Sacrilegious
I don’t know when they began looking at me like a god.
Maybe it was the night after I fed them my ideas on a warm, sugar coated spoon. Maybe it took a lot longer than I hoped. But I know I saw something shift, right there in their eyes after I led them out into the woods that night. I know they stopped looking at me as something purely human. I stood before them, white dress billowing in a bitter Autumn wind, moonlight casting me in soft light, my arms covered in dark, warm blood, the girl lying dead at my feet. Some may have walked into those woods that night and stumbled across that scene and shrieked in horror. They would have called me a monster, a murderer, a devil.
And they would have been right. But the people standing before me then had this light in their eyes. A light like the end of a very long tunnel. A light like I was the answer to all their prayers. Who was the one who coined that phrase, about one man’s god being another one’s devil?
When they got down on their knees and whispered my name like it was something hallowed I threw my head back and laughed.
Call it a cult, call me deranged, call them out of their fucking minds for believing I’m anything other than what I am. I call it something else.
A very long time ago I learned that we all worship something. I simply decided I wanted to be at the other end of that devotion. And maybe that makes me a villain, but hell, I’m hardly the first to play god.
—
Sunlight poured in through the windows of the cathedral. Heads were bowed, hands were clasped together, lips muttered silent prayers. The room was on its knees. Not me, though. My eyes were wide open and I was in complete awe that something so airy as faith could bring an entire room full of people to their knees. When my mother saw me in that state she pinched my arm and I quickly bowed my head with the rest of them. I kept my eyes open though, and a single, unforgiving thought made its way into my head and it still sits there to this day.
I want to be worshiped.
Some days I crept quietly into that old building long after everyone had gone. I would sit there until the sun fell low in the sky and caught the stained glass window, the colors all lit up from within like someone had set fire to them.
—
I remember the first time my mom ever told me about god. She sat delicately on the edge of my bed and she told me about a light in the darkness, about a sea torn down the middle, about suffering and sacrifices and saints, about a golden palace in the clouds, and fire and brimstone beneath the ground.
I think part of me always thought of it as another bedtime story, even though she spoke with such conviction, even though her words were desperate and heavy. I think part of me has always felt sorry for her. I was too young to name the pity for what it was, but it’s easy for me to fold my tongue around the truth now that I’m older.
The thing about people is they all need something to worship, something to pray to,
to devote themselves to in the name of something painfully more divine. And the truth is, most people want nothing more desperately than they want to believe that there is more than darkness at the end of it all.
The thing I realized for myself is on the flip side of that coin. We can get our hands on so little in this life, and we’ll never know if there’s more after this until it’s too late. The entirety of our existence is so miniscule in the face of history and eternity. We will touch the smallest, most insignificant sliver of everything that has been, and will be. If we want to be remembered we have to get our hands dirty. If we want to be revered we have to get them bloody.
I was 13 when my mother first took me to church with her. It was right after my father left us. I think she was looking for something else to carry her grief for her, to promise her that there will be more after this one shit life, to promise her that one day that hole in her chest will be filled in and forgotten. I remember her waking me unceremoniously on a Sunday morning and giving me a scratchy blue dress. We were 20 minutes late and we slid awkwardly into the very back row. I only remember a few things from that day – that light in the stained glass windows, that moment of the room being on its knees, and thinking god is on the right end of history. I remember thinking there’s something beautiful about damning a thing and then offering it the means to salvation – becoming both a poison and the antidote.
—
It took me a good long while but I eventually figured out how to pick out the kind of person who would follow me, who would look at me like I was a god. I was a little disappointed with how easy it was. First to get them close enough to whisper my ideas in their ears, and then to make them believe them.
I clasped their shaking hands in my own, and told them about cities in the clouds, about fire and brimstone and swarms of locusts blotting out the sun, about golden hills and sapphire seas. I simply wrote my name where god’s would be.
I promised them peace. I promised them pain.
And when they were filled with equal parts hope and dread, I whispered in their ears what they needed to do to earn one and escape the other. I fed them honey from the tips of my fingers. I made them bleed and kissed their wounds.
I told them that I loved them. And I meant it.
—
I led them out into the cold, their bare feet padding against the frozen ground. The moon was full in the dark sky when I drew them into the woods that night. I wore a thin white dress and my teeth chattered against the cold. I could hear the girl tearing clumsily into the trees ahead of us. I almost felt sorry for what was coming for her. Almost, but not enough to stop it when my entire life had been building to that very moment since that first Sunday morning.
With a single word my followers went tearing into the woods after her, the quiet night suddenly full of desperate howling and starved cries, carnal and beastly, and dreadfully, beautifully human. I could hear the girl racing through the trees, could imagine her own white gown shredded and covered in filth, could imagine her stumbling blindly beneath the canopy of evergreens as the cries get closer, and her own grow more wretched.
When they caught her she didn’t even scream. Her body was limp as they carried her to a sorry imitation of an altar I had them build that afternoon. I stood silently, holding a silver dagger tightly to my chest, drunk on the scene unfolding before me. All that matters, all that will ever matter is that they did this simply because I asked them to. The words I spit out next meant nothing, they were hollow, dead – words about innocence and sin and sacrifice. But the people nodded along and looked up at me with those bright eyes. The girl’s own eyes were dark as I lifted the dagger up, and the only thing she said before I plunged it into her chest was
Why?
They got down on their knees and I threw my head back and laughed.
I was still laughing when the sirens and lights ignited the clearing in sound and color and plumes of dust. I brought my bloodstained hands to my chest and laughed and laughed as my followers shrieked and scattered into the darkness beyond the trees, laughing as they raised their guns and fired, and I crumpled beside the girl’s still-warm body, laughing until my lungs were drowned in blood, and I drew my final, unsteady breath.
And I died, like everyone before me, and every one to follow.
Author Bio
Kaila is a senior at Cal State San Marcos, and she is studying literature and linguistics. She lives in Carlsbad with her dog and a couple dozen houseplants. Kaila loves horror movies and good books, and perpetually has a stack of novels to read next that never seems to grow shorter.