A Chat

The day I met God it was in the mid-70s and overcast. I love that kind of weather. It was later in the evening; I'd driven into the edge of town to have a few drinks with a friend of mine, but he'd cancelled at the last second.

I've never minded drinking alone, so I sat down, ordered three fingers of Jameson neat, and started reading a book.

A man came and sat next to me and told me:
"You won't believe this, but I'm God."

I told him he was right.

He said: "When you were thirteen, you fantasized about living inside a woman's breast, non-sexually."

I told him he was right.

"When you were twenty, you didn't threaten to kill yourself to your ex-girlfriend, because you felt that would be unfair."

I told him to get to the point.

"You're going to kill someone tonight, driving home drunk."

He was probably right, I was already on my second drink.

"You saw the little girl today, but you didn't really notice her. You remember the red balloon though."

I did.

"You're going to slam into her mother's car going home, and kill the mother. The girl will be brain-damaged for the rest of her life. Severely."

"Then I won't drive home," I said.

"Yes you will. You can't help it."

I looked down at the drink, then back at God. I finished the drink and ordered another.

I asked him why he was telling me all this.

He didn't really know. "There is no reason, I guess," he said.

"Okay."

After a few hours, after I was considerably drunk, I stepped outside. I felt decently dizzy. We had talked about the world and our favorite drinks and why certain animals existed, but Pokemon didn't. He was pretty nice.

I came to my car and looked at it for a long time, admiring the dents and the duct tape that held my driver's side headlight in. I ran my fingers across the cracked window moulding. Or whatever that stuff's called. I fingered my keys in my pocket, and took them out. Held them up against the lock of the car, and dropped them.

As I was turning my eyes back up to the car, after picking up the keys, I noticed a storm drain maybe ten feet away.

I slid the keys in, hearing them bounce and jingle and scrape across the asphalt.

When I went back into the bar, the man said I had to go to Hell now. That it wasn't a test, that the mother had needed to die. It was all very important to him for some reason. I offered to buy him a drink, but he shook his head and left.