And God Descended Like Hell on Wheels by Francis Walsh

I was seventeen years old and living in the suburbs of Westbrook, Maine, when God rode her skateboard through a flaming hole in the sky. She turned out to be a bit of an asshole in denim and sent forth a cloud of locusts to greet the camera crews and news vans that had arrived to film her descent into our fair town that fall. The locusts gobbled up the news crews like they were stalks of wheat swaying in the wind, shocking everyone in the neighborhood, as if none of my neighbors had ever read a word about the floods or the plagues or any of the other dark magics that littered the onion skin pages of every Good Book between these here coasts of this Great Nation, God Bless America, Amen, Forever and Ever, Holy Saturnalia, Mercury in Retrograde. 

That year everyone in my high school had bangs and wore high-tops because God had bangs and wore high-tops. But I flouted all the God-influenced fashion trends because God had already recognized me, elected me. We were friends and she knew of my attitude, and she allowed me this vanity. 

God and I always met after school. We rode our skateboards down the cracked, rippling sidewalks to the corner convenience store where the iced coffee was cheap—pocket change with a little lint and a cocked hip for the bored, gray-faced man at the cash register. God taught me not to be ashamed of my body. It was her creation after all. 

Our favorite after-school activity was reading the Tarot, and God let me practice on her. We would sit on my front stoop slurping iced coffee, the cubes rattling in the plastic tubs, and God would cut the deck, shuffling it three times before flopping a card into the grass and asking me to interpret the meaning. But every time she pulled a card, the Three of Swords appeared, the one featuring a swollen heart with three swords plunged into its fleshy mounds and storm clouds rumbling in the background. Usually, it indicates heartache, so I figured some man had jilted God, but whenever I insisted, she winked and said, “No way, dude, read my book, I never needed a man to flood my basement.” Which was cool, like an older friend telling me a joke and letting me in on a secret at the same time, and it’s easy now to say that I loved her, even if I didn’t know it then. But having spent a lifetime kneeling and reciting their Our Fathers, my parents didn’t approve of my relationship with God. She didn’t fit their image. 

Only I understood that God was a witch: she was the Three of Swords, her love was for me, and our meat was locusts and wild honey.

Francis Walsh is a writer from coastal Maine. Their work appears or is forthcoming in the Clackamas Literary Review, Brevity, East by Northeast, and the Gateway Review. They can be found on Instagram @walshfrancis.