Prompt:
Every God or supernatural being is born when humans give them enough faith, and then die when they are no longer believed in. You are surprised when one day you come into existence as an all powerful being, only to find that just one person believes in you.
Response:
I saw how they bullied her. I saw everything, really, since her faith had given me a power beyond that of human beings or any other mortals. Ironic, I think now, here in my final hours, how an all-powerful being’s existence can depend so directly on a single 90-pound waif of an intelligent being.
When I first awoke, hovering above her in the ether that living creatures fail to detect, blood was pouring from her nose, and from a cut beneath her eye. I knew why they’d antagonized and beat her, because her thoughts and memories of those moments of anguish had spawned the foundations of my own consciousness.
She wasn’t beautiful, in their eyes. Young animals are cruel to their weakest peers, to the physically unfit. Her features lacked symmetry. Her face was already pockmarked by the scars of early acne, even at 15 years old. She was stunted from malnutrition, and her hair was brittle and thin.
She had fled to the edge of a sun-drenched field after the beating, where I found her sitting, in a patch of wildflowers, with the hunched shoulders and hung head of a rag doll. She had picked a small bunch of forget-me-nots, lying them on her palm. She fingered them gently as she sniffled, admiring their soft sapphiric beauty.
That was how I came into her world. My arms are leaves. My heart is a severed stem. My eyes are yellow fornices. I am the Forget-Me-Not god.
That day was only the first time they ganged up on her. Their blows and scratches were bad, their violent tugging of her brittle hair – weak at the roots – even worse. Most terrible of all, though, was not their physical attacks, but their social punishments for her poverty and ugliness. Their words crushed her more than fists ever could, shivering my petals. The isolation they imposed on her dried me out. I stayed vibrant, still, because something in her did as well. Even when she wept at night, her vibrancy lived inside her, and in me.
I tried to stop her attackers, but gods are not all-powerful to all people. Gods only hold power over those who believe in that power, when there are enough of them to enforce allegiance among themselves, and those attackers were fearless of all but retribution from their peers. They were afraid of the snake that eats itself, of the fanatical mob that runs out of prey and turns on its own.
Eventually she left school, but the demons that had been bred in her followed. She didn’t know it, but they had trained her to destroy herself, slowly, and I felt contaminated water seep up the old severed base of my stem. The poison she chose was heroin. Then methamphetamine. It dulled her pain after she left home, ashamed to reveal to her mother that she was living on the streets, on the filthy concrete outskirts of a city of steel and mirror-like glass that rose to the sky.
On some days, she thought, when those distant skyscrapers reflected the blue sky, they became the color of forget-me-nots, and she longed for the field of her teenage years where she’d sought refuge amongst the wildflowers. I knew these were her thoughts, because I breathed them in as they floated out of her. I was her god, and she was my one believer. I existed because she convinced herself that those flowers of bygone youth watched over her, despite the slow shutting-down of her body.
I have been withering for years. My destruction is almost complete. The crystal meth ate away at my believer’s brain, and she has begun to forget her god. I will disappear when she does. I tell myself I’m not scared, because she has told herself her whole life the same thing – but in truth I am. I silently beg her not to forget me. I wonder, sometimes, which of us is the supreme being after all.
Today the sun found her curled up at the base of an ancient oak, near the long grasses in a ditch where she’d fallen asleep. She’d drifted off at sundown while picking the fleeting wild strawberries that grow along that strip of green. She is starving, skeletal. She has forgotten not only her god, but life itself. My vision grows grainy as she dies…and then clears once more.
I am not gone. Yet I know for certain that she has expired.
Suddenly, for the first time in my existence, I feel cupped in warmth. I feel lifted, against the crystalline soup of the ether, and find my believer staring down at me. Her eyes are bright, filled with wonder and warmth. She radiates light, her gaze upon me so beautiful and full of love that a feeling from some unknown well of the great universe rises in my stem: love, hope. I love her. She is hope.
Her body has died, but she is still here. I am still here. She has forgotten me not.
My god lifts me to her face, and her fingertips graze my petals, vibrant and bright blue once more. My god is here. My god has granted me salvation.
