He took a matchbook with him that night. People had been orbiting the cocoon all day in lieu of its hatching, and now, with the sun sinking lower by the second, they’d set up camp. Merrick threw up a tent of his own and waited, sheets just thin enough to see their outlines stagger into sleep. He stepped out when the encampment was still; the cocoon the only witness that concerned him, he set fire to its flesh.
It shone bright as a sun of its own. The flames engulfed it in a matter of seconds as if spurred by the fat underneath. Those who’d fallen asleep around it awoke to the smell of burning skin. Merrick said nothing to their screams; he just stood and watched the fire climb.
“Is this it? Is it hatching?” he heard a little boy ask—the same little boy, incidentally, that had brought the match into his hand. Merrick looked at him with pity and a thread of amusement stitched in.
“I would rather say it’s ascending,” he said. “Off to some place better than this.” People were spilling out of the Temple now, crowd growing both in size and understanding of its helplessness. Merrick was, of course, emboldened by this. “Perhaps we didn’t pray hard enough. Scared it off with our lack of faith. We don’t deserve something so perfect. So profound.”
It took five minutes for it to burn to a crisp. Left behind was a pile of char, like the flaky black hull sloughed off by firewood at the end of its life. The people behind Merrick went quiet, heads down in mourning or shock or something in between, while Merrick used their silence to keep his own voice loud.
“Now,” he started, “that’s not to say our job is done. We have found community here, a culmination of great minds joined by a commitment to truth. We must persist. With more members, more faith, and just a bit more money, we can win God back.”
A murmur started. Merrick squared his chest and soaked it in like any self-respecting leader, preparing to pull a longer speech from his ass. But the murmuring turned to “Look!” and fingers from the crowd craned towards the ash. It was breathing. It was squirming, too. An arm shot up, and out crawled a man.
He was nothing special to look at. He had a jagged precipice for cheekbones, flecked with acne and oilspots that, in the night, looked like freckled constellations. His body was wiry, fragile, although peeking through his shirt were the makings of a beer gut. He was crooked in his posture, too, as if the budding weight was too much for his back to carry.
He eyed the gathering around him—a stare made glassy by the darting blues inside. He looked ready to run at the first sign of conflict—conflict, in this case, being questions. And that soon came with someone asking if he was God.
“I’m Lester,” he said. “Lester Lemmings. I live here.”
A woman approached him, tracing his skin against hers as if some divine spark would give away his breeding. Judging from her face, it was not what she’d hoped. “You’re sweating,” she said. “I didn’t imagine a god could sweat.”
Merrick was the only one not staring. All this attention seemed ready to break the poor man, feet staggering back as far as they could without tripping over each other. “Well,” he said, sweating now tenfold, “that may be because I’m not a god.”
More murmuring. Merrick stuck his hands out to gather their eyes back on him, shouting with tempered lungs. “People, people. Do not be taken for a ride. This man didn’t come from the cocoon; he was beneath it when the ash fell.” He gazed back at the cowering Lester. “There is nothing godlike about him.”
“What would you like us to do, sir?” someone asked.
Merrick beamed. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “We have mass in the morning.”
But they made no effort to climb back in their tents. “Not you,” one said. “We were asking God.”
Lester’s eyes grew fat. Merrick almost choked on the spit in his throat, cheeks sucked in like he’d tasted something sour. “God?” he echoed. “God? You’ve known him no more than five minutes, and you’re already calling him God? You people would worship roadkill if it had a third eye!” He was red at this point, words frothing from his mouth. “Look at him; shaking, a damn nervous wreck—that is not a man equipped to lead. He is hardly less fool than any of you. I should be your god! And I might as well be: you grovel at my feet. You’d throw me your firstborn if I asked for it. Yet here you are, distracting yourself with novelties when you should be praising me for all I’ve done!” He stopped yelling long enough to bend over, cupping spare ash in his hands. He poured it over himself, coating his blonde hair black and streaking char down his robes. He laughed with his arms spread. “Call me rightfully as I am,” he said. “God of gods. Father of a new world!”
No one called him either.
Lester’s Craven—they spraypainted all the signs in town to read its new name. Merrick could no longer watch from atop the Temple, it having been torn down and fashioned back into Lester’s home, now far less modest than it’d once been. Instead, he watched from the streets, where his old graffiti was vandalized into multicolored amalgamations of Lester’s face. His grizzled brow—there was not a wall it left untouched, and now, to Merrick, it felt like those painted stares were watching no matter what he did or where he went. They were the only things that looked at him anymore; those who’d once been his followers were drowning Lester in praise and in gifts. Praise and gifts that were his.
He simply couldn’t bear it.
Dressed in all the luxury he’d salvaged, matchbook in hand, he took to the streets. Papers, fabrics, gasoline spills—everything flammable turned to blazes in his wake. Metal roofs melted, windows burst from the heat. People poured from their houses with water pots and foam, but their attempts to sate it came too late. Lester’s Craven was consumed, as was Morllane in its belly. When rain downed the flames days later, all that remained were brick crumbs bathed in char and paint chips.
It was anybody’s guess what came of Lester. It was likely he burned up in the fire, right along with the people feeding him grapes. His body was never found, though, nor the unmistakable sharpness of his skull. For those few still clinging onto hope, it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to think he escaped; perhaps he found a new hovel to hide in, a new telemarketing script to read, and lived out the rest of his days behind blackout curtains. Perhaps, stowed away in that cell of his own making, those scraps of burnt graffiti were the last parts of him to ever see the sun. And perhaps, for Lester, that was all he wanted. All a god could ever want: to be something beautiful, at last.
Add comment