I Met God And She Is An Atheist
by Katara Haran, Fintona Girls’ School
Years 9 – 10 Written Poetry Finalist
God sits on the windowsill outside my bedroom.
Smoke billows from her lips, weaving nebula clouds above her head.
I crawl out to meet her, eyes still puffy from the last “breakup” with my girlfriend.
Her skin shines with the resplendence of a thousand stars; her hair is lush and green.
She looks at me and her eyes are dull, duller than the tombstones decorating the cemetery near my house.
And her skin is carved with words, jagged and red, none of them nice.
God smiles at me, an altruistic patient.
I smile back, hesitant and sympathetic.
“I’m an atheist,” I say, apologetic.
She laughs and laughs, voice raw from screaming for eons.
“I am too.” Her teeth are stained with blood.
There are raindrops running down both of our faces. Or maybe it’s blood. Her blood, my blood, same difference.
All of it is red. She gives me her hair, earthy and long, to wipe the crimson away.
“I think the world is ruined.”
She looks devastated at this for one solemn moment; millions of years of grief worn like medals on her face.
Never, though, does she say I’m wrong.
For all my faults and all her wins, we sit here eating the same rotten fruit.
There is an apple tattooed on her wrist.
I ask her about it. “For my first love,” she replies. I let it be. I know all about that vein of heartbreak.
God offers me a smoke.
I decline. My ex-girlfriend is the only addiction I will ever need.
She smiles and presses one to her lips, the burning glow at the end brighter than the spark in either of our eyes.
She looks comforted for a lone second, and I want to snatch it out of her hands, just to feel that way.
I shake my head.
Who wants to be a slave to something powerful enough to trap a god?
The smoke glows a sickly green, tainted by the colour of our poisoned oceans and the money that is meant to help.
I wonder if she knows about that.
There is a bullet hole over her heart. It’s the same rounds they use in the wars. Everyone knows a soldier now.
The scars of a thousand suffocated voices are scribbled onto her ribs, hasty love letters sent from the shadows of closets, signed “destroy once read”.
Her dry, cracked lips curve upwards and white ink spills out of her eyes, consuming the constellations scattered across her dark cloudy skin, the stories indigenous people trusted to guide them for generations.
I wipe it away with the palm of my hand and lean closer to peer into the smoke, almost toppling off the ledge.
God’s magnetic allure pulls me back and she brings me closer with one skeletal wing.
She smells like sickly sweet peaches and sour milk.
“Don’t fall,” she whispers, “you’ll break your heart.”
The chemical burns staining her legs match the tiny fractures running through mine.
She continues to stare into the smoke. I stare too, trying to catch a glimpse of what’s got her so enamoured, but all I can see is my ex-girlfriend, from before it all fell apart.
God pulls it out. It’s a photograph.
She gives it a long, hard glance before handing it to me.
“Here, keep it. Put it to good use.”
And she’s gone, her only remains being a pile of lifeless cigarette ashes in the corner.
I stick the photo on my wall, next to the drawings my ex-girlfriend made for me.
I haven’t taken them down yet because I know in a night or two, she’ll call, apologies spilling from her lips, me drinking in the poison.
The photograph calls out to me one more time, emitting a rosy glow, a sunrise, the first fruit of spring, the birth of humanity, love at first sight.
I think of the scars carved into God, of the fractured mess her heart must be,
Chained to a crimson apple, blemished by the passing of time
Why does she go back to it, taking bite after bite of something rotten to the core?
I guess we all have our vices.