These preparations of hers irritate me but I can’t stop watching, I observe her every move, weigh her every sigh. You could call it a maniacal interest if it made any sense in the case of a god to speak of interest, let alone maniacal. You could call it a fixation, which suits me even less. If not an obsession. What’s certain is that nothing like this has happened to me in many billions of years; that’s what floors me. I’ve never felt less divine.
I Am God
by Giacomo Sartori
translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall
**
God has an existential crisis after he falls in love with a human who is an atheist.
THE SUPPER OF THE CRUCIFICIAN IMMOLATION
HUMANS ABOUND, although in comparison with bacteria (for example) they can almost be considered a species on the way to extinction. They teem in all four corners of that little planet that designates itself Earth, so that many regions seen from on high look like colonies of Enterococcus, a condition exacerbated by the pestilential fumes and lights that pollute the night. You might suppose that I watch all the geographic regions equally (divisions in nation-states make little sense to me). But no, I mostly keep an eye on what’s happening in that tatty little Italian boot that (rightly and properly) gobbled up the Papal State in the nineteenth century. Focusing in particular on a large city in the north not very far from a mountain chain famous for its rupestrian beauties. And more in particular, on that strapping blond mademoiselle (blond when not tinted purple), half skinny (on top) and half hefty (below) and intolerably sure of herself. I myself struggle to understand why.
That afternoon, the bespectacled beanpole, skipping her sacrilegious big game hunt, goes straight home. This time she cooks rice with okra, following a recipe she invents as she goes. She also makes an algae salad with capers and pickles that smell of oyster shells and the Atlantic. When she’s finished she goes to the storeroom with the bayonet window that looks out on the alley of Nigerian prostitutes, takes the door off its hinges and mounts it on two sawhorses ordinarily used to hold up complex stratigraphs of clothing. Over this she throws a colorfully striped tablecloth made from a parachute, the gift of a Swiss athlete with whom she’d had three or four two–zeros.
These preparations of hers irritate me but I can’t stop watching, I observe her every move, weigh her every sigh. You could call it a maniacal interest if it made any sense in the case of a god to speak of interest, let alone maniacal. You could call it a fixation, which suits me even less. If not an obsession. What’s certain is that nothing like this has happened to me in many billions of years; that’s what floors me. I’ve never felt less divine.