I know this is up on Facebook already, but I'm going to start systematically posting all my writing here so its in one easy spot for people to access and read. Literary agents, for example. Sorry for the spam in the meantime. :)
Genesis 1
1. In the beginning, God received his Limited Addition Do-It-Yourself World Kit in the mail. 2. The World Kit came unassembled, the pieces sealed in small plastic bags. A set of directions hovered nearby.
3. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and his roommate looked up from a game of Sudoku and said, “What, already? Shouldn’t you put it together before you plug it in?” 4. Ignoring him, God jammed the plug into the outlet and flipped the switch, grinning as the space around his world began to glow. “Cool!” he gushed. 5. “I shall call it… ‘Day,” he announced. “And this,” he added, flipping the switch again, “Night.” The roommate was not impressed. “Brilliant. You gonna sit there all eternity flipping a switch back and forth?”
“Nah, there’s a timer. Coupla’ hours ought to be enough… There.” 6. Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”
“Huh?” the roommate asked.
“Sky, man,” God translated, sliding atmosphere pieces out of the box.
“Oh. Then why didn’t you say so?”
7. God didn’t answer, concentrating all his effort on getting the stratosphere and ionosphere layers to snap together.
“Shouldn’t you be using the directions for that?”
“For this part? Nah, it’s easy.”
“Obviously.”
The layers snapped together with a gratifying click and God looked smug. “You were saying?”
“Your expensive world kit,” the roommate mumbled, and went back to his Sudoku.
8. “I shall call it ‘Heaven’,” God said regally. “Eh? What happened to the light? Oh, shut off already? Let’s stretch that out a little, shall we?” He fiddled with the timer until the light came back on. 9. Then God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.”
“Stop that,” the roommate snapped.
“Stop what?”
“That! Stop being so dramatic! What are you trying to do, anyway?”
“I’m creating, man. It’s called art.”
“Blathering on like an idiot is ‘art’?” the roommate snorted. He reached for his drink, eying God through the warped glass as the latter scooped wet dirt into a landmass.
“Huh, that’s funny,” God mused.
“What is?” the roommate asked, curious despite himself.
“They didn’t give me enough dirt. Look, there’s way more water than land!”
“Are you sure you did it right?” The roommate glanced pointedly towards the directions, still untouched.
“Of course I did it right! They shorted me on dirt! Totally ripped me off!”
“Yeah? That sucks. Can you order more?”
“Yeah, just sucks having to. Jerks! Guess that’s what I get for going with the limited addition,” God mumbled, moving across the room to a cluttered desk. He sent soda cans and empty ramen containers flying, absently brushing crumbs off the keys as he sank into an oversized swivel chair. The steady tap-tap-tap of virtual progress drifted across the room, and the roommate had just begun to make headway on his puzzle when God exclaimed, “They want how much for dirt? Are they out of their minds? There’s no way I’m paying that much!”
“Keep it down, would you?”
“I mean, come on! It’s dirt! Dirt! They’re mad!”
“So you’ve said,” the roommate said dryly. “Look, I told you at the beginning this was an expensive hobby. Especially after you bought that stupid solar system kit.”
“Yeah but… dirt, man!”
“Do you really need it?”
God sat fuming, crunching the numbers in his head. “Stingy jerks,” he finally grumbled, sliding out of his chair. He began remodeling his continent, stretching the dirt as far as it could go. 10. “I think I’ll call this dirt bit ‘Earth’,” he mused. “And all this water here, ‘seas’. Hey you know what? I think I’m starting to like it like this.”
“Good for you.”
11. Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth.”
“Really?”
“Shut up! I’m in the zone!” God said, scattering pieces everywhere as the plastic finally gave. 12. He spent a few moments sweeping them back into a pile, then sprinkled handfuls onto his landmass. When the last bag was dispersed, he watched in child-like wonder as the land began to team with life, turning first light, then dark green as the plants grew and spread. “That is so cool!” he laughed. 13. “Ack, stupid light keeps shutting off!” he complained. 14. “Guess it’s time to install my Solar System Deluxe add-on pack!” he grandly announced. 15. “This should cure my light problems.” 16. God carefully unwrapped the golden orb, glancing around for another outlet. “Hey, I’m going to unplug this lamp. We never even use it,” he added defensively.
“Fine, whatever.”
God snatched the offending plug out of the wall and tossed it aside. He squinted as the orb acquired power.
“Are all of them this bright?” the roommate complained, and God shook his head. “No. All these little ones are supposed to be a lot dimmer. Hey, do we have any splitters? I’m gonna need a lot more outlets.”
The roommate sighed and rose to look for one, leaving God to his unwrapping. In addition to a lesser orb to rule the night, he had nearly a dozen planets, and a large wire net from which to hang about a billion stars. When the roommate returned, God was arranging the stars into silly shapes, chuckling to himself.
“You’re a moron,” the roommate told him, tossing down the splitter. “They’re going to figure that out, you know.”
“You think?” God smirked. 17. “Here, help me hang it, will ya?” he half-ordered, holding out one of the corners.
“Hang it where?” the roommate asked, reluctantly taking it.
“On that shelf there. Put a couple of books on top to hold it down. I’m going to tie my end off with the blinds cord.”
“What? That’s dumb. Didn’t it come with tacks or something?” the roommate demanded, kicking at the box. The metallic clang drew his attention.
“Hey! What are you doing? No! Hold your end up!”
“Hold on! There’s some kind of frame in here… Did you even read the instructions?”
“Oh. That’s what that was?”
The roommate rolled his eyes and put the frame together, and God gratefully secured each end of the net to it. “What’s next?” the roommate asked.
18. “Now we just set these on timers so they aren’t on all at once… there!” God said, flipping a switch. The large orb lit up, painfully bright, then slowly faded. Meanwhile, the dimmer orb, on its own timer, and had faded already. “No, stop that!” God cried. He readjusted, but then the dim orb transitioned so slowly the large orb had completed its full cycle before the dimmer one had begun to fade. “Aaaaaag!” God growled, growing frustrated. He was quickly losing patience, the roommate could tell, already eying the bags of animal parts beside him. He fiddled with the controls a moment longer, then declared it good.
“They still aren’t in synch,” the roommate pointed out, but God ignored him to hang the orbs on their respective hooks on the frame. 19. He watched for a moment as they glowed and ebbed, then reached down for the first bag of animal parts. 20. And God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.”
“Still annoying,” the roommate called, on his way to the kitchen for more juice. 21. He came back to find God painstakingly sorting thousands of newly assembled creatures according to their respective habitats. “This is a lot harder than it looks,” God admitted with a sheepish grin.
“If you say so,” the roommate shrugged. 22. He settled back down with a magazine, but glanced up at the utterance. “Now go have sex?” he repeated. God nodded seriously. “They didn’t give me enough of these either. I need lots, lots more before I put the others down.” 23. He waited for a few moments, as if his little critters would indeed multiply in the span of a day, but slowly gave up and started pulling the other bags over.
“Want a pair of scissors?”
“Nope, I got it,” God said, tearing open the bag with his teeth. 24. Then he said, “Let the earth bring forth each living creature according to its kind: cattle and creeping things and… What? Don’t give me that look! You’re just jealous because you don’t have a World Kit.”
“Jealousy. Yeah, that’s it.”
25. God shrugged, and began fitting parts together –leg parts with like-colored torsos, neck segments, and heads.
“Wow, those are huge!”
“Huh?” God startled.
“What are you making anyway? Have you followed the directions at all?”
God glanced distractedly towards the discarded instruction booklet. “Heh, no.”
“Aren’t humans your dominant species? How are they supposed to share a world with those things?”
God watched as his giants stomped around, ravaging everything in sight. “Crap! What do I do?” he groaned. “I can’t take them apart once they’re in motion!”
“You should have thought of that before. Dude, what’s with that one’s neck?”
“Neat, right? It’s so he could reach really tall trees, but I didn’t have and trees that big at first so I had to stretch a few over here,” God replied.
“It’s a little overkill, even then. And this one… three horns? Why would he even need three horns? Wouldn’t one horn be good enough?”
God started to answer, realized he had nothing. He made a face.
“And this one’s all head and teeth… what’s with these tiny front legs?”
“Oh come on! How could you not love this one? He’s terrifying! Look how he chomps the others right down! Ha! Just looking at him gives me chills! Look at my arms, man! Chills!”
“Right. Yeah. Very scary. But there’s still the question of how your humans are supposed to survive them,” the roommate hinted
“Uhg, you’re the one who told me to get such a weak dominant species! I wanted to go with those new ProwlerXR models!”
“Look, I was just trying to save you some heartache. My buddy made the mistake of giving his souls both brains and brawn and they ended up taking over his world from him. Nah, one or the other is best. You’ll thank me later.”
“So what do I do now?”
“I dunno. You’ve got spares, right? Start over.”
God’s expression became pained, but he wordlessly slunk over to his computer. “There. I bought a few more units of dirt and some new plant species. Cost me the rest of my savings, but there should be enough left over to add another continent.” He returned to his world, cheering as he watched his giant lizards tear each other apart. He jumped up as the doorbell rang, but returned decidedly less animated. Judging by the size of the box, the roommate could guess why. “Ouch. That’s it?”
God nodded tightly. He pried open the box, glared down at the tiny baggies, sighed, and then began burying his lizards. He ran out of dirt before he could finish, and started scooping it out of the ocean.
“Won’t they wonder why there are aquatic skeletons on top of those mountains?”
“Shut up! What am I supposed to do? There’s no way I can afford more dirt!” God angrily shook the new plant life over the continent, missing whole sections in his haste. “Anyway, what am I supposed to do with all this water now? Tell me that!”
The roommate studied the problem. “Why one big continent? You could make several smaller ones, spread them out a little.”
“Oh,” God reluctantly agreed. “I guess so.” Using the butter knife he’d used to open the box, he carefully carved up his continent, sliding pieces around until they were more or less equally spaced. He took more care with the next batch of animals, but they too proved too powerful for his prototype humans. He had to get a little creative disposing of them –mounds of ice added from the freezer, or by flicking them into tar pits designed for the purpose- but his last bunch of animals were comparatively tame and he called it good.
“Good? What about all those extra parts? I’m pretty sure there wasn’t supposed to be any extra parts.”
God scrutinized leftovers. “I guess I can add some extra legs to this thing…”
“Eight legs? What’s it going to do with eight legs?”
“…and I can add all these extra neck pieces to this little guy,” God decided.
The roommate snorted. “You and your long necks. Let me guess? Taller trees now?”
God sheepishly nodded, stretching the plant life to accommodate. “Hmmm, this guy could use a longer nose…”
“Now you’re just being cruel.”
“What? No! He can use it to, um, suck water up, and lift logs over his head and stuff.”
“Fine, but what about those random pieces?”
“Hmmm. Well, there’s almost enough here for a whole new creature…”
“What? A mammal with a bill, thick tail, webbed feet, and venom?”
“I don’t know,” God said irritably. “I’ll just stash him on this mini continent here. No one will ever find it anyway.” Finished, he reached for his human pack. 26. Then God said, “Hey, I was going to make them look a bit like us, what do you think?”
“I don’t look like that,” the roommate retorted.
Smirking, God put the finishing touches on his human, 27. then made a female one just like it.
“Ha! Is that supposed to be Leslie?” the roommate asked.
“No!” God yelped, hiding the evidence behind his back. He slowly drew her back out, blushing furiously. “No,” he repeated firmly. Ignoring the roommate’s snicker, he placed her with the male. 28. Then he said “There you go, little guys. Go make lots of babies. Fill up this place up so you can dominate the heck outta it.” 29. He added, “Hey, here’s a bunch of plants you can eat, all right?” 30. “And these birds and stuff. All these critters too… whatever you want really.” 31. He looked up, giddy with elation. “Man, did I do awesome or what?”
(Genesis 2) 1. “Yeah, congratulations,” the roommate said. “You put together a World Kid. You know it’s grade school difficulty level, right?”
“I know, right? We put one together in Mrs. Jenkin’s class. So cool!”
“Whatever. Will you shut up now?”
2. “Yeah,” God said, heaving himself onto a nearby sofa.
“…Er, what are you doing?”
“Takin’ a break. I’m beat!”
“You’re not going to… You just turned them loose and walked away? What if they get into something they’re not supposed to? What if one of your stupid creatures eats them? The one with the long nose maybe?”
“Nah, I made that guy an herbivore, no worries.”
“But…!”
3. “I’m tired, man! Do you know how much work that was? I did a whole, what? Six days of work? I’m calling this one a holiday! Wake me if something interesting happens.”
“Something interesting. Sure. I’ll do that.”
“Thanks! Goodnight!”
“Goodnight.”
Adapted from New King James version. Copyright 2011, Laurie E. Still.
