Work Text:
God fell from the sky when I was sixteen.
It was tiny. Its impact crater swelled a shopping small. It was three meters tall and three feet long, and Its skin hung from Its bones like curtains from a windowsill, fingers almost insectoid as It clutched at Its surrounds, curled like a spider lain supine under a wine glass. Its hair was web-fine, and it clumped together in coarse, foam-like puffs, as though a wig melted together in cooling, eyes glassy and unlidded, as though Its eyelids had melted away from its face through the fall, fleshy pulp crowning tear ducts and scalp.
It rang identical to me, a mirror of my friends, It was all and It was nothing, and It reeked. It stank of dissolving flesh and still-burning hair, of congealed polystyrene and a well-seasoned cast-iron
Its drifting pupils dialated and constricted, the nauseating webbed muscle sheet of Its iris tearing from itself and recondensing so visibly, so rapidly, that it made the pulp of my teeth itch and crawl with sensation. It was so blindingly present, and yet, as I stared into the matte lenses of Its drying eyes, I realised that I couldn't make it out; I couldn't tell the shapes from each other, I just couldn't see It. Like plugging an HDMI cable into one's cognitive DVI port.
God's corpse rests in my hometown, oozing a cloying sweetness. The Main Street tastes of roadkill, of rot, as It decays beneath the soft earth of Its grave, the abhorrent airborne texture omnipresent within city limits.
Tourism spiked. We're an Evangelical must-see, a Protestant Mecca, second only to the Catholic's Vatican.
Population, meanwhile, plateaued.
We stayed a retiree super-centre, pop. 170 and dropping by the year, supplementing the nearest high school's grad class by a fistful — orphans, children of divorce, and whichever of the Waylon kids made it to a grad cap before getting married off — and our only scrap of sapient life remained sat quietly in their church pew. The town was built back up around It, like the tell-tale heart, omnipresent, deafening, an unnecessary reality check.
God's corpse sits below the tiled linoleum of my hometown mall, enthralling all those who'd believed, and revolting those who'd not. The implication. Never seemed to dawn.
God died in my hometown. And now, we have been left to rot and decay as it had, skin laccerated, hands pierced and bloodied, lungs sticky with tar, and extremities lousy with soot, detrivores scraping against skin.
Its corpse lay a tourist trap of my hometown.
Written by a human in Ellipsus.