"God Still Speaks, But So Do Asses"

Seth watched the TV, listened to the radio, read the newspapers, popping antacids all the time. Just because you're immortal, that doesn't mean you can't get sick, and there was a lot to sicken him these days.

A preacher picketing soldiers' funerals in the name of God, saying their deaths were not due to an idiot occupying the White House, starting wars to avenge the family name or satisfy his own penis envy, but because someone had firebombed the preacher's church a few years back. The dead soldiers proved God was on the preacher's side, the preacher said, proof that God had turned his back on America for not stoning gays to death in the streets.

"What the hell do you think was poking into Paul's side?" Seth muttered as he read the item.

Another was saying a storm had struck New Orleans, drowning thousands, because of the gays, and because women flashed their goodies at Mardi Gras. Didn't they realize half the people in their Bible were naked, or next to it, most of the time? When God looked on his creation of Adam and Eve, and saw it was good, they weren't wearing sheets from head to toe, after all.

Seth set his paper down, took a sip of from the lemonade glass in front of him.

"It's a sign," an aging black man said at the next table. "God won't be trifled with."

True, Seth thought.

"Damn Sodom and Gamorrah shit bringing this down," a younger man said.

"Actually, New Orleans is well known for its hospitality," Seth said. "You know Sodom and Gamorrah was punished for a lack of hospitality, right? And really, the account glosses right over how it's supposedly a good idea to offer your daughters to be raped and killed, as long as it protects the precious sphincter of a man."

"God won't be mocked," the older man said.

"You're right, he won't," Seth said. "And Jesus said to turn the other cheek -- but never said what to do if they hit you again. You folks crucified him the first time he was down here; how pissed off do you think he is over seeing the Klan using his name? Or to see black men talking no different from Klansmen?"

"Well--" the younger man started.

"Well, nothing," Seth said. "David and Jonathan seemed awfully close. And didn't Ruth and Naomi sound like a little more than good friends? I wasn't around to meet any of them, but neither were you, and for that matter, the people who started writing about Jesus did so years after he was crucified. All rumors, all speculation, all legends passed down like family history -- you know some things get washed over in the retelling."

"I'm not listening to another word of this," the old man said.

"You weren't listening to the first half, either," Seth said. "You don't listen to much beyond your own fear. But the same science that's keeping you alive after your heart surgery, that powers the car that brings you here, the air conditioner that keeps you from dying in the summer, is the science you dismiss whenever it says things your preacher doesn't like. Nothing's more dangerous than a human with a brain he won't use, or a more tragic loss."

Seth stood up, left a tip on the table, put his hat atop his head, and walked out. It would be so much easier, he thought for the millionth time in two millennia, if Jesus had left him some lightning bolts to toss at the Pharisees. But no, he had to beat up a few money changers in the temple and hope the humans took the hint.

He looked up at the sky, at the clouds overhead, and wondered what it would take to get a metal plate into that so-called minister's head before the next weather front moved through his town. "Dorothy was a damn fool, wanting to go back to Kansas," he muttered. Then Seth -- an Egyptian, not a Jew, but a wanderer -- was on his way somewhere else.