Pregnancy preceded my tragedy - before my salvation. Spheres of truth existed beyond my understanding. I understood my memory of my sister as a teenager and her unwanted pregnancy. I could not understand the motherhood that was taken from me. I only knew that when I looked into the spheres of my daughter's emptiness: then I could see the truth.

Terror was mine, for the truth is terror. It will threaten and it will take and the fear is as its weapon. To deny the truth is to become compromised by it.

My aversion to lovely sounds was my denial of the lies of our world. Wind and water, birds and music - all of it was frightening to me because I could not be safe in a world that denied my pain. The beautiful world ignored my suffering and so I feared that which was pleasant.

Much happened to my material life after the birth I gave to a corpse. My husband left me and so did my friends; eventually I quit my job and ended up homeless. In the beginning I drove them all away by telling them the truth.

Nobody wants to hear the truth; they only want the beautiful lies. If it is true and it is about our existence: then it is not beautiful. Some compare the truth to freedom or to light. Truth is condemnation and the endless void is in eternal night. The universe is godless and uncaring.

I could see into the spheres and I saw she had chosen correctly. Giving mortal creatures awareness of their own existence should take unimaginable cruelty. No god would devise such an existence.

There is nothing more to explain. All I knew, before salvation, was that I had killed God with my thoughts and feelings. I could still see good in the world around me. I could still see the human pain and empathy in the spheres. They could have convinced me that I was surrounded by God, bathed in such light and warmth.

Although it was springtime the mornings were still freezing. I had a lean-to and slept with my boots on to keep my feet warm. I knew I'd become a vagabond as I shuffled about. A warm world for lice. I was fully aware of my minutes and years, in equal increments. Such time becomes eternal, as one observes God.

God is shy - as the truth is never beautiful or illuminated or good.

If the truth isn't horror, then it is a lie.

I believed that I would never be able to pull back the curtains for the other humans and show them that I had found the withered and lecherous creature that was speaking God's words into a microphone.

My problem was that I was still in Kansas.

I shuddered in anxiety as I knew I was getting closer to the answers. I feared that the truth would be damnation. That salvation was a corruption. That religion was an adultery of our God-given sense of actual morality. I feared for my soul or that of the world.

I found God sitting next to a small campfire and cooking a piece of roadkill. I asked it why the universe should even exist at-all and God said:

"Filtering."

Which I did not understand. God spoke and it wasn't clear what was meant. I would have thought that God was the soothing sounds and smells of nature. Instead, my nostrils stung from the garbage burning in the campfire.

"Are you God?" I asked. If I couldn't understand, then perhaps I was not in the presence of my Creator.

"Are you?" God asked, looking up at me. God decided that the roadkill was cooked enough and blew on it before beginning to nibble on the hot, dried-up thing on the stick.

Fear crept into me. A new and unsettling realization impregnated my mind. God smiled, knowing that I had begun to understand. I felt defenseless, helpless and vulnerable.

"If I am, and I cannot prove that I am not, then I am to blame for all." I realized with a lump in my throat. "But how could I be God?"

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"You deny your own existence?" God asked me devilishly.

"I don't accept it." I responded defiantly. I was afraid to understand.

"That is good. That is why I am speaking to you now." God nodded and chewed.

"My will." I brightened. "If I am God then my will be done. I want my daughter back and my old life back."

God looked around theatrically and then looked back at me and shrugged. "Guess not."

"Unless I don't." I felt gravity. I knew I was singing a false song. It was impossible to insist on my excuses when I was staring at God.

"Your daughter chose to be free. She is truly her mother's mote. She sits by my side in my kingdom, like all who deny they are God and leave this universe of their own choice." God grinned.

"So - you are God!" I pointed and sounded frustrated.

"I never denied it. Will you?" God looked away from me, some kind of regret was in the flames to stare at instead.

"I hated my old life. I could see it was just a storefront - a commercial - a conformity. None of it was real." I confessed.

"You would rather the lice than your old friends?" God sounded amused.

"The lice are real." I admitted. "And they only irritate my skin."

"As opposed to your old life." God glanced up at me while helping me compare my past friendships to the lice on my body. Then God added a new clue to the revelation I was getting: "You are the only one worthy of all of this."

"What?" I suddenly realized I was being singled out for approval by God and I found it disturbing. I had thought that the theories of preachers were more than just a way to draw tithes. Apparently not everyone is loved by God.

"Does it seem sincere that I would create mortal creatures with the awareness of humans? You are aware of me and you are aware of yourselves and you are aware of all of reality. This is all a test. Isn't it obvious that humans are here for a reason? What reason? To live and die, but is it how you live that I care about or how you die?"

"It isn't about life, is it?" I dreaded.

"A human that lives their whole life questioning and resolving nothing is not worthy. I did not put you here to deny me, to deny yourselves, to deny reality. Only in death are those three things together. If you prove my existence by ending your own, then you are mine. All others are cast into nothingness, from which they came."

"But death is the fate of all things. To live in the shadow of fate takes faith." I argued with God.

"Fate is a sin. You deny that I made you in my image? You allow your death to occur at a place and time and way that is not of your own free will? You are claiming that you are not God, that God has chosen when you die. You have denied that God has given you that choice and that it is the only choice, the only thing you will ever do, that determines if you are worthy or not. I don't care about your brief and silly life. I only care if you prove yourself worthy of me, if you prove your free will, if you prove you are a part of me. Then, you too are God, and I am you."

I fell to my knees at God's diabolical sermon. I felt sick. Great existential horror swept over me in the form of trembling terror. I landed on my palms and started to dry heave.

"You should probably eat something. You've fasted for three days now." God told me.

"Wouldn't it please you if I starved myself to death?" I glared up at God with briny tears on my cheeks.

"Nothing would please me more." God said with a mouthful of some dead rotten animal that was rewarmed by the flames.

God's spheres were like my daughter's.

A strange calmness arose within me. My daughter had earned her freedom. I asked God:

"How did my daughter die?" I asked.

"I grant each of you one wish. It is why people pray, because sometimes there are miracles. She heard the music and used the melody to make a wish. She wished to be as music. Her first thought was to accept me and deny this universe. I granted her wish."

I nodded, appreciative for the confession of murder.

"You son-of-a-bitch!" I sprang at God and tackled it to the ground. God was very strong and wrestled with me, pinning me. With all of my frustration and fear becoming anger I fought and clawed and screamed with rage. I was on top of God with my fists balled and knuckles bloodied, trying to punch the smile into the mouth. God managed to grab a rock and struck me on my hip, dislocating it.

I gasped from the jolting pain and fell over but clambered onto God's back as God tried to crawl away.

"Oh no you don't, you sorry son!" I picked up the same rock as I rode on God's back. I hit God in the back of the head and God dropped to the ground with a limp thud. "Kill myself to prove I love you? How about I kill your punkass and...and..." I stopped talking and lifted the rock with both hands as I straddled God - who lay face down in the dirt.

"Don't...don't kill me..." God wheezed.

I disobeyed a direct order from God and brought the rock down with a collapsing sound. The rock entered the back of the skull and remained there as I climbed to my feet. The pain from my dislocated hip made my posture into living agony. I stood over God and said:

"Now I wish for music too."

And I felt the spheres watching me. I could feel myself exalted. I asked myself if I had known God and I decided I had known nothing.

In the music I could feel the springtime morning. I could hear the sounds of nature - birds and water - music. I knew it was everywhere, I knew that life had taken on a new melody.

Her voice was all around me, in me, in all things. As the music - as the wind. I could deny God as I heard her there, proving my existence.