God was bored by his creation. Drowsy but not exactly tired, he felt the way one feels after lunch when one's labors lack the freshness of morning but before evening (with its firelight and starlight) stirs up sentiment that makes it difficult to sleep. The watchband on his burly forearm stretched across the forested landscape like train tracks; the thick hairs would get trapped and pull when he flexed and felt his power. The mechanism itself--the precipice of a proud technology--was growing sluggish, slow enough for him to photograph each passing scene in all its mind-numbing minutiae, even as he grew sleepier, caring less and caring more...
He had a dream on the train.
The hair on his hands, his wrists, his arms was growing rapidly. Like time-lapsed legumes in test tube terrariums, hairs sprouted and grew in devout hunger for the sun. Outside now, out of the laboratory and naked, summer glistened on his skin like polished bronze... And then the hairs started growing, from his hands again, from the top of his feet, from his inelegantly thick and muscled thighs. Like the crops of a cool, dry season, his chest hairs grew more slowly. Down to the nest below his belly button, the wild garden grew.
The razors were machetes clearing long-abandoned paths across his skin. In ambidextrous urgency, he went on with the harvest. The hairs were like black snow. The hairs were like ash, like dark vines falling and finding new soil. The tendrils took to red clay and black sand with equanimity, standing up on end like threatened snakes, coiled around aging suit cases, anchored in the earth but stretching.
He woke up with an erection, charmed into an exaggerated outline in his jeans by the jiggling train car and the content of his dream. Across from him, the white-haired vicar (or perhaps priest) held a book of "cross-words" at just the right level to disguise the line between his myopic stare and the starched elongation of the member. God shifted in his seat, turned to the side, and pulled the wool jacket he was wearing down so it would cover his lap. Noticing the minister's indiscretion when he opened his eyes, God had forgotten the substance of his dreaming. He lay quietly with his eyes closed. The uneven tracks, the aging steel bands, rocked him back and forth. He tried to return but there had been a tablespoon of adrenaline in the fading memory. He was wide awake inside his muddled mind.
He sat up. The erection had disappeared and with it his companion across the car. He was alone. He was awake. His thinking was persistent but abstract, as if he were searching the snow laden world for one bright bit of color, the luminescent something that would make him say, "YES" in singing repetition. With the light in the sky receding, the smear of scenery became superimposed with his own vague features. He was clean-shaven. His eyes were dull but wide. The reflection in the window made him feel the loneliness quadruple, expand in his lungs with lethal glee. As if the train carried chlorine and other chemicals, as if by sabotage or neglect, the train had derailed, as if... As if...
Bored with all creation, God created me (and you) to help him waste time, so that it runs out more evenly, runs down more completely and slides to a gasping halt in some remote station.
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