I was four whiskey sours and a shot of Jameson deep when a girl who called herself God slid onto the barstool beside me and decided to join me on my bender. I didn’t acknowledge her, not at first. I didn’t come here to meet a girl; I came to drink, and drink a lot. So, we sat in silence for two minutes before her smoky voice scattered the quiet with, “Will you buy me a drink?” I sighed, took a long pull from my drink, and examined this brazen creature through the mirror behind the bar. She was pretty enough; she had burgundy brown hair, blue topaz eyes in the shape of teardrops, and a perfect bow of a mouth. Her nose was slender and straight, and her nostrils flared just slightly while she awaited my answer. I cocked my head and looked down into my now empty rocks glass, tilting it this way and that on the glossy bar top. The ice clinked against the sides; the only sound other than soft music with indiscernible lyrics. The bartender watched us out of the corner of his eye as he washed a shaker. “Why would I do that?” I asked her. “You’re not my date.” I could see her lips twist up in my periphery. “I don’t have my wallet.” “Not my problem.” A plaintive sigh escaped her lips. “Please?” I turned and looked at her full-on for the first time, unsmiling, and was momentarily taken away by her scorching beauty undistorted by the reflection. But I wasn’t easily swayed. “Give me one good reason why I should.” Her eyes flicked to the bartender and then down to her lap. She bit her lip, an expression that twisted something inside me, and finally she looked up at me, eyes burning with intensity. Her hand reached out to touch mine. “I’m God,” she whispered. I blinked, slowly, and looked back at my empty glass, wondering if I’d had one too many, before I looked back to her. “I’m sorry?” “I’m God,” she repeated. “Are you kidding me? Am I actually supposed to believe that?” “Why would I lie about it?” “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you’re a nut job looking for a free drink?” Her eyes gleamed hypnotically. “Or maybe I am God, and you should give me the benefit of the doubt.” She flashed a smile. “Who knows? Maybe a drink with me could change your life.” I continued to look at her in disbelief. Bold, impossible, irritating… a barrage of descriptors paraded through my mind, even as my mouth said, “Bartender? Two more whiskeys, please.” He dutifully set about pouring them. “Thank you,” she said kindly, and I held up a hand to stop her. “I’m buying you a drink, but I don’t buy your act here. You gave me a good line, it worked, but who are you really?” She sighed. “I’m God.” I rolled my eyes. “And I’m the Virgin Mary.” “Why don’t you believe me?” I snorted. “Do you want the abridged version of that answer?” She didn’t respond, only watched me with those piercing eyes. I started ticking reasons off on my fingers. “I’m pretty sure the return of the Messiah did not entail a visit to the local dive bar, I’m the furthest thing from a prophet or anything worthy, God’s not a woman—” “Excuse me?” she asked. I paused while the bartender set our drinks down in front of us, nodded at him vaguely in thanks, and observed her critically. A goddamn hippy. That’s who I bought a drink for. Some feminist hippy who worshipped a goddess. “God isn’t a woman,” I repeated. “How do you know that?” I stopped short. I didn’t have an answer. I looked down at my whiskey and took a hurried drink so I didn’t have to give her one. “Would it make you more comfortable if I looked like this?” she asked, and I turned to look at her—but she was no longer there. In her place was a carbon copy of me. I sputtered, choking around the liquor sliding down my throat. I--he—smiled, said in my voice, “Or like this?” I blinked and a hulking, six-foot-three black man with the mass of a bull was sitting next to me. “Or maybe like this.” And suddenly I was sitting beside my mom. “Okay, enough!” I shouted, and my mom’s foggy grey eyes blinked, amused. “Go back to who you were!” The bartender threw a strange look down the bar, but I didn’t care. I was watching her. She did return to who she started as, shifting forms in the space of a heartbeat. My mom’s blonde hair gave way to the brown of the girl I met, her grey eyes blooming into vivid blue. Her features sharpened, the cheekbones rising, lips filling out, eyes widening… and gone was my mother, as if she was never there. I stared in awe. She smiled. “Do you want to get out of here?” she asked.
God liked waffles, apparently. An hour after meeting her, I found myself not in a bar, but a twenty-four-hour diner with a stack of waffles, six strips of bacon— “Three for each of us,” she had said cheerfully—and two very strong cups of coffee sitting on the table between us. I was demanding answers of her between bites. “Are you really telling me God is agender?” “Are you really telling me humanity hasn’t figured that out yet?” she returned with a roll of her eyes. “Then why do you look like a girl?” “I’m confined by your human forms. You were created in my image spiritually. This body was just for convenience. I don’t have a form you could comprehend if I chose to manifest myself to you as I truly am.” She lifted her coffee to take a drink. “Right,” I said. “Sure. Makes sense.” She smiled into her mug. “And God likes waffles and coffee, apparently?” She took her time answering that one, drinking deeply and smacking her lips before saying, “No more than any other meal.” I sat back, exasperated. “Why are you here?” “Why not?” She shrugged. “You give some infuriatingly ambiguous answers, you know that?” Her features shifted, then, and something closely resembling pain flashed across her pretty face, marring it. For the first time, her voice was something besides enigmatic. This time, it was bleak. Mournful. “I know everything.” I rolled my eyes, and back was the playful, coy woman. “It’s true. Ask me anything,” she said. “I don’t think I’m interested in your answers anymore.” “Just ask me something.” “No.” “Coward.” “Fine,” I barked, and plucked the first God-worthy question I could think of from my brain. “What’s the answer to the universe?” Her lips quivered, a smile dancing behind her teeth. “Forty-two.” I stared at her, but, despite myself, found laughter spilling past my lips. “Fine,” I chortled. “Fair enough.” Her laugh was as smoky as her voice. A smoldering fire. It was downright hypnotic. But then it faded, mine lapsing soon after, and I asked, “Do I die?” Her eyes softened. “You all die, Eli.” “You know what I mean,” I said sharply. “Do I die soon?” Her silence stretched between us, palpable. “That’s what I thought.” She swallowed thickly, audibly, and looked down at her plate, nearly empty. I sighed and put another waffle onto it; a peace offering. “Why do you let people hate you?” I asked gently. “Why do you let them be so angry when you could prove to them that you’re real? When you could change their lives?” “I can’t force people to hear me,” she answered. “Sure you can.” She snorted and there was something comical about the sound coming from such a lovely creature. “What would you do?” she asked. “Take ‘em to church.” She sighed again. “Church is just four walls and some pretty windows. I’m not there any more than I’m anywhere else.” Unbidden, my frustration rose, spilled out on harsh words. “Where are you, then? Last time I prayed you were nowhere to be found. You were anywhere but here. So if you’re not there, and you’re not here… where are you?” “Stuck somewhere in between.” I knew exactly what she meant. I couldn’t explain exactly how… couldn’t begin to fathom how in the world I could relate to a deity. But I knew. “It’s very lonely to be a god,” she murmured. “You can’t imagine how alone…” Her eyes slid to look at me, and I forced my features into impassivity, unreadable neutrality; I masked my pain with steel eyes, a clenched jaw and hard mouth. But I wondered if she could see all my lonely nights at the bar, just myself and a bottle and the bartender dancing around topics that didn’t have enough words. Wondered if she saw the three-in-the-morning laundromat runs when I stared at my reflection in the window and the light of the neon sign, trying to decide if I was real. If anyone else could see me. I wondered if she could see me suffocating in the PET scanner, see me fighting to stay calm in the face of the doctors that wouldn’t have to deal with me when they clocked out, see me dying in the stifling silence when I left the hospital alone. “Well,” she said. “Maybe you can.” Yes, I could imagine. “You know, it’s funny,” she continued, toying with her waffles. She speared them over and over on her fork, mangled them, appetite long gone. “I’m as removed from you as you are from me. There’s an insurmountable gap between us. I can see you, I can hear you, but I can never reach you.” “Maybe you shouldn’t have locked the gate on humanity,” I answered. “There aren’t any gates. I didn’t want to keep people out, really. I wanted the illusion of keeping people out. It’s more like your neighbor’s fence, the one you used to jump to get your ball back when you were a child.” She lifted her eyes to meet mine. “I wanted you to fight for me.” I was quiet for a long time after that, and she didn’t offer anything. She imparted no pieces of profound wisdom, gave no answers to the mysteries shrouding the world… didn’t even bother to tell me why she decided on a blue sky. I tried to remind myself that despite the coffee I was still drunk, and this girl was just crazy. In spite of this, I said, “Maybe we wanted you to fight for us.” It took her a long time to answer. “I tried,” she finally whispered. She looked up at me with pleading eyes. “I’m trying.” There was so much anguish in her gaze; it was heavy, crushing, bearing down on me and impossible to alleviate. I could feel all her pain saturating the air around us. Crazy or not, the girl was in agony. “Okay,” I said. And then, when her expression didn’t fade, “I bet you don’t know everything, though.” She sat back, suddenly exhausted, hopeless. “No?” I shook my head. “Nope.” “What don’t I know?” “What kind of shoes a ninja wears.” She frowned, confused, and I grinned at her. “Sneakers.” It took her a second, but then she laughed, and warmth swelled in my chest, and for the rest of the time she spent with me, she smiled. When the bill came, the waiter handed it to me wordlessly, and I paid slowly, reluctantly, aware that as soon as we went back out into the bitter cold, the girl would disappear. But I couldn’t draw it out long enough, and we walked slowly out together. “It would be nice to see you again,” she said, bundling herself against the cold. A blue scarf encircled her neck and accentuated her eyes. Wisps of her hair escaped from under her knit cap. My heart was firmly lodged in my throat. “That would be… nice,” I agreed. “Maybe we could go back to the bar.” She smiled and took a step forward. I eyed her warily, but then her arms wrapped around me, trapping me in a hug. “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” she whispered in my ear. She pulled back, still smiling. Tucked the escaped hair under her hat. Looked at me with eyes that could see entire universes like I was the only thing that mattered. “Goodnight, Eli.” I watched her walk away until she was obscured by the snow. It was only later, when my head hit my pillow and I stared at the ceiling fan in the dark, that I realized I never told her my name.
The next night, I returned to the bar. I was four whiskey sours and a shot of Jameson deep when I finally understood she wasn’t coming back. I paid my tab. I downed the last of my drink. And I left alone.
I love this story. It feels like you’re sitting in a metropolitan scene, or a movie.