Metal Dwarf

God told me yesterday that he doesn’t find his wife attractive anymore.

He doesn’t like to look at her or dress his palm around her soft neck skin or share the same bed. She’s the mother of angels, proposed to be the most beautiful creature in the heavens and she cannot grow old or ugly or double-chinned, but God has still grown tired of her looks. Her beauty is dull and God cannot stand for the dull. He wants to get a divorce.

"How does she feel about you?" I asked God, but He just shook His head.

He told me, "She loves me just as strongly as the day we met, she never gets tired of my company, never considers leaving me no matter what I do. I feel so awful about it. I cannot leave her without being cruel."

I did not respond to God, letting Him get the weight off his chest as He always does with me. My attention was busy with a young freckled pixie which had landed on my palm, giggling and teasing me with caress-gestures as pixies often do to humans for fun, knowing that we find them sexually enticing but could never have them in bed due to size constraints.

"Tomorrow morning," God continued, "I’m just going to have to level with her, tell her she no longer interests me in the slightest and then give her the papers to sign."

God must have already told her by now, already broke her heart. I wonder if that is why the weather is so bad today, the sky is black and purple and it is raining tears instead of water. Well, I am just guessing they are tears because they have a salty-thick flavor. Maybe it is raining sweat instead, maybe someone is sweating really hard up there in Heaven. Maybe God is making love to a new mistress angel and pump-sweating away on her. And all the colors in the city are much less intense than usual, and textures are a lot more bland.

I go to the bookstore and find that they no longer carry any books besides the bible. Even the horror section is nothing but bibles and biblical references, the same with the mystery section and the fantasy section. The erotica section is empty, however, as well as the gay and lesbian section, as well as the black literature section, as well as the science and science fiction sections. But bibles are everywhere else in the bookstore, especially in mainstream.

I decided not to buy the bible since I have no use for it. I meet God for lunch every Tuesday and if I ever have any questions concerning life and ethics, I can just ask him then. It is difficult to look things up in that big book. He tells me that it is outdated anyway. He would update it, but people seem to be getting along pretty well without religion these days, which is what He always wanted.

Today is very dull. Perhaps God did not confront His wife yet, perhaps He hesitated and is sulking in His private chambers right now. His emotions are overwhelming to the earth, reflecting upon us how dull it is to be married to the mother of angels. I’ll have to check on Him next week, see if He’s doing okay. I bet He’ll be quite finger-frustrated if He hasn’t told her by then.

I’ll probably end up pissing Him off in some way, for very little reason. He becomes quite irrational when frustrated. I guess everyone is like that.

I go to the park to discover the grass is not grass-green anymore, it is olive-green or maybe navy-green. The trees are the same way, dull and plain-ugly. Hopefully, this won’t go on for much longer.

I am being approached by an angry dwarf made of metal, or perhaps he just has metallic paint covering his body. He walks up to me with a battleaxe raised above his head as if he wishes to cut my head away from my neck.

Dwarves are everywhere these days. Ever since the environment turned to shit, the government ordered dwarves to be supplied to every household. This is because dwarves have the ability to recycle anything they eat.

For instance: A man drinks a beer and then feeds the leftover bottle to his household dwarf who then digests the bottle and reforms it into a jar of pickles, which is excreted out of its behind for the man. They saved the planet and everyone thanks them. There was once a slogan that said, "Save the planet, own a dwarf."

The little metal man arrives to my waist and stares up at me with an angry beard.

"He doesn’t really like you, ya know," says the metal dwarf in a rusty tone.

"What do you mean?" my eyebrows ask him. "Who?"

"Chuck," replies the metal dwarf. "He just pretends to be your lover because he feels sorry for you. But he really doesn’t like you at all."

"What are you talking about? Who is Chuck?"

"God," replies the dwarf. "Don’t you even know God’s real name?"

"That’s not his real name. Who told you that? Anyway, what do you mean lover? We are just weekly companions."

"Get off it," squeals the dwarf. "Everyone knows you two are having an affair. Everyone knows God is divorcing His wife for you. But He’s really not in love with you, He’s just pretending."

"Look, I am friends with God. He came to the decision that He would divorce his wife within my presence, so I might be the cause of His divorce in that way. But He is not sexually attracted to me."

"I know, that is what I’m trying to tell you. He is pretending."

"God is not interested in me, nor am I in Him. You are terribly mistaken."

"He loves me, damn it!" screams the metal dwarf.

"So that’s it," I say. "You are just jealous of my relationship with God, even though it is so small and meaningless."

"Charles was my high school sweetheart," says the dwarf. "He said we would be together forever."

"Well, He doesn’t like you anymore. He said you’re too short for Him."

"You liar! You just want Him all to yourself!"

"Look, I’m sorry. He just thinks I’m the sexiest man of the year and has forgotten all about you."

The dwarf kicks me in the gut and I pile to the ground, raises his axe, ready to chop off my head.

I scream, "If you want to kill me I’ll go to the heavens and be closer to Him than ever."

"Not if I send you to hell," says the dwarf.

"Are you kidding? You know how God is about sending muscular young men to hell."

"You better stay away from Him," screams the metal dwarf. "This is my only warning."

He stomps on my stomach with his mechanical weight and my breath harsh-squeezes a groan. Once the pain leaves and my eyes open, I see the little metal man running through the trees of the park, chopping at squirrels with his bloody axe.

I’m sure God will find this story terribly amusing when I tell Him next Tuesday. He’ll forget all about how His wife is horribly dull just as I’ve forgotten about how horribly dull this day has been up until now. Maybe He’ll be up for getting some high class prostitutes after we eat lunch. Or perhaps He’ll admit that the dwarf was telling the truth and He really is attracted to me, He really divorced His wife for me. Our friendship just wouldn’t be the same then. I’d have to start ignoring His phone calls and start telling Him I can’t make it to lunch on Tuesdays. He’ll leave pathetic messages on my answering machine that I will not even listen to. He’ll bump into me at a video store and I’ll look the other way as if we didn’t even know each other.

Eventually, He’ll understand and leave me alone, but He never takes rejection very well. The Church will probably blame me for breaking His heart and tell me I’m going to hell. Of course, that’s all they ever tell me anyway.

The end

copyright c)2000 Carlton Mellick III

Carlton Mellick III runs Eraserhead Press, publishing chapbooks and zines of the surreal and literary bizarre. He is the author of four novels and has sold work to Alien Q, Alternate Realities, Blue Food, Burning Sky, Cotworld, Darkness Within, Dementia, Drang, The Dream Zone, Driver’s Side Airbag, Eaters of the Dead, Edgar: digested verse, Fables, Fear of the Dark, Ghoul, The Harrow, Imelod, In Posse Review (web del sol), Jupiter’s Freedom, Lethologica, Mindmares, Nuketown, The Orphic Chronicle, Parchment Symbols, Quicker, Redsine, Rosewort, 69 Flavors of Paranoia, Seattle Fiction, The Sidewalk’s End, Story Bytes, Vacancy, The Vestal Review, Winedark Sea, Writer’s Hood, Xenith, and Xero Magazine. His website is at http://carltonmellick3.cjb.net