The Deliverance, A short story

A great miracle has occurred.  After years, and years, and finally giving up,  but then a miracle, God has heard me.   An unknown large planet arrives out of nowhere, and is hurtling towards earth, like in the movie Melancholia, the great collision to destroy all things.  Frantic scientists on the news 24/7, Nasa can’t explain this one, where did it come from?  How could we never have seen it coming!  After millennia of suffering God has had enough with this world.  The human race, what a disappointment!  While the once-happy people of the earth panic and scramble over each other to get somewhere, anywhere, to save their lives somehow, to the underground bunkers, and the grocery stores, and gather at churches and beg God to “just let them live”, and weep and wail, for the time of the end of all things has arrived, but the tortured prisoners of the Earth quietly reach out their hands to the sky, and their paws,  from their hospital beds, and from their cages, and with silent tears of hope they beg the planet to come smashing in.  A monkey in a research lab.  They held him down a month ago.  They cut off his arm.  He was not even anesthetized.  He was screaming for help.  Nobody cared.  He is horrified every time the lab door opens.   A mouse in a medical experiment.  They cut her toes off today with scissors.  She watched the scissors cut.  She couldn’t escape their hands.  A cow in a factory farm.  They always stick needles in her.  She’s never been outside or walked around.  She listens to the other cows as they are hoisted up and have their throats slit.  A starving child, amongst the masses of other starving children, whose given up on getting anything to eat today.  And me… well they recently locked me in the psych ward “to rehabilitate me”.  I had tried to jump recently.  I was “rescued.”  Rescued so I could be brought back to this hell.  I had wanted to be free, like a bird.  Free, like a stillborn child.  I look out my little window of the psych ward and anxiously await the coming “great collision.”  I’ve never been so relieved.  Please, don’t miss us, I beg the planet.  Please, we need you!  I weep for the innocent lives who will have to die in such a way, I pray it’s peaceful, and quick, either we die like this or continue on living in hell.

I hear the screams of horror outside as the vague outline of the planet comes into view.  I hear people screaming out to God to save them, but don’t you see, it’s to late.  In my mind’s eye I see the suicide hotline worker throw himself off a bridge, a pastor stick a gun in his mouth, a school teacher sits rocking on the corner of the floor, a pregnant friend swallows pills.  Years ago didn’t you ridicule me, teacher, for rocking myself back and forth?  Didn’t you say I should just grow up? Last month, suicide hotline know-it-all, didn’t I call you up and didn’t you explain to me that life is beautiful and only somebody “mentally ill” would ever “throw it away”.  I guess you were wrong.  Preacher, didn’t your sermon last month say that God never gives us more than we can handle and that he has a blissful eternity in store for us so any degree of suffering we go through on earth is ok?  But I see you break, preacher.  I see you rip your bible apart before getting the gun.  And, pregnant friend, didn’t you try to explain to me about the gift of life that you were going to give this new child?  Didn’t you think I was evil for insisting it was wrong to create new lives on a planet like this?  Didn’t I say, spare the child the misery and yourself the grief?  But you hated me for that.

God is finally, finally responding to the cries of the tortured prisoners of the earth.   It’s time for their wish to come true.  It’s time for this Earth to stop turning, and to stop existing.  And for the prisoners of earth, it’s time to be free.  It’s starting to get really, really hot.  The ground is burning, something’s just happened to the sun, it’s moved.  The rays of the sun are scorching us all.  Our skin burns and blisters.  Regular people outside, now “mentally ill” just like me, screaming and pacing and trying to die faster before the next body part gets burnt.  All the Earth waits together for the planet to strike.

Ten thousand years later, and still my peaceful sleep continues uninterrupted, no more nightmares, no more earth, it’s all over, thank God.