The Godly Atheist

Once upon a time a girl sat down to write a book about romance and love and all those things girls seem to write about on long afternoons. She picked up her pen and chewed on the end of it, then tossed it aside and grabbed her laptop. There in the bony shade of a two hundred year old apple tree, she watched in wonder as her fingers began to type and a story appeared before her.

Sobbing filled her ears as a child wailed in the hands of his mother's lover and darkness hovered nearby, broken only by the child's smiles. He grew up, a brilliant light in a dark garden and began to attract the most unusual adventures. He and his best friend climbed mountains and met bears, they nearly drove off a mountain when their brakes failed and in between it all he fell in love.

In his innocence and youthful exuberance he raced off into the world to seek his fortune, leaving the girl behind and getting himself kidnapped by mysterious men in the rain forests of Peru. Questioned and tortured in ways you cannot imagine, he survived because his life had never been easy and he was strong. It was only when they began to hurt his friend that he faltered and even then he could not tell them what they wanted to know, because he did not know it either.

He might have died there, but strange little men, who looked like jaguars, emerged from the jungle and carried the two boys away. Far away, to the top of a mesa, to a place so peaceful it was called the Sanctuary and there he met his destiny. A man called the Conductor, and -- and here the girl paused in surprise.

The people in this story were all playing the wrong parts! The most common place people were doing mysterious things and the most mysterious of all was the atheist, who might have been god! She held her breath to see what would happen next.

The boy left the Sanctuary and there followed births and deaths, comings and goings and nothing was ever as it seemed -- until the end, when the little boy from the dark garden returned to the Sanctuary, taking his place at last.

Smiling, the girl closed her laptop and sat back, dreaming of jaguar men and godly mortals and a beautiful golden haired man sitting quietly in the space between his breaths on the top of a Peruvian Mesa.