I counted my heartbeats. Aside from the rush of air, it was the only sound I heard. When I reached 443,557 beats, I hit a swarm of razor blades. Slices and strips of flesh tore away from me and continued to fall. The plain looked as huge and uncurving as ever, though I must have been thousands of miles 'up.' A red haze of blood fell with me, a screaming ruby comet.
Then I hit.
Pain exploded inside me as the spikes I'd landed on punched through my body. One went straight through my skull with a sickening crunch. I crossed my eyes, focusing on something yellowish-grey that dangled at the tip of a slimy red cone.
'You've made your point!' I shouted, the spikes through my lungs aspirating my voice into a raspy wheeze. 'Show yourself so we can get on with it!'
There was no sound other than the slow dripping of my blood. I stood, pulling myself up off the barbs. Gobbets of my own skin and muscle lay about here and there where they had landed. I picked them up and placed them in torn folds of flesh that served as pockets.
Something looked strange about the ground on which I stood. The spikes grew out of small depressions in the surface. It looked unsettlingly familiar. Especially the salmon-pink color of the flesh.
A giant hand darted out of infinity at an impossible speed to seize me between a thumb and finger of planetary dimensions. Crushing pain steamrolled across me. The immense digits rolled my body around like a ball of snot; after ages of grinding, twisting agony, the fingers separated.
Across a million-mile chasm, bridged by an arm thicker than worlds, I stared at my quarry face to face.
His hair had been styled in a crew cut. I had never imagined that God would look like Jack Webb.
'I love you,' bellowed a voice that rumbled deeper than earthquakes.
He had some way of showing his affection, having smeared my body across a good portion of his index finger. Stinging anguish cried from every particle of ruined flesh.
'Knock off the displays, little boy,' I said. 'I've been worked over by professionals-L.A. cops.'
'I love all of you, and you've all turned your backs on Me.'
'According to Your supporters,' I shouted across the gap, 'You gave us the ability to do so!'
'You stole it from the Tree!'
'Why didn't you take it back, Omnipotent One?'
'You didn't have to use it!' He put the squeeze on again.
When the fingers released, I said, 'You're supposed to be all-powerful, yet You didn't remove the knowledge of good and evil from us. You could have easily corrected the Original Sin, yet a third of the angels turned against You. Why are the creations of a perfect God so flawed? Is there something we've overlooked?'
'Mocking me. You've always mocked me. I created the world for your happiness-'
'Yeah,' I said, seeing an opening, 'and filled it with storms and earthquakes and famines and wars and suffering when you could have made it a paradise.'
'I had!' His voice thundered like a thousand Hiroshimas. 'You broke the rules, and I had to throw you out!'
'You gave us the ability to break the rules.'
'I didn't want mindless automata, I wanted free minds-'
'Then why,' I screamed, 'do You threaten us with punishment in Hell for exercising that freedom? You could have turned us into robots, but You didn't.
'
'I wanted you to choose Me freely, out of
for Me.'
