in the depths of her domain, beneath rocky mountains and stone sediments. God doesn’t live in the sky, there’s nothing up there for her. All her materials and designs are here. Even if she wished they weren’t.
I’m standing over her, my feet aching with the weight of my body, my shoulders struggling to keep the bulk of my head upright. The stitching around my neck is imperfect, the one across my torso is already unraveling. My left arm is banded across my front, fingers holding the threads together lest they come apart and I collapse in pieces.
God creates all life. But she gave life the ability to make more life. And there, perhaps, was her ultimate mistake. No man, no woman, no child, no animal, no bird was allowed in God’s domain anymore. But she’d never said anything about all of us together.
She pulls out of the spring and towers over me, fascinated despite herself. By her standards, I’m an abomination, a thing that shouldn’t exist. Head of a lion, body of man, wings of an eagle, heart made of an engine that is running out of fuel. It took a lot for me to get here, but I’m the first to make it this far. I wonder if God knows about the chimeras littering her doorstep.
“What do you want?” She asks me now, because she knows we always want. Pilgrimage is never really selfless although it pretends to be. All the projected suffering of making a procession trip, all the calculated difficulty, and the heavy-handed offerings; they don’t come from love as much as they come from trying to create an obligation.
Me as well, I’m an offering of responsibility. A painfully put together act of desperation that is hoping that she will take pity. Hoping she will see our dire straits and come fix what we broke.
“Help,” is all I say to her.
God knows all and she knows our follies the best.
She doesn’t want to, I can see it. She doesn’t want to go upstairs and see the mess. She wants to be here, cocooned in the heat and the salt. She can wait us out, after all. Time means nothing to her, one year or one thousand are all the same.
One day, everyone who knows where God is will be dead and she will still be here.
One day, she will feel the last breath stutter out and stop, and then she can go check. Then she can decide what she wants to do next.
“It hurts,” I say to her in the hopes that this will galvanize her.
God is loving, but she is not kind. She takes my hand and pulls it away to see through the stitching across my heart. The widening cut reveals the gears and dials that whirl around in my chest. She leans forward to look inside and smiles. “I hate this,” she says. “Why are you all like this?”
“You made us this way,” I say and I wish it didn’t sound accusatory but it was. It was hard not to be. “Resourceful and tenacious and clever. Is this not what you wanted? Ingenuity?”
“I don’t know what I wanted,” she plucks at the thread unraveling around my chest and pulls, the skin seals together painfully, hiding away the machinery of me. It’s like she can’t bear to see it. “I just wish you learned how to be happy with what you had.”
God forgives all. But it’s hard to forgive betrayal, even for her. I suppose it’s difficult to have ungrateful children.
She watches the seam of skin curiously. “You’re not even bleeding,” she breathes out with a laugh. “Are you in pain?”
“I am always in pain,” I tell her because you can’t lie to God. “But all of us are in pain and we need you.”
God is life and God is destruction. It does not surprise me when she starts to undo my stitches. I don’t move, because you can’t fight God. You can only accept her as she undoes you.
It took us decades to make me the way I am and it takes God seconds to unmake it all. My machine heart crashes to the rocks, whirring violently among the mess of flesh, bone, mane, and feather. God lets me look at her as I shut down, and I know that she will not help us.
God is eternal. We mean nothing to her.
🜁🜄🜂🜃
S. Nara (she/her) is a writer of horror and magical realism. She is based out of Toronto, Canada.