By Valli Jo Porter

Featured Art by Tristen Luken

I escaped the religion of my youth by moving five hundred miles from Ohio to Virginia. There, I refused to pray as I drifted off to sleep, and I never roused for church on Sunday morning. I lived in a tiny broken-down ranch on a quarter acre lot, a single oak tree in the front yard and the world’s worst neighbor to my side. Wayne Bishop was his name, and he spent his afternoons in his driveway, under the shade of my oak, his feet propped on an upturned milk crate, empty beer cans lined up next to his lawn chair. He looked like a toad with a rosacaed face and giant turned-out lips. He called me over to help with his projects, and each time I’d internally debate just drunk or personality disorder. He’d enlist me to help him cut crown molding or install paneling, then he’d hover and insult my handiwork and calculations while he drank his beer. He was also breathtakingly litigious, prone to staying up all night authoring lawsuits that he asked me to copy edit before he filed. I picked random sentences and inserted commas—he never had enough commas—to placate him, so he didn’t sue me like he did his former employer, every doctor who tried to help him, and his own brother. I always helped because I was lonely, and it seemed prudent to stay on his good side.

His only redeeming aspect was his relationship with a rescue pit bull, Jaunty, the most sniveling, nervous creature I’d ever met. She spent all her time quaking behind his calves, unwilling to be coaxed out for a pet or even a treat. Wayne seemed unhinged, but he treated that dog with such gentle affection that even when he rang my doorbell at ten-thirty at night and yelled incoherently about the water department digging in his easement, I decided he couldn’t be too violent.

When my sister started having kids, I moved back to Ohio, and I didn’t leave my contact information. Seven years later, I opened my front door and found Wayne Bishop standing on my front porch. I knew immediately that he’d hunted me down to kill me. I wilted in resignation, imagining the bullet hitting me mid-forehead, imagining how destroyed my face would be at such close range, imagining my sister and my nephews accepting condolences at my closed-casket funeral. But then Wayne Bishop said, “Hello, Child,” not in his voice, but in that far-off voice I recognized from childhood, the one that contained every language all at once, the English carrying over the top.

“Wow. It’s been awhile,” I said, taken aback. “I didn’t expect you to look like this, God. Should I take off my shoes or something?”

“What do I look like?” God seemed interested in my answer, which irritated me. Omniscient much?

“Like my drunk and/or mentally ill neighbor from Virginia.”

“Ah,” God said. “Well, through a glass darkly and all that.”

I shook my head. “It would be easier to handle if you’d brought the dog, too.”

God inclined Wayne Bishop’s head. “Dogs are one of my better pieces of work, no?”

“They’re great, but if I had to choose between dogs or trees, I’d choose trees. Oxygen and whatnot.”

God spread Wayne Bishop’s hands wide, palms up, in a gesture somewhere between what are you going to do? and come unto me. “On a more salient note, I am here to pick you up for our participation in the social science research.”

“Was that today?” I murmured, my anxiety peaking even higher than when I thought the person on my porch was about to shoot me. After the years-long silence between us, I was surprised God had kept to the calendar. I’d chucked it long ago.

I grabbed my coat and drove us, under God’s auspices, back to my hometown, an hour south. I kept up a nervous stream of small talk. “I bet the research is going to be surveys. I do love giving my opinion on various things,” I said, to avoid bombarding God with questions. I knew from experience that God’s answers only grew more cryptic and apocalyptic. Every time I caught sight of God in the passenger seat, wrapped in Wayne Bishop’s pustule-ridden face, I startled a little.

 God told me to get off at the next freeway exit, which unnerved me even more. It was the same one my parents had taken on the way to church every Sunday. I drove the curve of the road a little too fast and had to skid to a stop at the light. After hanging a left, past the post office, the church building loomed above us, its sanctuary roof soaring a hundred feet above the earth, looking much like Noah’s ark, except with more stained-glass windows.

“Pull in here,” God said.

I guessed we were coming here for nostalgia’s sake, a stop on our way to an appropriate venue for social science research. But then I remembered: In a brazenly opportunistic American evangelical move, my old church congregation had sold this building to a university and relocated to the richer section of town. This was no longer a house of worship, it was a paean to human knowledge. I’d probably be more comfortable in the building now. But would the university be happy with us poking around while classes were in session?

Inside, the building was silent and eerie. The all-purpose carpet, which had been a dusty rose the last time I was here almost two decades ago, was now all-purpose tile. The main atrium was empty. On the opposite end, the indoor water fountain I’d thrown pennies in as a child burbled pointlessly. We turned down the hall toward the back of the building. On the left, the former Sunday school classrooms bore professors’ nameplates on their doors. On the right, the former kids’ classrooms on the right had rows of desks lined up, lecture-ready. We hadn’t encountered another soul in the building.

“This is a strange situation,” I said.

“A Strange Situation, indeed,” God replied.

God led me to the fellowship hall, where I’d eaten so many times during my childhood. But now, instead of a large serving window, a dark mirror ran the length of the wall between fellowship hall and the kitchen. I recognized it immediately from cop TV shows and couldn’t help but press my face to the glass in an attempt to spot people on the other side. All I could see was the myopic Dali version of my own face.

“Don’t smudge the glass,” God said, not unkindly, so I pulled my sleeve over my hand and rubbed away my nose and cheek prints. I stood next to God, unsure, and observed the rest of the room. Several comfortable leather couches were parked in a pleasing pattern around the room, along with shelves and coffee tables full of books. In the middle stood a foosball table.

“It’s been decades!” I said, as I glanced at God, who nodded permission for me to explore.

I found the ball, dropped it in the side, spun the blue team forwards with authority, and scored.

“Can we play?” I asked.

“Sure,” God said. “You’ll probably win, though. My wrists aren’t what they used to be.”

God was right, those holy wrists were crap. I was up five-nil when I noticed a stranger hovering behind us. I turned to find a woman, perhaps in her twenties, her black hair twisted up into a complicated knot at the back of her head. She was as beautiful as Wayne Bishop was ugly, with a symmetrical face and skin that any multi-level marketing beauty company would love to use as an After shot.

“This is Sophia,” God said, and I laughed. My nerves seemed to be firing in unexpected patterns. I felt a few of my fingers twitch of their own accord.

“Oh, that’s a little on-the-nose, isn’t it?” I said.

Sophia looked politely bewildered, and God said, “Names should be respected and used.”

Sophia meant wisdom and was a Greek word sometimes used when referring to the Holy Spirit, a detail from my childhood indoctrination I would never forget, but perhaps this weird day wasn’t quite as weird as I wanted to make it. Perhaps God wasn’t trying to make some kind of existential point, as I’d often feared God was doing. Perhaps Sophia was just Sophia.

I looked down to hide my shame and said, “Would you like to play, Sophia?”

“An excellent suggestion,” God said. “My wrists don’t really bend at all anymore.”

Sophia jumped to the other side of the foosball table, and she made the game a game, narrowing my lead to two in about two minutes. God cheered for us both indiscriminately, which irritated me. Yes, yes, good sportsmanship, we’re all children of God, etc., but God was there with me, not Sophia.

The score was eight-all when a man stuck his bald head in the door and pushed his glasses up his nose with his knuckle. “God,” he said, “you’re needed down the hall.”

“I’ll be right back, Child,” God said, but I abandoned the game and instead followed on God’s heels.

“I’ll come, too,” I said. “It was supposed to be us two. Ich und Du. When is the research going to start? I don’t want to split up.”

“God will be right back,” the bald man promised. He held the door open wide enough for God to slip out, but not wide enough for me to accompany.

“I’ll be back in five minutes,” God promised.

“But your time is all wonky!” I said. “Five minutes to you could be five million years to me! I could be dead and my carbon could be decayed by the time you came back! There could be no trace of me five God-minutes later!”

“Five minutes your time,” God said. “Sophia is here. Have you seen the books on that shelf? I think you’ll like the one on the coffee table.”

I sulked over to the couch and plopped down, arms crossed as God stumped into the hall, the door gliding shut. Indeed, the book on the coffee table was one that interested me: a history of cults in the United States, one I’d been meaning to order from interlibrary loan. But I was miffed that God had left me alone despite my protests, and I couldn’t even pick it up to check out the chapter titles.

“Don’t worry, God will be right back,” Sophia said, sitting down on a couch opposite mine. “What do you think of this place?”

I hesitated, then decided it was easier to talk than to sulk. “It’s strange,” I said. “My sister married her husband in this building, and they had a quick dinner reception in this room afterward.” The windows looked out to the brickscape courtyard, which looked more bleached and crumbly than it had two decades ago.

“No dancing?” Sophia hazarded.

“And no alcohol! Can you believe it? Those were my family’s evangelical days. We thought that would please God.”

“God’s children often misunderstand God,” Sophia agreed.

“Well, God can be frustrating,” I said, carried on by Sophia’s understanding as well as her wide, neotenous eyes. “God is all, ‘I want it to be a relationship!’ and I’m all, ‘It’s hard to be in a relationship with someone who never calls,’ and God is all, ‘Oh, I don’t want to interrupt you,’ and I’m all, ‘But I’m always the one who calls! You don’t care, we’d never talk if I didn’t call!’ It went like that, for awhile. But when God actually showed up on my front porch, it seemed things had changed.”

“Things are always changing,” Sophia agreed, and I began to suspect she wasn’t actually understanding at all, just skilled at parroting party lines. She offered me the book from the coffee table, and in an attempt to calm myself, I flipped to the footnotes at the back. I was delighted to discover it cited several books I’ve read—Alice Miller, Alexandra Stein. I always get a snobby little thrill when I discover I’ve already read some of the sources. I stuck my finger in the footnotes section and wandered over to the door, cracked it open, and peeked into the hall. It was deserted. I sighed, then turned to find Sophia hovering next to me.

“Come, sit,” she said. “There are other books you might enjoy. How about one on the origins of the universe?”

I scanned the hall again before I followed her back to the couches. “I am a fan of the universe coming into being,” I murmured.

She handed me A Brief History of Time, and I flipped to the back to see which of those books I’d read, but it only had a glossary and an index. I shut the book. “Who does God look like to you?” I asked.

When Sophia cocked her head to the side as she did at that moment, the symmetry of her face seemed too severe, her cheekbones and jaw too cutting. “What do you mean?” Sophia asked. “God looks like Regina King, of course.”

“Regina King, the actor?”

“Yes, but now that I consider, Regina King actually looks like God. God came first.”

I shook my head. “But doesn’t God look different every time you meet?”

“No.” Sophia was firm on this. “God comes here sometimes with other children. God always looks like Regina King.”

I tried to make sense of this but only ended up shaking my head. “When is the research going to start? I’m telling you now, if you want me to press a button and shock someone, I won’t do it. I’m wise to that Milgram bullshit. I’ve had antiauthoritarian tendencies my entire life. God can confirm.”

“Don’t worry, we don’t do that type of research here,” Sophia said.

I gave up my pretense of distraction and tossed the book onto the coffee table. At that moment, God strolled back into the room. A burst of emotion—joy? relief?—came over me, because it really had been only five minutes, God had kept the promise. I bounded over to God, who held out Wayne Bishop’s arms for an embrace. I caught a whiff of Wayne Bishop’s familiar Budweiser breath and hesitated before complying, God drawing me to Wayne Bishop’s beer belly. I was embarrassed, then, and turned away, because Sophia had to see my reluctance, and God definitely noted my reluctance. I glanced at the dark mirror. Were there people behind there scribbling about my reluctance on official clinical forms? And if those people were there, who did they see God as? Did they scribble things like, “Subject hesitated to hug Betty White”?

“I’m back,” God declared, settling down on the leather couch, and patting the adjacent cushion. “Sit, Child, and tell me what you’ve been up to lately.”

I noticed then that Sophia had disappeared. Had she snuck out? What was going on?

“When are we going to start the research?” I asked, suspicious. I hadn’t signed any forms. It seemed impossible in this age of consent that I could be in the midst of an experiment I didn’t understand and didn’t sign to participate in. Some review board somewhere would object. Sophia and the people behind the dark mirror would be reprimanded, maybe even sanctioned. “I thought we were going to fill out some surveys.”

“Surveys are the least accurate form of social science research,” God said idly. “Humans exaggerate, claim falsehoods. They want to appear more virtuous than they are if there’s one other human paying attention, even a stranger.”

I tried so very hard in that moment to take God’s statements as general ones about human nature instead of specific ones about me. I did. But the last time God and I talked, years and years ago, I was surrounded by my church friends at a youth retreat. Hands thrust in the air and eyes closed and tongues rolling lyrics like Create in me a clean heart, and Jesus, lover of my soul, they sang and worshiped and wept, and I—I felt nothing. They were so certain, and I was so uncertain. My uncertainty ate at me like acid. So I prayed like I had been taught: God, don’t let me be a hindrance to your presence here. Don’t let me be lukewarm. I opened my eyes to see one of our youth sponsors frantically waving me into the hall, and I burned with humiliation. She only asked whether I needed accommodations for dinner, because of my peanut allergy, but afterward I stood at the threshold of the room where my peers sang in one eerie voice and I knew. I knew I could never go back in. I’d been spit out of God’s mouth, just like the Bible promised the lukewarm would be. Better to be cold than lukewarm, it said. So I would be cold.

I would be cold.

With that history, how could I take God’s words as general instead of specific? I felt a certain caring in me snap, and I turned away from the leather couch and sang, under my breath, “Why did you make me like this?” I wasn’t proud of it. I was thirty-five, and my upbringing lingered on in the architecture of my thoughts. I knew this question was the last thing I should ask. Paul was very clear about that in Romans 9—the lowly clay should not complain about its shape to the potter. And to mumble it with God only a stone’s throw away? Teenage-level passive aggressive.

“My love,” God said, “is infinitely broad and deep and wide, but your need seems fathoms larger.”

God’s response, surprisingly tender, made me feel like I had to backpedal. “Sorry, I know it doesn’t make you seem omnipotent or whatever—”

God shook Wayne Bishop’s head. “It expresses something profound about the human condition. Really, it says more about you than it does me. If my love is this big—” God stretched Wayne Bishop’s arms wide, which I felt was a little too evangelical-preacher-overcommitted-to-his-crucifixion-reenactment, but then God also stretched Wayne Bishop’s arms along the y-axis, then the z-axis for emphasis—love in 3-D— “If my love is this big, then your need must be overwhelming.”

“It is,” I whispered.

“It is,” God confirmed.

We sat silent, letting this understanding we’d come to spool out between us. I imagined the future, imagined us, God and me, Ich und Du, like the trees in the forest, our backs straight, our limbs strong, our roots firmly in the soil, sending signals through the dirt, the most elemental yet mysterious of signals, shedding our leaves in unison. But God shattered the moment by popping up to Wayne Bishop’s feet with alacrity that belied the stiff-as-boards wrists. “I’m needed down the hall again.”

I was immediately apoplectic. “What is going on? You’re acting like a doctor, trying to see two patients at once!” I followed on God’s heels, yelling all the way across the room. I intended to head right down the hall with God, to leave this room and never, ever come back, but God slipped through the door, almost supernaturally, and left me alone, pounding on the wood grain.

“Why are you doing this?” I shouted. “Why even bother coming here with me! I was fine without you! I need, I need, and you walk away!”

I turned from the door. Overcome with fury, I ran over and smeared my hands across the entire horizon of the dark mirror, just in case there was anyone behind it, and, for good measure, swiped all the books on the nearest shelf onto the floor. Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child slid across the others, the lead in the avalanche, the last to come to rest. I owned two copies. As a rule, I afforded all books the respect I was taught to have for the Bible as a child, but I stomped over and ground my heel into the cover, the ripping cardstock providing no comfort, not even any shame. So I dropped to my knees next to the pile and began to rip the covers off all the paperbacks, one by one, tossing the insides over my shoulder, imagining the books cowering, their knowledge laid bare, left with no shelter, not even the most basic shelter of covers.

“Oh! You seem to be having big feelings!”

In my mania, I hadn’t heard Sophia come back. She stood in front of me, on the other side of the avalanche of books, helpless. I picked up the innards of The Drama of the Gifted Child and began ripping it page by page, making furious eye contact with her the whole time, throwing the introduction in her general direction, even though the pages fluttered haplessly back at me.

“Would you care for another round of foosball?” she asked. “I’m sure we can—”

“I would not care for another round of foosball!” I ripped the remainder of the book in half. “I want to go home, and I’m never talking to God again! All I wanted to do was take a lousy survey!”

Sophia remained calm, but I could see her pulse pounding at her throat. “Look,” she said. “Look, God is back.”

I saw Wayne Bishop sidle back through the door, as if on cue, and appraise the damage. “What’s wrong, my Child?”

My fight immediately drained, and I slumped back against one of the couches, still not ashamed. God deserved it. Sophia deserved it. They all deserved it.

God clomped forward, more arthritic than before, and proffered Wayne Bishop’s hand. I felt my face crumple. I hated taking that hand, but it was the only way I could reconstitute myself. I stood up. I looked away.

“I’m here now,” God soothed.

“Is this the research? You, coming and leaving and leaving and leaving?”

“You know surveys are the least effective—”

I interrupted. “I didn’t consent to this! You need my signature! I don’t consent!”

God looked levelly at me, Wayne Bishop’s lips rolling outward in surprise. “Parents can sign for their children. I consented for you.”

“I’m thirty-five. I’m like five times the age of reason. You have no business consenting for me.”

“You came along,” God insisted. “You drove us here. Your presence is consent enough.”

“Tell that to the peer reviewers!”

Sophia inclined her head, nodding, as if agreeing that the peer reviewers would find this problematic. Then she gave a little shudder. This gave me courage, and I grabbed my jacket from the couch and stomped from the fellowship hall without looking back.

But this time, God followed me. “Wait, Child. We’ll leave together. I will escort you to your porch.”

I took the back exit so I didn’t have to be in the building a moment longer. No longer a house of worship, no longer belonging to me, but still home in painful, familiar ways.

“You mean I’ll escort you to my porch,” I growled, unlocking my car, starting it before God even folded Wayne Bishop’s body into my passenger seat.

“You’re driving, but I’m holding the rest of the world together so you can.”

“So you founded gravity, big deal. You still have to put your seatbelt on,” I said, throwing the car into reverse, not waiting for Wayne Bishop’s clumsy fumbling with the belt before I launched forward.

We argued all the way down the street, my bitterness in balance with God’s prevarication. Before I could return one last verbal blow, God gasped and threw Wayne Bishop’s hand across my midriff.

“Watch the dog!” God yelled.

A spaniel raced across the four-lane road, aiming for the safety of the shoulder. I slammed the brakes and swerved. My tires screeched, and the spaniel froze in the middle of my lane, lactating nipples undulating under her belly. She looked into my eyes as I braked even harder, and my old Civic bucked toward her, jerking several times before it hopped the curb and, with a crunch, nosed its grill right into a giant oak tree. I waited with shoulders high, eyes winced. The dog, unscathed, trotted around the tree and looked reproachfully at us through God’s window.

“I really thought you were going to hit her,” God said.

My response was an anguished cry. “You didn’t know? You really didn’t know?”

“My foreknowledge deals in probability,” God said. “Like predicting where electrons are going to be in relation to the nucleus. I have a commandingly good idea of each and every possibility in the entire universe. It’s a numbers game, and I’m extraordinarily good with numbers. But once in a while they surprise me. Once in a while my children surprise me. I love a good surprise. And even better, the mystery—how did I not see that outcome as inevitable?”

I considered how, for my entire life, I’d only longed for certainty, and yet here was God’s secret: Certainty wasn’t for the divine, let alone for humans.

The dog scampered behind the house on the other side of the tree. I was chagrined to see the bark of that oak crunched in on itself, a bumper-shaped valley in the middle of the otherwise pristine trunk. I didn’t even disembark to inspect the damage to my car. I just watched in my rearview mirror until the road was clear before I threw the car into reverse, then drive. And without another word, I sped toward the freeway. I drove God home.

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Valli Jo Porter earned her MFA from Old Dominion University. In 2020, she won an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council for her short fiction. Her work has appeared in Gordon Square Review and Literary Mama.