This is the rough draft I submitted for class. We just had to write a short story. I don't think it's very good, but I like it anyway. I certainly hope to improve my style, but this is my first real attempt.
With two hundred thousand people starring at me and the television cameras pointed at my face, I began to realize that I was in way over my head. Many people find themselves wondering “How did I get here”, not me; I know how I got here, and who got me here. The person, if you can call Him a person, was God, who actually turned out to be a jerk.
Listen: Just a few months ago, I was just a simple farmer… a tree farmer and a pretty bad one at that. I was poor; I hadn’t planned out my finances very well. I hadn’t anticipated that trees would take so long to grow. It’s not as if I knew much about tree farming when I started, my parents weren’t tree farmers, and there were no tree farming courses at my college. These are things you must find out first hand! Sure, I could have asked a tree farmer, but how many tree farmers do you know? None. Except for me, I suppose, but I digress. My point is that I am poor. I’m still paying off my college loans. If you are wondering, I received a degree in philosophy and then decided that life was absurd and pointless. As a result of this decision, I choose to pick the stupidest profession I could think of merely to entertain myself in some weird way.
So, there I was, in the middle of the winter, in my shack next to my forest, eating bark. It’s not so bad; you get lots of fiber which makes you very regular. This may be more information than you want, but I could probably set a clock to my bowl movements. Anyway, there I was, eating my bark, drinking my rainwater, and trying to figure out where my life went wrong. In the middle of my dinner, I was interrupted by this incredibly bright light outside my shack. At first, I thought that my forest was ablaze, or that I was having an acid flashback. I opened the door of my home, and immediately shut my eyes tight and fell to the ground. It felt as if my eyes had just burst into flame, and I felt heat all over my body. Then, I heard “Oh stand up you pathetic imbecile”. The person who said it had a very deep voice, it sounded like James Earl Jones had just eaten peanut butter. I stood up, and opened my eyes again. It still hurt a lot, but I could see what was emanating the light. I immediately realized what was going on, and smacked my hand against my forehead. I softly said “Oh no…”
“What? What is it, why do you say, oh no?” wondered the glowing white being
“Well, you see... I’m an atheist, so, I’m kind of committed to thinking you don’t exist. This kind of shatters my whole world view”
“Yes, those who do not believe are fools”
“Or maybe… or maybe I am just crazy, yeah, I think I must be crazy. I must have cabin fever or something, I mean, I haven’t seen another human being in over five years, I haven’t been off this farm for ten… My diet consists of bark and bugs I find. Yeah, I am just delirious.”
“No, you are not. I am the Lord, your god”
“No… try; I am the Lord, your hallucination. Listen, as long as you are just in my mind, could you turn off the whole bright light thing, I get the point, you are divine”
And, immediately, the light dimmed. I could see that this God fellow was just white humanoid, devoid of any unique characteristics. He looked like a male mannequin.
“Alright, if you are this God-thing, then, what do you want with me?”
“Well, I like picking poor, destitute, chemically imbalanced men to be my prophets. So, you are it”
“Uh, so, what do you want to tell me about life? What information would you like me to relay to the human race? A message of kindness and compassion? A blistery fire and brimstone sermon? That it’s cool to be gay now? I hope it’s something exciting.”
“Nothing like that, I just want you to tell the human race that I am leaving to create a new galaxy, that this one has began to bore me, and that you are all on your own now”
“That’s kind of depressing. But people will never believe me, and they will probably get mad if I start saying things like that, I’ll get stoned, like, Old Testament style.”
“No worries, I no longer care about the fate of this world, so I will just give you the power to perform miracles… trivial miracles. Yes…yes… and I want you to use your new powers to prove that you are a prophet of God, and then tell them I am leaving”
“Uh, if you are leaving, why do you care if we know or not?”
“Well, there are a lot of people who have invested a lot of time and money in worshipping me, and I feel as though I owe them a goodbye, though, I don’t want to get too personal, so, you are it”
And He was gone. The human race was alone in the universe. I didn’t really care too much, but I knew some people would be pretty sore about it. I had a long few months ahead of me. I had no idea where to start. I used my new found powers to conjure myself some money, and bought a computer. With my new found access to the internet, I needed to figure out a way to make myself famous. After searching around for a while, I decided that making a video of myself doing something miraculous and posting it on a popular video website would be a good start. So, I bought a video camera, and sought out someone to perform a trivial miracle on. I began walking around, changing people’s hair colors, turning diet soda into regular soda, bringing road kill back to life, and flipping light switches from across the room. I posted my video and called it “God Sent Me to Impress You with My Skillz”
Comments were mostly negative. Well, they were all negative, but some were negative in a nice way. Some said awful things about me and my mother, and a few compared me to Hitler for some reason. I didn’t think that was appropriate at all. I knew that this was no way to get famous, so I had to use my miracle powers to do it. I changed all the negative comments to glowing reviews, and added about five million views to my video. I went outside to my forest, conjured a hammock, and awaited the arrival of the major news corporations.
I was awoken by somebody poking me. I opened my eyes, and saw what I knew I would. There were cameras set up all around me, and a man in a nice suit was warming up for our interview. I walked up to him, and told him that I was sent by God to deliver a message to mankind, and that I was going to do it when he interviewed me. He loved the idea, but this guy walked up to me from the news van. “No, that won’t work” the man said.
“What? Why not?”
“Listen, if people buy this whole sent from God thing, it has huge potential, you could have millions of followers, make a fortune! And, we want to be there every step of the way. How about a television show? Anything you want! Just impress people in this interview, and word will spread. Come up with some phony baloney advice, we will have you publish some self-help book, and presto, we are all a lot richer.”
“I don’t have any good advice… I mean, I’m a tree farmer living in a shack eating bark, I don’t have anything to say… well, other than the whole message from God thing.”
“Don’t worry about that, we will make it all up for you, you will just have to read what we tell you to read, and we will be fine. You have these little magic tricks, and we have all the advice you need to make us all rich. And, you can even deliver your little message from God, provided it won’t offend anyone.”
“Well… alright, I won’t spill the beans just yet.”
And that is what started this whole crazy spiral of press, money, orgies, drugs, books, church, and television appearances that have consumed my life for the last few months. My popularity was finally starting to dwindle, so my agent told me that it was time to deliver the whole message from God. The only problem was I couldn’t really remember it that well. Two months of sniffing the finest glue in the world will cause you to forget some things. I couldn’t tell anyone that though, so I just figured that it would come back to me.
So, that is how I got to be on that stage, in front of the whole world. Well, at least the people with televisions, the half of the world that is starving to death has no idea all this stupid stuff is going on, but everyone else was watching me. It was time to speak.
“Uh… Hello” I began, feeling uncertain of myself. I then told my life story, up to when God visited me. I continued “When God visited me, well; He had nothing but nice things to say… He wanted you all to know that He was proud of you all, and that you should give yourselves nice pats on the back… Oh! And He also wanted you all to know He existed, so, that’s cool, I guess… I know there was something else… about him going on a vacation or something…”
At this point, people started to lose their patience, they started to leave and boo. I was thinking that I was losing them, and God was going to be mad… and that’s when I remembered.
“Oh, yeah! That’s right, I remember now. God wanted to let you all know that he is leaving our universe! He is going to start a new one… he got bored or something. Geez, that blows huh? I forgot how depressing that was… but, hey, now that He’s out of the picture, we can party and stuff right? Like all the time?”
People kept leaving, they didn’t want my message from God, they didn’t believe me, they were angry at me for even suggesting such a thing. Didn’t God realize that people wouldn’t believe me? That they wouldn’t want to accept what I had to say? I went back to my shack in disgrace, and found my shack and forest burned to the ground. All my worldly possessions were gone. And so were my powers. God’s message went unheard, and people went on living just as they had before. All of their prayers went unanswered. No one noticed that God was gone… except me. For those months, I had something to believe in, that what God told me was true, and that I could accomplish His mission. He was wrong, and I was nobody again. I had less than when I started.
I had the memories though. I did have a good time doing all of those things. Perhaps I couldn’t have done them without my trivial miracle powers, but, I did them all the same. I still thought life was absurd, but I no longer cared if it was pointless or not. I just wanted to have fun, to enjoy life. So, I grabbed some bark off of one of my remaining trees, and started walking. I didn’t know where I was going, or what I was going to do, but I was going to go and do something. And I was going to enjoy it. Or, I wasn’t, but I would have those memories. And in the end, that is all anyone ever has
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