Rooming With God by Andrew Bertaina
Somehow the shape of his life had gone all Picasso, but unintentionally. He had thought his college education and strong passions would lead him somewhere, anywhere, but things had gone astray, one idle job to the next, one failed relationship to the next, until he’d moved to this small town in the Midwest where he worked in a local library and lived with God.
The house they shared was a bit rundown, a three-bedroom rambler with a row of Dutch elms dying in the back, and a pair of squirrels living in the attic. Sometimes God said He could hear the elms screaming, and the man felt sad, until God said He was fucking with him, even deities find the language of trees obscure. You have to talk to the roots, God said, and they’re hard to track down. The man never knew if God was speaking deep-seated truths or just messing with him.
The library where the man worked was housed in a brutalist structure, grey and bleak. A relic of an architectural past when windows and natural light were provinces of the weak. The man made just above minimum wage shelving books and answering the occasional reference question on the weekends. His favorite days were those when he got to shelve poetry or philosophy books, those brief stretches when he could run his fingers along the spine of the titans and imagine himself reading them in a great library far away.
As the man walked back from work, the sky turned lilac, dark winter clouds framing a deep blue sky. Overhead, a flag was snapping in the breeze, hung at half-mast, as it always was lately. Life doesn’t always turn out as you want, his mother had told him often, in the years when they were still talking. Of late, she’d lost her mind and only wanted to talk politics. The man was sad for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate to himself but felt quite deeply.
Back home, God was watching Real Housewives of Atlanta, His large sandaled feet stretched across the large industrial coffee table. God was shiftless then. He often said He was thinking of getting back into furniture making. Though He said He wasn’t sure there was still the market for it. He worried cheap labor and low environmental standards would undercut His fine craftsmanship, so He watched reality television instead.
Do you think you’ll read all these Economists? God asked, nudging them with His feet. I wouldn’t. Just put your money in stocks. That’s what I read somewhere.
The man sat down on the couch and sighed.
I hear that cry for attention, God said, pausing the television.
I need advice.
About?
Everything, the man said, gesturing to the blond coffee table, the shabby couch, the shape of the dying elms framing the fence line.
Have you tried meditation? God asked.
The man shook his head.
Dating apps? What about a new hobby or a sports league? I’ve heard the sports leagues are basically the same as the dating apps. What about a Peloton bike?
Outside, pigeons were gathering and hooing in the elms where they nested, their small movements sending bits of the decaying branches to the patio below.
Don’t you have something, you know, beyond that? the man asked.
Fine. Fine. God said. He spoke in parables, of birds rinsing their feathers after rain, of glittering fields of swaying grass, of asses roaming wild through meadows blanketed in paintbrush, columbine, sunflowers, and remote mountain valleys crisscrossed by indigo streams where, ages ago, Leviathans once sang in the depths.
The man regretted asking.
Maybe don’t ask for advice from a guy who killed His own son, God said.
In bed that night, the man added a dating app and swiped on women he recognized from previous times he’d had a dating app. He wondered if they’d changed in the past four months. He wondered if anything could change after a certain point in life. He felt very old despite being relatively young.
As a child, his favorite television show had been X-Men, and he’d loved the episodes when they time traveled, altering the course of the future, guiding their lives back into shape. He wondered if God could do that, weave His way through the strands of time, bending them into new shapes.
***
Despite his reservations, the man joined a poetry club he’d seen advertised at the library. It was time to shake things up, which he understood on an intuitive level. And though the choice of poetry as an agent of change was marginal, it was still movement. The flyer was hot pink, and POETRY CLUB was spelled out in block letters. Accepting new members all the time, it read, with a phone number attached.
When he texted the number, asking for the address, he got a quick answer. Sure. No worries. Happy to have you! And thank God!
Lovely. Really excited. Also, thank God?
The last three texts I’ve gotten have just been dicks.
Lolz.
I’m serious.
I’m sorry. That’s awful.
Why are people?
It’s a mystery to me.
The man drove toward the poetry club and sat in his car on the street beneath the pool of lamplight, wondering if he had the courage to go inside. Wind was blowing down the wide-open streets, and someone was listening to country western music from far enough away that it reminded him of a horror movie. The man thought of driving away, lifting off like the geese in winter. But he had nowhere else to go. No summer home. No wife and children. Just God, who didn’t seem all that interested in him. He got out of his car and walked toward the house—a low slung ranch style with a generous front porch, two ornamental bushes potted on the sides. As he approached, a large dog jumped out of the door and started barking.
Startled, the man jumped back.
He’s all right. He’s all right, a woman said, appearing in the doorway behind the dog. She was holding a glass of wine in her left hand and using her right to hold the dog, which meant the wine was precarious or had already spilled.
Shut up, you loon! She shouted at the dog, who was still barking at sharp intervals. Sorry. Sorry, she said, waving at the dog and sweeping him into the house. He’s not even my dog. I’m watching him for a friend.
Inside, the man felt himself nervous, standing at the edge of a conversation, a stranger when everyone else was a friend. He couldn’t believe he’d come. In the living room, there was a long white bookcase adorned with all the authors he’d always wanted to read but had somehow avoided, life putting so many obstacles to leisure. There was a thin glass topped coffee table and coasters with pictures of the National Parks on them. The hostess, if that’s who she was, passed him a glass of red wine.
Its great virtue, she said, is that it’s four dollars a bottle. But I think I’m supposed to say tannins.
He smiled and slid his glass onto an image of Arches National Park, a place he’d been ages ago, with a woman he once loved. They’d hiked for miles in the red rocks, taken pictures of the sandstone arches framing blue avenues of sky.
After a while, the hostess called things to order, thanking everyone for coming and asking if anyone wanted to read. Some of the small group started to read poems, and he listened intently, his eyes sometimes closing as the words washed over him, a baptism.
An older woman, with her hair tightly pulled back in a bun, kept saying, so lovely, so lovely, each time a poem finished, and the hostess caught his eye and smirked.
At the end of the night, the man stood awkwardly, running his hands across the top of his pants for no apparent reason. The gentle older woman who’d read the poem approached him and asked why he hadn’t read anything.
I’m not good at poetry, he said, feeling himself flush with the honesty.
Oh, nonsense, she said, chiding him. Anyone can do it.
But not everyone can do it well.
That’s the trick, she said, smiling.
The man went to the kitchen and gingerly set down his wine glass. He gathered himself and walked toward the door. Before he was out though, the hostess called after him.
I forgot your name, she said.
He told her, and she smiled. What did you think of things? she asked.
The poems?
Well, please don’t tell me about the tannins in the wine.
I sort of loved them, he said, flushing again.
She stood with her hip resting against the door frame. She’d had at least three glasses of wine. They all take themselves so seriously, she said. But poetry never changed the world or stopped a war. I think it might have started a war, though. Or maybe I’ve just had too much wine.
He stood on the porch in a soft circle of overhead light. Moths battered themselves against the bulb. The dog was panting on the steps, worn out from barking at everyone who’d left.
By the way, she said, thanks for not texting me a picture of your dick.
I thought about it, the man said, but I figured I’d wait until the second meeting.
The crickets were going wild in the waist-high grass. The moon was a sliver of yellow, partially obscured by passing clouds, way up in the stratosphere, or at least that’s how it appeared. He had no idea if clouds existed at different levels. He looked at the woman. No one ever said exactly what they meant.
You should come again, the woman said. Then shyly, my favorite part of the night was watching you listen to the poems. The dog leapt from the porch and set off into the grass, dashing towards the dark corridor of road.
Get back here, Butch, she yelled, running down the steps. The man stood, started to move, then stopped, wondering if he should have run with her, then milling about, half-frozen by indecision as he’d been his whole life, more statue than man. A dark shape approached from the road, the woman holding Butch by the collar.
Oh. You’re still here. I thought you’d have run off.
The man blushed. Who’s is he?
Oh, she laughed. Mine. I just didn’t want anyone to think I’d have such a shittily behaved dog. It’s my first time hosting. They chatted on the porch for another half hour before he drove across town, headlights as ribbons through the depths of night. When he got home, he lay in bed, thinking of the woman, elated, as he’d been when he first fell in love.
Within a month, they were sleeping together. The man had forgotten how much he loved the warm comma of bodies at night, the near comatose naps that come after afternoon sex. They always spent the night at her place, watching old episodes of television shows and minding the dog. In her small double bed, where she lay across his chest, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so good. Next to him lay Butch, breathing heavily.
The months followed along, burning through the darkness of winter and into an unseasonably warm spring. Bees lifted from flowers and butterflies skated through slight drafts. The man began to fall in love with poetry, with the way language, unbound from traditional rhythms, could crack open the seam of the world. As he shelved books, he would often pause to read a poem or two. Outside, a group of sparrows were diving in and out of a tree in some intricate dance, known only to them. How to capture that?
He still didn’t read his poems at the group meetings, but he felt himself beginning to understand as he read poems. His girlfriend was having some work done on the house, so they were meeting at his place for the first time. He picked her up, ruffled the dog’s ears, knelt and said goodbye. He drove her across town in his old Toyota Camry. She said she’d miss the dog, but also that the dog was driving her fucking nuts.
I embrace duality, she said.
In the weeks that followed her first visit, she began asking to stay at his house more frequently. Once there, they’d drink beer and eat takeout, and then she’d start talking to God. At first, it didn’t particularly bother the man. He’d had a lot of questions at first, too. In fact, it was hard to find a roommate who a girlfriend could tolerate. He considered himself lucky to have found God.
As his love for poetry began to expand, her interest waned. When he asked her if she’d like to spend time writing with him, she’d usually just read a book or take a nap. When she awoke, she’d ask if he’d changed the world.
Not yet, the man would answer. But maybe if I work over this metaphor more.
In the living room, they could hear God playing video games. He’d started playing Witcher 3 because He said He was crazy about the scenery. Sometimes, God said, as He was playing, something about the vertiginous snow-capped peaks, the flower spotted meadows and solid oak beams made Him wonder if reality wasn’t a perfectly good simulation. He asked the man if he thought a game could simulate God. The man shrugged, probably?
You’re a great comfort, God answered, shaking His head.
The poetry group kept meeting at bi-weekly intervals. The initial group of ten steadies had been whittled down to seven. Kevin and Patti had moved back to Iowa City to be closer to her parents, and Jason had disappeared. Jason had real talent, but he’d never seemed all that interested in poetry. No one said it aloud, but they all were secretly glad Jason was gone. Watching him squander his talent had been painful.
Like the parable of the talents, God said.
Why did the one who just buried the talents get punished? the woman asked.
Whims of a not-so-benevolent God? Problem of evil and such.
She laughed.
The next week, the man thought it might be time to read his poetry. He’d been writing it for weeks, carving at the syntax, trying to sharpen each image as a finely honed blade. The poem was four lines. Several people were reading poems, while he held his crumpled in his left hand. God had tagged along that night, saying He was lonely.
I usually dictate my poems, He said, when asked to read something, He quoted a few passages from Psalms. Most of the group looked politely confused at the anachronistic language.
On the break, the man walked onto the porch with his girlfriend. The sky was on fire, blazing and making the sort of background that made you think of the afterlife or Jesus parting clouds. A lot of the poetry in there is absolute shit, his girlfriend said, taking a slow drink of her wine. God’s wasn’t bad though.
The man didn’t understand the rhythms of poetry enough yet to know if any of it was shit. He loved the sound of words, the gentle swaying of lines. It reminded him of childhood in some obscure way, when he would lie in his grandmother’s house, looking at the rafters on the ceiling. He hadn’t been scared or happy then, just an in-between feeling, a place he’d been trying to get back to without really knowing it.
Like Heaven, God said, stepping between them with a laugh.
I asked you to stop doing that, the man said, irritated that God was interrupting their conversation and reading his mind. The man thought of his former life, where he’d lived in a small city in Northern California, nestled at the base of small mountains. A town where shaggy retrievers chased tennis balls in the dark and children scurried from playground to playground. He’d lived there for longer than he should have, but he hadn’t known it then.
You want to talk about inertia, God said. Imagine the big fucking push I gave right after the Big Bang. I pushed so hard everything is still hurtling through space. Hell, God said, getting philosophic as He often did after a few beers, I might have pushed it so fucking hard we’ll be ripped to shreds one day.
They stood in the porch together in the silence that followed, watching the light fade from brilliant orange to a molten glow, gone now from the waist-high grass but still hanging in the crowns of the trees.
Back home, the man tried to puzzle over why he hadn’t liked having God at the poetry club. Was he jealous of His poems? His confidence? God was at the doorway then, mumbling into His long white beard. He said He wasn’t going back to the poetry club anyway.
I already wrote Songs of Songs, you know? It would be like Jordan unretiring again to play basketball.
The man felt unburdened, and at the next meeting of the club he intended to read. Drinks were served with small chunks of ice and copious amounts of cheap liquor.
Where’s God? his girlfriend asked.
Absent, the man answered.
Everyone else was drinking already. Maybe they were turning into a group of people who liked drinking together as opposed to a poetry club. Maybe the world was falling apart, and they were the last to know. Maybe they all just liked the way the ice clinked in the class, the way the ice cubes spun in the brown ether of liquid as stars in the sky.
The small woman who had been so kind to the man on his first visit asked to read a poem, and his girlfriend sighed and rolled her eyes.
It’s not one of my own though, the woman said, shyly.
Thank God, his girlfriend whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear.
The woman read a poem by one of the poets who was no longer in fashion, a poet who included small bits of nature in every poem, birds and flowers and rain. The younger poets found this poet’s work banal, a relic from a bygone era. The universal had been subsumed by the personal and political. The man closed his eyes and listened as he always did. He liked the description of the scrim of sky, the aspens quaking in the breeze, and the slow unfolding of the evening revealing itself, in all its splendor, to be the only thing that mattered.
The younger poets were restless. Several of them got a second drink, and his girlfriend poured herself a generous third. The poets sat on the couch and whispered to one another.
What are you whispering about? the man asked, leaning toward his girlfriend, letting his shoulder rest gently against hers.
It’s a secret, she said, holding a finger to her lips.
Outside again, the young poets were smoking cigarettes and trying to outdo one another for descriptions of the moon. They were all wrong, the man thought, not sure what it was himself, hanging there in its quiet majesty, as an adornment on the wide antlers of the bare oaks. But he knew, like God, that it was something they’d never understand, never quite put a proper name to. Instead, they’d keep trying to define it all their lives.
He wanted to share this insight with his girlfriend, but she was laughing in the distance, happy again, or so it seemed to him, as she’d been when they first started dating. Lit by an inner fire, which he no longer brought out in her. He searched the other poets to see which one she was in love with. He couldn’t quite understand who it could be, so he walked back inside and read his poem in the bathroom mirror.
***
She falls
Thinking my way through–
She said; call me if you get this
But the little black shapes,
Oh, birds she said.
Gathering on the
Horizon.
What time did she say she’d–
No one is calling anyway.
Folding the white wings
Of birds all afternoon
It builds concentration.
Which is a resource
I–
She still hasn’t called.
Someone says that mother
Has fallen three thousand miles away
I can hear, if I listen, you say,
The way that bones fold
Like the paper wings of a bird
Call mother–
So we can talk
The children are playing
On the computer
What if we made dinner–
She told me once
About the way
The herons used
To glide like white boats
Into the fields
Of her childhood.
***
The next day the man awoke to a low slanting sunlight coming through the half-closed blinds. God was out in the yard, standing in a circle of pigeons, dropping bits of bread. He was leaning down in the circle occasionally, nodding His head and smiling at all the squawking. The elms were still dying.
When God came in the sliding glass door, the man asked what He’d been saying to the pigeons.
Nothing, Thomas, He said. They’re just pigeons.
But the man knew that wasn’t true. He’d heard snatches of what had been said as their iridescent heads weaved and bobbed in the light—a longing for wind and cave, rocky islands and battering sea.
In the weeks that followed his first poetry reading, his girlfriend stopped coming over to the house. The man figured her absence was just fine. Like the pigeons, he could feel her longing for something else. Sometimes he longed more for the poems than for her, for the quiet way he felt after finishing something beautiful.
He asked God if He wanted to grab a beer or three down at the local bar. The sky overhead was a mass of whirling lights. God looked guilty as He stood in the living room, pulling His small roller suitcase behind Him.
I’ve been meaning to tell you, God began, but He didn’t need to finish. The man didn’t need divine foreknowledge to know where God was going with that suitcase. He’d seen the way she looked at Him.
As God started to walk away, the man called after Him. What about the elms?
God looked back at the man and shook His head. If I saved one, I’d have to save them all.
***
That was the last time the man saw God. Though sometimes, in the years that followed, he sometimes thought he caught sight of Him on the metro. However, whenever the person turned, he saw that he’d been mistaken, and the train would rumble on through the darkness. The man would turn back to his middle musing, to whatever book of poems he was reading on the ride home.
He thought of that time often in the years to come, the months he’d spent falling for poetry, changing the trajectory of his life. On vacation in a seaside town, while he watched the fog roll in one wave after another, he felt his soul pierced and knew it was time to retire to the little house he’d rented with the small windows and wrought iron table. Knew it was time to bend over the blank page, to record the rhythms of this day, the grey sky, the mournful cry of the gulls, the way the day unfolded like any other, magnificent.
Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus 2024), the book length essay, Ethan Hawke & Me (Barrelhouse, 2025), and the short-story collection, One Person Away From You (Moon City Press Award Winner 2021).
27 February 2026
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