✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

THE BOOK OF MARTHA-PAGE 1

lexal.net · 7,247 words · saved by 1 readers

"It's difficult, isn't it?" God said with a weary smile. "You're truly free for the first time. What could be more difficult than that?" Martha Bes looked around at the endless grayness that was, along with God, all that she could see. In fear and confusion, she covered her broad black face with her hands. "If only I could wake up," she whispered. God kept silent but was so palpably, disturbingly present that even in the silence Martha felt rebuked. "Where is this?" she asked, not really wanting to know, not wanting to be dead when she was only forty-three. "Where am I?" "Here with me," God said. "Really here?" she asked. "Not at home in bed dreaming? Not locked up in a mental institution? Not … not lying dead in a morgue?" "Here," God said softly. "With me." After a moment, Martha was able to take her hands from her face and look again at the grayness around her and at God. "This can't be heaven," she said. "There's nothing here, no one here but you." "Is that all you see?" God asked.

THE BOOK OF MARTHA-PAGE 1 As of Friday, June 15, 2007, SCI FICTION will no longer be availabe on SCIFI.COM. SCIFI.COM would like to thank all those who contributed and those who read the short stories over the past few years. In fact, seated as he was on his huge thronelike chair, he looked, she thought, like a living version of Michelangelo's Moses, a sculpture that she remembered seeing pictured in her college art-history textbook about twenty years before. Only the pathway was a ribbon of pale light—starlight and moonlight. There was a full moon, brilliant, yellow-white, and huge. And

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading