by TJ Heffers
God is chewing gum as she punches in ten minutes late for swing shift.
Her eyeliner’s really heavy and she’s gone heavy on the powder. Her hair’s dyed black with blue tips. I let that go. It was hard enough to get her to drop the black lipstick and the pigtails. I pick my battles wisely. I have to, as the manager of a being who introduced herself to me by saying, “I am who am,” stared at me for a second with the force of the cosmos, and then walked off, chains jangling on her skirt.
You don’t know how nervous it makes me to have to walk up to her and say, “That’s the second time this week.”
God turns and glowers at me, blows a bubble. “Yeah,” she says. She must have picked up her accent from Mallrats or something.
She could change the time, of course—make it ten minutes ago. Or she could make me forget she was late. Or she could blink me out of existence. But I guess she’s dedicated to being a seventeen-year-old goth, who would have none of that omnipotence thing. I wonder if God can be nominated for an Oscar, but then I figure that’s probably unfair.
“You gotta get here on time,” I say, resisting the urge to tug at my collar. “Cheryl leaves at five. She’s got a second job she’s got to go to. You don’t want her to be late, do you?”
Her eyes flick toward the register, where Cheryl is trying very hard not to look back. Nobody wants to lock eyes with her. When I have to talk to her, I pick a spot on her chin to watch.
“Guess not,” God says.
At that I nod and straighten up, and she scuffs her way over to the register, unbuttoning her grocery smock so the black button-down she’s wearing underneath shows. Cheryl murmurs something like, “Have a good night,” and hurries off. God leans against the counter, blowing another bubble and watching customers try to decide between skim and two-percent.
“No gum at the register,” I say. My voice kind of squeals on the way out. God looks up at me and my knees nearly buckle, and I continue, “It’s the rules. We talked about it last week, remember?”
“Right,” God says. She picks the gum out from between her cheek and gum and holds it between her thumb and forefinger for a second. Next thing I know she’s spinning a miniature galaxy in the palm of her hand, watching it turn and glow like it hadn’t just been a stick of Wrigley’s a split second before.
“No,” I say before I can stop myself. I cross the floor between the time clock and the register and have to stop before I get too close. The heat of the galaxy is so intense my smock smolders, smoke rising, and I know for a moment what kindling feels like before it’s set alight. “No, no, no, that…. That’s too hot. There’s radiation, and,” I stagger, mind getting filmy, “people can’t handle that….”
“Oh.” For a second the goth is gone and God looks out at me, curious and apologetic. “Oh, I’m sorry. I forget sometimes.” The galaxy vanishes without a sound and suddenly I feel much better than I had even before the lethal dose of radiation poisoning, like I’m twenty-five again. “Sorry, Roger,” God says again, and after that the melancholy settles back in her eyes and she’s in character again.
#
The rest of the night is dull. It’s Tuesday—slowest night of the week, as anybody in the low-cost grocery world will tell you—so we only have a few scattered customers coming in for things they forgot to buy on the weekend. I spend most of the night near the front, working on planograms for early-spring deals. God spends most of the night picking at the black polish on her fingernails, watching customers meander about like she’s got better places to be.
I guess she does have better places to be—better planets, better species, certainly better supermarkets. Why come to Havermeyer’s, of all places? There’s a Whole Foods three blocks down the street. She never told us why she’d be here. All she told us—on planet-wide intercom, voice booming up from the ground itself—was that it was time for Earth’s quarterly performance review, she’d be spending a few weeks living among us, and we should just forget she was there.
Easier said than done. She turned into a burning bush in front of my apartment to contact me about the swing-shift opening as I came home late from work. Then she came in for the interview looking at first like a swirling cloud of everything anyone had ever known, before trying out various human forms—I got dizzy around when she put on the goth girl and told her that was fine. The rest of the interview was unremarkable.
So God sits there at the register picking at her nail polish and pretending to be bored. Everyone knows it’s her. We all know what she’s here for. No one wants to be judged, but it’s impossible not to be, because God knows every one of us back through a million generations to when we were monkeys just at a glance. The world waits with bated breath for this God-as-girl to see as much of humanity as possible from a register at a third-rate supermarket.
But there are also people who simply do not give a fuck.
Up walks this middle-aged lady, weighing at least three Gods, pushing an enormous cartful of stuff—milk, cookies, sugary cereal, Pepto-Bismol. God leans forward to start running stuff across the scanner as the lady says, “I forgot my coupons.”
“‘Kay,” God says with a handful of pasta sauce.
“So you can look them up, can’t you?” the lady asks. God looks up at her and I dunno how the lady doesn’t shit herself—but maybe she missed the thunder-voice that had told everybody how this judgment thing would work. “I have those coupons,” the lady continues when God starts bagging her groceries. “They’re just not on me. I deserve to be compensated.”
“It’s against policy,” God says with a shrug. She stuffs the bread in with a tub of ice cream and a jar of peanut butter. “We have to scan them. Bring them next week.”
“They expire this week,” the lady says, swelling and crossing her arms over her chest.
God only shrugs. She swings bags into the lady’s cart. She hits the total button on the register and the lady twitches. I try to hide behind the planogram for Easter-egg-shaped Reese’s cups, but I know what’s coming and I don’t even have the power to see the future.
“Can I speak to your manager?” the lady asks. She’s already speaking to the Manager, but we all know what she really means.
“Hey, Roger,” God says, without looking at the lady, dutifully filling the cart, the way she must have filled the universe with shining balls of plasma.
I sigh and set the planogram down and walk over. The lady looks me up and down: balding head, two-day stubble, Coke-bottle body, the spotty green smock and cigarette stains on my fingers. Her eyes rake my nametag: “Roger Miller, shift manager.” She kind of smirks. Over her shoulder I see God looking disinterestedly down at the scuffed toes of her Doc Martens.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” I ask in my best matador voice.
“I have coupons at home for most of what I bought and I want the discounts applied.” The woman leans forward on the handle of her cart, then jabs a finger at God. “And I want you to know your employee is extremely rude and she should be fired immediately.”
“‘Least I’m not a whale,” God says under her breath. Does she breathe?
The lady snaps around, teeth gritted. “You little bitch. Who the fuck do you think you are? How dare you talk to me like that? I’ll make sure you lose your job and I’m never coming back here again, there’s a Whole Foods down the street-”
She jabs a finger in God’s face. God doesn’t flinch. For the first time she’s acting just the way she would both as God and as that girl—neither one would find this woman intimidating. Gods and teenagers both think they’re invincible.
“Go get some water,” I say to God, who rolls her eyes and shuffles off toward the break room, flicking her thumb against her forefinger to produce a little flame like a lighter. I’ll have to talk to her about that now, too. In the meantime I talk the lady down from going postal and send her away with a twenty-five-percent discount on her next transaction, more of a discount than she’d have gotten even if all her imaginary coupons were real.
Once she’s gone, I bring God back to the register, but now’s not the time to lecture her. She’s sulky, throwing her lower lip out in the same look my daughter would give me if I ever sent her to her room. It’s odd to think of the Creator as your own daughter. She knows I’m thinking it, too, but she’s got the best poker face I’ve seen this side of De Niro.
The rest of the night’s quiet and God entertains herself by blinking the register on and off, using it to post on Facebook about the idiot customers she has to deal with at work. Simon Peter, Joseph of Nazareth, and 489,176 others like this. Once, after I go to the bathroom, I come back and I swear she’s changed my planogram around. I don’t bother getting outwardly upset. She knows I’m mad.
#
For some reason or another, she’s always the last person to leave, other than me. She drags her feet counting out the registers, even though she knows damn well how much money is in her drawer, not to mention every drawer on the entire East Coast, without having to count. God sits at the counter flipping through bills, sliding her fingertips over the rough paper. Then, when she hands her drawer off to me, she sits outside the door to the cash office, filling in the blank spaces in her tattoos with a black Sharpie. I wonder what kind of mother would let their seventeen-year-old daughter get full sleeves, but then I guess God doesn’t have a mother.
It’s late and the drawers aren’t adding up. It’s not a lot, just a couple bucks, but when I look out past the doorframe at God, I get the sense she’s waiting for me to say something. She clicks the insteps of her boots together, hands flat on the linoleum to either side of her.
“You’re four bucks short,” I say.
She looks over her shoulder at me and for the first time I meet her eyes. They’re not just eyes. Stars sparkle in her irises, the glowing wisps of nebulae, the depth of the universe she created receding infinitely into her. For all her power, she cannot hide who she is.
My shoulders wobble, but I grip the arms of my swivel chair.
“It wasn’t me,” God says, voice low and heavy. Her arms stink of Sharpie fumes, and I can smell them even ten feet away.
“It sure wasn’t Cheryl,” I say. God glances at me again and I scratch the scrubby back of my head, looking past her out at the registers. “Look, if Cheryl were gonna steal from us, she’d take a little more than four bucks. But she wouldn’t, because if she gets caught and loses this job, she can’t feed her kids.”
God reaches into her smock and pulls out the four bucks. She holds the bills out to me without looking, eyes drawn by something deep in the store that I can’t see. I slip the bills into the safe and adjust the math and then roll into the doorway, sitting more-or-less next to her and leaning forward with my elbows on my knees.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask.
She laughs. It’s weird, doesn’t really fit the character she’s playing.
“Why take the money?” I press her. “Why be late? Why be such a jerk to that woman? You’re…you’re God, I mean. You don’t need to do those things.”
She clicks her boots together and flicks a flame to life in her hands, flicks it out, flicks again and there’s a notebook with a sticker of Jack Skellington and a bunch of bleeding eyeballs drawn on the cover. She draws her hand across the cover of the book and there’s page upon page of poetry inside. I wonder if the next Gospel is going to start, “My heart is as dark as a bleeding grenade in a rotting hand.”
“Do you know what it’s like to be omnipresent?” God asks me, and it’s the voice she used when she nearly killed me with the galaxy, light and reedy as the wind. “No, of course you don’t. Why would I ask that?” She laughs again and continues, “When you’re everywhere at once over the span of an infinite universe, it starts to feel like you don’t exist. Knowing a feeling and feeling it are two different things. After a while, I forget things.” She pats the floor beside her, smiling. “I like to feel. I think physical existence is the best thing I created.”
It takes me a moment to realize I’m talking to God. When she’s acting like the goth, it’s easy to forget—I’m just looking at a skinny girl with too much makeup. But next to me is a being I cannot comprehend and she’s talking to me of all people about the experience of infinity. I watch her expression and her smile has transformed her, but the glitter of the universe lingers in her eyes.
“Anyway,” God says, “if I’m going to exist, I might as well exist like one of you, right?”
“I guess so,” I say. There’s a long pause. A siren wails outside and stops only a little ways away. Maybe somebody robbed the Turkey Hill on the corner again. Trying not to think about it, I say, “So how are we doing as far as the judgment goes?”
God shrugs. “I haven’t been paying that much attention, to be honest. I certainly don’t need to live among you to judge the world, do I?” She runs her fingers through her ponytail and says, “I needed an excuse to get away. The one thing I never quite got down is that people can always tell when it’s me. If I came down here with no explanation, people would notice. Everyone would keep asking questions and not even I have the time for that.”
I chuckle. The smile fades from God’s face and she sinks back into character, doodling a skull on the edge of her smock. I guess physical sensation is pretty great, but she’s right—it’s not like I know anything else.
Her shoulders are a little hunched and her breathing’s huffy. God bites her lip. She knows I’m watching, knows what I’m thinking, and knows everything about me—what I’m about to do, what I did years ago, what I do when no one is looking. She’s putting on a show of sadness and it starts to wear on me. I can’t help but feel a little manipulated, but what teenage girl doesn’t do her share of manipulating? And again I wonder about her pretend home life, wonder where she goes when she leaves Havermeyer’s. She must be lonely.
“So what do you have planned for the rest of the night?” I ask. I don’t like to imagine her sitting alone in a slummy apartment. I’m still caught up on the fact that she looks like a girl.
“I was thinking about eating an Egg McMuffin and smoking some weed,” God says. “Would you believe I’ve never done either of those things?”
“The Egg McMuffin, maybe. Not the weed.”
“Moses liked smoking hash,” God says, pushing herself to her feet and dusting her sleeves off. “It helped his stutter a little. It’s where I got the burning bush thing from—I figured it would get his attention.” She jerked her head toward the front door and slid her hands into her pockets. “Come on. I’ll buy.”
I sigh and glance at the computer. There are a dozen unread emails from the DM, and I’ve got to get out the signage for next week so the morning crew can put it up and—but then I look back at her and shrug. “Yeah, alright,” I say. “Just let me finish all of—”
I blink and we’re in the parking lot. It’s pitch black, even with the light pollution from malls and fast-food joints and the five-lane highway in front of us. God is already shuffling out toward the sidewalk, head hung and shoulders bunched up as she scuffs her boots across the crumbling asphalt. “Hey,” I say, hustling after her, “I have paperwork to do. And the alarm—what about the—”
“77824561,” God says, frowning at me over her shoulder. “I took care of all of it. Now come on, McDonald’s is like four blocks away and I’m freezing.”
I catch up to her on the corner and we start down the street side-by-side. The Golden Arches glow in the distance. A couple cars rush by as we cross a side street. I look over at God, and she’s sullenly focused on her boots as she walks, eyebrows furrowed. There’s no point trying to get her to talk if she’s playing the miserable teenager, so I dig my pack of cigarettes from my pocket and light up. She sees the flicker and watches me lower the lighter. “Can I get a cigarette?” she asks.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” I say, sliding the pack into my back pocket. She glowers at me and I shrug. “It’s not good for you, for one thing. And you’re too young.”
God’s glower deepens.
“Come to Earth as somebody my age next time, then,” I say. “You want us to treat you normally, right?” I shake my head as we stop at the next corner, waiting for the light to change. A few cars roll by, the people inside ignoring us both. “If I were treating you normally,” I continue, “I shouldn’t be going to McDonald’s with you. It’s against company policy for managers to fraternize. And anyway, do you know the last time I went out with coworkers?”
“December 4, 2005,” God says. I frown at her—that’s the night of the Christmas party where my daughter was conceived—but she only shrugs. “I appreciate the realism, Roger, but it’s not really necessary. Besides,” her voice softens, and when I look at her I see God looking back at me and not the girl, “it’s not like you have anything else to do.”
I can almost feel her flipping through my mind: my apartment is empty my ex-wife is long gone my cat doesn’t give a shit where I am I haven’t seen my daughter in six months my car doesn’t start and I can’t get my Wi-Fi to work consistently. The stars in her eyes form a pitying constellation, but I harden myself, scowling down at the sidewalk. “Don’t do that,” I say.
“Even if I could help it,” God says, “I don’t have to read your mind to see on the schedule that it’s been six weeks since you had a day off.” McDonald’s is three lots up and we keep walking, but as I suck the cigarette down I can feel her eyes on me.
She shouldn’t have said anything. The pout she gives me as she watches the cigarette is just like the one Angie gave me when I wouldn’t give her a second cookie after dinner. It’s not a mistake; she can’t make them. I keep forgetting what she is—maybe that’s the point in taking a human form—but I never completely forget it. God-as-girl. I’m so conscious of the way she looks at me, how she’s known every atom in my body from the moment they squeezed together in the heart of a star, and yet I keep thinking about how she should have a jacket because it’s too cold for a child to be out in March wearing just a shirt and a polyester smock. My throat gets tight. But she’s not my daughter. She’s not my daughter.
We walk up to the McDonald’s. I rub the cigarette butt beneath my heel outside the door and we walk in. “They have breakfast all day now,” God says as we walk up to the counter. She lowers her voice to a whisper and continues, “It was my idea.” I smile. At least she’s trying.
God orders three Egg McMuffins and a small coffee and I pay, ignoring her protests and threats of smiting. We grab a table near the bathrooms, out of sight of the gawking kitchen staff who crane their necks to get a view of her over the heat lamps for the fries. “Why get three if you don’t know if you’ll like them?”
She unwraps one of the McMuffins and takes a nibble, face brightening as she swallows. “Because I did know that I’d like them,” she says, leaning back and popping the lid off her coffee so it cools faster. “I knew I would like Egg McMuffins from the moment I flicked this universe into being out of the singularity it was before the Big Bang. I am who am, Roger.”
God takes another, larger bite of the McMuffin and looks out the window next to us, stretching her arm across the back of her seat. Her reflection in the glass is crossed by these floating pinpricks of light from the cars, the ceiling lights dull and lifeless. She chews her food for longer than anybody should, swallows hard, runs her fingers through the blue tips of her hair. The look she gives me is like she’s looking at guidance counselor, or—my stomach twists—a father. She knows how I feel about the way she looks right now, a teenage girl with her lip between her teeth and her eyebrows knit together—but maybe she’s doing this intentionally, trying to get me to say something.
“You’re not here just to feel things, are you?” I ask.
She runs a hand over her face without looking away from the window. “That obvious, huh?” She shrugs and scratches the side of her face. “I know this is above your paygrade,” she continues, finally turning to me, “but let me pick your brain about something important.”
“I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
“I’ve already picked it,” God says, smiling, her eyes crinkling around the corners in a way that makes her look much older than seventeen. “So I guess not. This will be more for your benefit, really, since I know how this all goes down already.” I nod and she leans forward, elbows on the table as she unwraps her second McMuffin before she’s finished the first. “How do you find meaning in life, Roger?” she asks.
I stare at her. “What?”
“How do you find meaning in life?” God asks again. “People…humans, at least, they know on some level that the meaning of life is whatever meaning they give it. You don’t need me for that. It’s one of the things I like about you little monkeys.” She laughs at the look on my face and bites into the McMuffin, speaking again before she’s finished chewing. “I say ‘monkeys’ affectionately, of course. But somehow most of you know what it takes to keep you going. How do you do that?”
The McDonald’s gotten strangely quiet, even given that it’s eleven at night. I can’t see any of the workers moving in the window reflections, and outside the cars seem to have stopped coming down the street. I run a hand over my head, fingers slipping across my bald spot. “I don’t know,” I say. “Why?”
God sighs and chews thoughtfully, eyes on some spot over my head. “I think,” she says slowly, “that the reason you find it easy to assign meaning to life is because it’s so short. There’s only so much you can do in the time you’ve got—a hundred years at the outside. So the things you choose to do out of all the possibilities are really important.” She leans back again, arms spread around her. “But me? I simply exist. I am everywhere. Everything. I’ve been around since before this universe and I’ll be around after it, and I exist at the beginning and the end and all the in-between at once. Infinite means something, Roger—it means I don’t get to choose, because my experience can’t be limited the way yours is.”
As she talks her voice drops and the thoughtful look fades and I see the girl again—but then, maybe she’s just feeling as sad and sullen as a goth might. Maybe that’s why she settled on this body; it had nothing to do with me. I try to think of that, of what drew her to this rock in the corner of the universe, to this tiny, niche body, instead of her question. God is asking me for the meaning of life. I try to breathe steadily but for once I can’t forget that she is God; the illusion has been broken. The weight is tremendous.
“It’s hard,” she says when I don’t respond. “I don’t know what my purpose is. I created the universe, alright, yeah, but…in the same way that you create skin cells. I shouldn’t get any credit for it.” She crumbles up the McMuffin wrapper and sets it down in the middle of her tray. “I’m trapped. To you, it seems like I made the choice to try an Egg McMuffin tonight, but I always have tried them and I always will, and eating them means nothing.”
She closes her eyes, expression drawn. I want to reach out and pat her hand or something, but my skin crawls at the thought. Even if the people in the kitchen are frozen or gone or otherwise incapacitated, I can’t bring myself to touch a teenage girl. I’m too old and too male and, awkwardness aside, I can’t possibly comfort the Creator. She draws a shuddering breath and brushes her hair out of her face and my ribs squeeze in around my heart.
“Did you like it?” I ask.
God blinks at me, supernovae blooming in her eyes. “What, the McMuffin? Yes.”
“And do you like the universe?”
“Quite a bit,” she says. God opens her hand and something glowing and fluxing appeared there, shrouded in a buzzing cloud and bent like a wide V. “I’m particularly fond of water,” she says, holding the object up for me to examine. “This is a water molecule, just much larger than usual. Isn’t this perfect? And its properties at a moderate temperature, it….” She trails off when she sees the grimace on my face. “Sorry,” she says. “Nerding out a little.” She closes her hand and the molecule vanishes, too small for any human to see.
I shrug and look out the window. When she follows my gaze, I say, “You’ve got an advantage in that nothing is really beyond your control. Things can’t be taken away from you. So when you enjoy something, when its existence brings you pleasure…that’s a sort of meaning. Lots of humans go through life experiencing as many good things as they can, and just the fact that they….”
My voice catches in my throat. I swallow but the lump won’t go down. I look back at God and all I see is my daughter, my little girl. I close my eyes and walk into my lifeless apartment all over again, the drawers left open, her little white bed empty in the middle of the night. My wife’s note taped to the fridge. Meaning—she’s asking for meaning from someone whose meaning is twenty-five hundred miles away, living as another man’s daughter.
“What the hell am I talking about?” I ask. My eyes open and I look up over God’s head at the water-stained wallpaper behind her. “I’m a night manager at a grocery store, I….” I shake my head and slide out of the booth. “Go ask someone else,” I say. “I don’t know anything about this. If this is why you came here, why you’re working at my store, you’re wasting your time. This isn’t It’s a Wonderful fucking Life, kid.”
“Yes,” God says, the gothic bite back in her voice, “it must be very hard for you, all the responsibility you have on your shoulders. The world will end if you don’t balance the safe at the end of the night, won’t it?” I glare at her and she crosses her arms, leaning back in her seat. “And it’s not like you’ve got any other areas of expertise to draw from, huh, Rog?” She sees me thinking of my daughter and feels the sting in my gut.
“You haven’t exactly been meeting your parental responsibilities, either,” I shoot back at her. “Letting us fend for ourselves. That’s gone great, hasn’t it? Is that why there’s war—because it’s too hard for you to figure out how you fit in to all that? Maybe if you would make an effort to be around no matter how meaningless you find your existence, things wouldn’t seem so meaningless. Do something, rather than just sit around being.”
She unwraps the last McMuffin and stuffs the whole thing in her mouth—it should be too much for her thin face, but I think she’s doing it for effect. God sits there chewing, giving me the dull glare of the girl, rapping her fingers on the table.
“We rely on you,” I say. “Maybe not religiously, but if you really are everything and you were to leave, what would we be left with? We need you. Don’t just give up and decide that your existence is meaningless and let us flounder. You’re part of all this, just like everyone else.” My hands are shaking badly by this point—she’s going to shoot lightning at me or something, I’m sure of it—and I pull out my cigarettes to steady my trembling.
“You can’t smoke in here,” God says, pointing to the sticker on the door next to me.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t stop time or something,” I say, smoke streaming out of my nose. “And I have been so goddamn nervous—er, sorry—the whole time you’ve been at Havermeyer’s it’s a wonder I haven’t had to take out a loan for these cigarettes.” I take a deep breath, ball of the hand holding the cigarette against my forehead. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
“Probably not,” she says, standing. “I guess you’re right. I don’t really get to decide that I’m meaningless, do I?” She pulls off her smock and throws it across the table, standing there in black shirt and black jeans and black boots. “I am quitting, though, Roger.”
“Oh.”
“We’ll have to save the weed for next time,” God says. She grabs the tray from the table and dumps her garbage in the trash can before returning and taking her lidless coffee. “But I’m tired of being finite and getting yelled at by my boss. I told you to treat me normally, not to parent me.” She walks over to the door and hesitates, watching me over the edge of her cup as she takes a sip.
“This is a little abrupt, isn’t it?” I ask.
She shrugs. “It’s not It’s a Wonderful Life, kid.”
But then God smiles at me and the goth girl fades away completely. Suddenly there’s no one there at the door, and yet everyone is at the door, every smile ever to cross a human face radiating in my direction at once, every ounce of joy and pleasure and humor ever felt by a human flowing across me. My knees start to buckle with the weight of it, my heart thudding and eyes watering.
Then the door opens and shuts and I hear someone in the kitchen ask, “Yo, did God just leave?”
#
After that I walk home, flop into bed, and dream of the water molecule, the cloud of electrons swirling around it like a neon breath. It pulses and twists, but the hydrogen and oxygen cling to each other, bound together even though they’re separated by a gap too infinite for God to fill. I dream of the galaxy in God’s hand, the heat of it, the force of its wind.
When I wake up it’s after ten and I stare up at the ceiling. The apartment is quiet. My neighbors are at work and their music doesn’t filter through the walls the way it usually does. The bedroom door is open and from where I lie I can see across the hall into what used to be my daughter’s room. The cat is sprawled in her bed, tail fluttering in comfort. By now, Angie is far too big to use that bed, even if my ex let her stay here, but I keep it anyway in case I wake some dark night and look across the hall as I am now and see her there, curled and asleep as if she’d never left.
I roll onto my back and stare up at the ceiling. God is here now—at least, she would say she is. I breathe for a few moments, close my eyes, fumble on my nightstand for my phone. I hold it in front of me and stare at it, palms damp. I can be a better parent than the Lord has been—let her see me, show her how it’s done. I switch on the phone and pull up my ex’s number in my contacts and dial it. It rings and I hold it to my ear, listening carefully, reaching out.
TJ Heffers is a Northeast-Pennsylvania-born, Arkansas-based writer with two cats and too much debt. His work has appeared in Blunderbuss Magazine, Pen and Ink Zine, the Blue Lake Review, the Rat’s Ass Review, and others.