| Story |
 
|
(Page 3 of 6) Loose by Vasilis Afxentiou
He had been overwhelmed back then.
"Oh, so long, long ago."
***
"Toad turds to the three-hundred-and-fifty-days-of-sunshine. It's not September even."
"Who said that!" thunder boomed.
"Don't, Lord," Satan hurried and said, thinking that modesty can be overdone.
Satan turned to the other, "Charlie, button up."
There was an odd light in God's eyes, a sign that made Satan sorry He'd spoken at all.
"That's what the sign said. Over the airport terminal six years ago when I set foot here -- ‘Three-hundred-and-fifty days of sunshine'. It's just their lousy luck," Charlie looked meaningfully at the Other and gestured to the sprawled tourists, "to be here the fifteen days it's going to douse."
"Six years ago, Charlie?"
"Yeah. Weather was different, a paradise." The youth's face suddenly became well-defined. A shaft of sun passed through a rift in the clouds and shone upon it. He had regular features, brown round eyes, brown light hair and a slight growth of beard. He might have been a Kentucky farmer's boy. "Who were You talking to up there anyway?"
"Hear that, Lord? Things were different." Then to Charlie, "God, Charlie. To God. I may have saved your--you from eternity just now."
"Strong shit, ain't it?" Charlie dragged in a waft and Satan saw only the white of his eyes.
"Ouch!" All of Satan's defences went on alert.
"Is that mortal smoking hashish, Lucifer?" Amazement, dread and execration churned in the words.
The heavens boiled with white-grey fury. Clouds effused, irradiated red flashes against the silver and blue of the sky. The thick plumes puckered squarely over Charlie's stoned head.
Satan almost peed.
He could taste the hot, moist air of a killer storm brewing. No backing out now, He thought. He wasn't up here to save souls.
But new blood was what he wanted and it was pooled in Charlie's fate--and genom.
Humanity Mine, He lavished. Revive remorse of ‘the slumming life', arouse compunction about ol' avarice, coveting, and civil strife; contrition for good ol' false pride, bipartisan morass; and just sit back and make room for the guilt-beset, shame-ridden hoards....If Charlie only keeps his flappers fused.
He rummaged to get His act together. For Hell's sake.
He had come to realise on His sojourns that it wasn't that mortals didn't take Him under account, no.
People merely dread more the evil in themselves, and what it can do to them while still in this life, than what I dish out in the next.
People simply feared more for the here and now than afterlife.
Today they wanted association, the New Order, brotherhood, prophylactics, life for Rwanda; and it all had started when those hippie heads sprouted, and more recently, when that Tipler fellah was being tipped with the inside dope--straight from up there.
Satan gruffed.
He needed old fashion, unequivocal Gospel Sinning. Sin-anxious mortals. None of this doubt-eradicating, Cosmos-probing, high-tech-for-high-peace stuff.
"Our mysteries are Ours," He grunted.
No yuppie yo-yos shouting, Make business not war, or, Greenpeace greenbutts yodelling, Be true to blue.
He wanted the greenback to read In Arms We Trust and, by gosh, the Wall put back up.
"He's been getting all the kudos," Satan griped under His breath, "and I all the barbs."
There was much to justify in His own accomplishments.
| |
