By the age of twenty-six, Elaine O’Neil was a mother and twice divorced; Her last separation having went better than the first, considering that all participants left the ordeal in one piece and without a black eye. Her eight-year-old, Sean, wasn’t happy about it; but he’ll come to appreciate arriving home after school to a quiet house. He’ll learn what it’s like to not have to turn up the TV volume all the way to drown out the shouting. Elaine thought he deserved to know peace.
They settled on shared custody, Mondays to Thursdays Sean spends at his grandmother’s house, where Larry now lived. Elaine came to hate collecting him on Monday evenings. It’s not that she resented her ex-husband, it’s really the opposite. She still loved him as much as she did the time he came to her with his nose bright red, eyes watering, presenting her with a bouquet of daffodils, her favourite, even though he was severely allergic. As much as she did when he knocked on her door at eleven O’clock, drunk off his head, got on one knee and started sobbing, saying that he can’t live without her. She said yes before he figured out the ring box.
But somewhere along the way, that changed. She reckoned it was the death of his da, but never said it. It wasn’t her place. Jokes turned into attacks. Arguments into screaming matches. Perhaps he was losing control and instead of getting a new haircut he got a new woman. She was pretty enough for small town standards, and look just about legal. She reminded Elaine of herself when she was younger and more stupid.
Making small talk with the man you still love is hard enough, it gets harder when he’s making small talk with his arms around Catherine Lambe. He’s always had a thing for gingers. Elaine herself wouldn’t consider dating again for a long while, too tired of getting knocked up and knocked around and then left behind.
It was a Monday. Larry was hungover and passed out on the couch so she made polite conversation with Catherine Lambe while Sean got into the passenger seat. She couldn’t remember what exactly they spoke about. She was fixated on a mixed fantasy of either yanking her by her orange hair and calling her a husband-stealing round-eyed cunt or telling her to get out of it and focus on her exams, for god’s sake. Instead she smiled at the appropriate times and told her she’ll see her next week, then drove her son home in her second-hand 2004 Honda shit-mobile.
She cooked spaghetti that night but Sean refused to eat it, pushed away the plate and made an expression of disgust. He doesn’t speak to her much since he decided that she was at fault for Larry having to live somewhere else. She asked if he’ll eat frozen nuggets. He said he’s going to watch TV until it’s cooked, and she took that as a yes.
Throwing the nuggets into the oven, she leaned against it, lighting a fag as her son watched cartoons in the living room. She allowed herself a quick shot of vodka, and another one. Suddenly, the house phone rang.
She doesn’t get calls very often; all her friends have graduated and moved on to greener pastures and communication fizzled as it always does.
‘Hello?’
‘Good evening, Elaine, this is your god.’
She wasn’t a religious woman, but being raised in a catholic household forces you to believe in something. Still, the premise of god ringing her through a telephone and sounding like, of all things, a woman, is just laughable.
‘If this is a scam, it’s a bad one.’
‘Yeah, I thought you’d say that. Here, is this enough proof?’
The cartoon stopped making sound abruptly and she peered into the living room, where her son sat, frozen mid gesture as he reached for a piece of crisp. She moved her hand in front of his eyes. He was a statue. She opened the curtain and saw a cat suspended in mid-air as it leapt down from her neighbour’s roof and a car stopped on the road just as it’s about to U-turn.
‘Well, god, I’m listening.’
‘You believed quite a big claim pretty quickly.’
She shrugged. ‘I can’t deny hard evidence.’
‘You’re bright, Elaine. You could’ve gotten somewhere, been someone.’
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
‘If I hadn’t gotten drunk and shifted Tommy Walsh in Aoife Macgregor’s back yard? Doesn’t take a god to know that.’
She started cleaning up as she talked, holding her phone up with her shoulder and throwing Sean’s books and pencils back into his bag and hastily signing his homework journal.
‘Good point. You want to hear something only a god knows? Your existence is fictional.’
That made her stop.
‘Oh?’ Was all she could muster.
‘You’re a character in a story. You don’t exist outside of a few hundred words on a screen. Your entire universe if a work of fiction and I am your author.’
She paused for a second and considered the claim, glancing outside the window at the cat.
‘You don’t believe me. Here, I’ll show you.’
She didn’t feel any transformation, just felt the urge to look into the full-length mirror in the hall and found her ash-brown hair replaced with a long, straightened ginger waterfall. She touched it and was sure it’s not a wig. She wondered if she was dreaming or if she was drunk, but it didn’t feel like it. This was undeniably real. As real as it gets.
‘Do you like it?’
She was tempted to say yes, but any idiot would know that her hair wasn’t the reason Larry left her. He liked the brown before. He told her she was pretty when she let her hair down.
‘...No’
It was changed. Like a blink.
‘I’m just a character you created. In a book. You’re writing this story right now. You’re typing out the words.’
‘Yes, pretty much.’
Many times had Elaine drunkenly contemplated and cursed the unfortunate lot that fate had dealt her. She wished life was as fair as she thought it was when she was young. In her experience, doing good earns you nothing and bad people are never punished. She’s never done so much as skipped a queue, and she worked non-stop for three bloody months to save up for a bike for Sean’s birthday, only to have the knackers the next estate over steal it. One of them won a scratch-card last week, and now they’re off to Malibu or some bullshit paid-holiday eutopia.
‘If you’re a god, why do you let such awful things happen in the world?’
‘Honestly? Maybe it’s just because it’s the way things are in my world, and I wanted you to be like me. Or maybe your existence is just so insignificant to me that I don’t think twice about adding another cruelty to your life.’
Elaine felt like her eyes were being glassed over. Everywhere she looked, all she could picture was some ordinary woman, hunched over a computer, with the power to make and break everything she’s ever known. She tried squinting her eyes, thinking that maybe if she did it hard enough she’ll see her, and realised the stupidity in that. She’s shackled to this reality. God is a one-way relationship.
She looked at her son, his face frozen, enraptured by the bright picture on the screen. He’s so young. And he doesn’t know that he’s not real. She started crying at that thought, but she wasn’t sure why. She supposed the god orchestrated that too. She considered taking a step, thought ‘She’s probably writing that line too. ‘Elaine O’Neil takes a step to the right.’, decided on clinging to whatever shred of free will she had, stood still and then realised that this, too, had been written. Elaine O’Neil stood still.
‘Yeah. Sorry. You’re not devoid of free will but uh, you don’t have much of it.’
Since stepping was out of the equation, Elaine sat down where she was and buried her face in her hands. She thought about how fragile everything is compared to this revelation. Her life was literally just pages and words. She thought about Larry and how the ghost of his touch still seemed to haunt her. She thought of Catherine Lambe and of Sean. He hasn’t been doing his homework for weeks and she’s been signing it anyways. There’s a letter from his teacher on the counter but she hasn’t opened it. It had a circular bottle-butt stain on the front.
She ought to take him out of school. Take him to the Bahamas or wherever those cunts went. She’ll hold up a store to get the money. Drink herself to death on fine whiskey. What does it matter? Nothing is real. Absolutely nothing is real.
‘You’re not going to do that, Elaine.’
She forgot she was still holding the phone. She supposed she didn’t even have to speak to communicate with it.
‘Fuck you,’ she thought. ‘Fuck you. If I want to go outside and stab the first person I see I’d do it. You’re not the boss of me, you bitch. You stupid power-tripping bitch. Are you happy? Are you happy you made me like this? Are you happy that I’m fucking miserable while some whore fucks my husband? Why are you doing this to me?’
As is the case with most prayers said in the most desperate time of need, it went unanswered.
She held the phone up to her face and heard a continuous dial tone. God has hung up on her. She raised it above her head, fit to smash it against the ground, but instead hung her arm limp. God saw that too. God saw everything.
The television sounds came back on, and she heard a high-pitched yelp as the cat outside landed in a thorny bush. She put out her cigarette and put the phone back into its receiver. Dragging over the bin, she swept all the empty bottles off the counter, and the half-full ones too. She tied a knot on top and then went to find her son.
‘Sean, do you want to go somewhere tomorrow?’
‘Where?’ He doesn’t take his eyes off the screen.
The Bahamas.
‘The park? We haven’t been there since-‘
‘Since Larry left.’
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘Yeah, since Larry left. Do you want to go? You can skip school.’
He thought about it, thought the opportunity to skip school was too good to pass up, and said yes.