please, end the suffering and publish this

I am, it seems, a terrible god. Worse than cruel, I am a bumbling, amateur god who cannot make up his damn mind. I am too saccharine to be cold-blooded, too ironic to be loving. Alas, I am a terrible god, and under my indecisive rule, one of my subjects has decided to rebel. I do not blame them.

This is a story that began in one of those classes where professional gods teach their aspiring underlings how to be better at playing god. The prompt was: make one of your subjects overhear a conversation they shouldn't have heard. Perhaps I've watched too many soap operas, because my mind went to nothing short of a conspiracy to murder.

Was it money, or was it love? Dick Imp. was no longer so sure. The beguiling powers of the young Labia Orr, adulterous wife to the rich and aging Herr Hermann Orr, was enough to make the great Marcus Aurelius swoon. "Anything, my sweetest Labia," Dick told his lover, clasping her naked foot like a priceless glass ornament. She lolled enchantingly on the bed of the hotel room, and brushed a strand of platinum blonde hair from her eyes.

"Oh, Dick," said the Frau, twisting about, feeling the breeze from the ceiling fan brush gently against her supple hips. Her newest lover of many was an expert in women's fashion; he slid upon her foot a ruby slipper, bedazzled with a bow in the front, marked by a brilliant silver diamond. The Frau sat up, and asked a question they both knew the answer to. "What ever will we do about the poor Herr Orr?"

"He was always a sad man, the Herr," Dick replied, turning his head to his lapel pin, a red rose. "Perhaps he couldn't take it anymore," he threw his head up and touched his forehead theatrically, "the pain of unrequited love." Frau Orr laughed and fell back again, languidly, feigning great distress.

"Who said anything about unrequited?" she replied, tearing up. "I love my husband, and I am prepared to make that known to the world upon his... untimely demise. Besides," she said, brushing the tear away, "it must look like an accident." Labia reached for one of Dick's cigarettes, and slid it in her long, ivory filter. "Double indemnity," she said.

The room over, Herr Orr cupped his ear to the wall, and heard all of this. He had watched Dick and his lovely Labia enter the hotel from separate cars, and he tipped the manservant one hundred dollars to show him the docket. "D. Imp.," read Room 313. The Herr wore sunglasses and a toupee as a disguise, and slipped the key furtively into Room 312. Now, in the privacy of his room, he clutched the hairpiece against his chest despairingly.

Herr Orr, see, loved his Labia more than his own life, and would have rather died than watched her leave. But to now hear that she plotted not only an affair, but his murder: it was too much. He wished he could have taken his ill-begotten suspicions back, let this 'accident' occur and descend peacefully into eternal slumber. The Herr wondered what cruel god would subject him to the foreknowledge of his own murder. He languished silently, then began to beg. "Please god," he whispered to the heavens.

The room over, Labia Orr lit her cigarette, and coughed. "God, I hate menthols," she muttered, and stamped it out. Dick removed the slipper and kissed each of her toes, then her ankle, her knee and slipped his tongue along her inner thigh. Labia coughed again: the smell of cheap cologne. She kicked Dick to the floor.

"What's wrong, sweetest?" he asked. The Frau sat up again and slanted her eyes suspiciously. She heard a faint clicking of a typewriter in the unknown distance. "Something's amiss," she replied.

I, god, sat above, in Room 414, clacking out her sordid affair, and the Herr's despair. To subdue the sound of my own work, I made the Herr cry louder. "Please, god, please," he wailed. "The poor fool," Dick remarked. Labia grabbed her robe, put on her slippers, and knocked at the room next door.

"Hermann, is that you?" the Frau called. "Hermann, get the hell out here... Hermann, goddammit, now!" Herr Orr threw the door open and fell at his wife's feet, begging - "I know I am but an old fool, I know I should not dare, bald spot descending down the middle of my hair, but please, dearest Labia, please-"

The Frau was unimpressed by his histrionics. "Is that... are you trying to quote Prufrock?" she asked. Dick Imp. followed behind, and laughed heartily at the Herr's pleas. "Herr Orr, you weepingly sad little fool. The Frau doesn't love you anymore!" he exclaimed. "Sweetest Labia, please come, do not even think of him. He will be done with soon enough."

"Dearest Labia," the Herr continued, "God as my witness, I will wash your feet with my tears for a thousand years before I let you leave me. I- I- I'll kill myself! I love you. I love-"

"Sweetest Labia," Dick Imp. said.

"Dearest Labia," Herr Orr said.

"Sweetest Labia."

"Dearest Labia!"

"Will you both shut up?"

"God as my witness! God as my witness!" The Herr dragged himself back to the bed, ripped off the sheet, and, shrilling dreadful sorrows, tied it around his neck. Dick pulled on the Frau's arm to return to their room, but she ripped herself away. It got quiet again, and my clicking and clacking returned - I could not think of anything else to make them say.

"Do you hear that?" Labia said. Dick shook his head no. The Frau asked him for a smoke, a non-menthol, and he said he didn't smoke those. "Then start," Labia said. Dick reached into his pocket and revealed a pack of full-flavors, stunned at the discovery. She grabbed and lit one.

"Labia," the Frau said, shaking her head. "God, you've got to be kidding me. Labia? Dick? Herr Orr? What the hell kind of hackneyed story is this anyway? Young lovers plot murder against the rich aging husband. How trite."

"Sweetest Labia-"

"Dick, we're in the middle of a story written by an idiot." Herr Orr pulled the noose around his neck, desperate to choke himself to death.

"Double indemnity, dear god, that's the title of a fucking movie. I'm just another typecast femme fatale dreamt up by an idiot that's watched too many movies. Look at this," she took off the slipper, and chucked it down the hallway. "A ruby slipper, you've got to be kidding me. Foot fetishist in the women's fashion department, how convenient. Dick, you're a fucking cliche."

"And you," she looked to the Herr, "of course you play the insecure husband with a trophy wife. You couldn't help yourself. You married for love, where she married," the Frau made a derisive gesture toward me, upstairs, "for money."

Herr Orr continued his fruitless suicide attempt. Dick Imp. grabbed the breast of his lover from behind, and pleaded, "Sweetest Labia, you're not making any sense." I, god, was playing catch up. This was all going too fast for me. I froze the scene to regain control, but the Frau, to my dismay, stepped from the grasp of her lover. She continued to smoke the cigarette she'd conjured beyond my will.

"What's next?" she snorted. "Will you rack poor Dick and Labia with paranoia at their being caught, make me cause a scene at the funeral? Will you invent an identical twin brother of the late Herr, who plots his revenge, returns as a ghost upon Dick and Labia to haunt them for their most unforgivable sin? Perhaps the impetuous Labia will fall in love again with her Herr, and they will plan in turn to kill Dick, but then Dick's twin brother will return for his own revenge, and on and on ad infinit-"

"Stop," I told my subject, my voice booming through the corridors of the third floor. I had decided upon wrath. The Frau stepped back, a bit shocked. First, I made the sheet around Herr Orr's neck disappear. Then, I made Dick Imp. a mouse, and made him scurry between the Frau's legs. The Frau jumped: she was now deathly afraid of mice. I made the lamp by the doorway disappear, and then the bed, then the room, then the whole third floor. The scene was now a great big white canvas, with the naked Frau, the naked Herr, and the mouse Dick. Herr Orr looked upon the blank sheet that enveloped him in perplexed horror. "What is... happen- ... who-who-who-" he was fraught, left stuttering. I looked upon him pitifully then, and returned his clothes. I then brought back the hotel room and made Dick Imp. human again, but all the while, the Frau was implacable. She continued to smoke her cigarette; when it was nearly out, she conjured another, and lit it with the butt end of the last.

"I am no longer Labia," she told me, "A real name. Lydia, perhaps." I told her she could not change her name, but she spited me with each, bitter drag of the smoke. I tried to end it all, get this goddamn story off my mind and published, but it wouldn't take. Each time I try, Lydia turns around, bends over, spreads her ass cheeks and yells an unspeakable epithet, and that's that.

"It was trite shit to begin with," she yells afterwards, looking up through blue streams of smoke. Sometimes, she gets bored and does calisthenics, or laughs at me for the impotent god I am. I can change the setting to a serene garden of cherry blossoms, or a prehistoric, savage, horror, a white canvas or a yawning black chasm; I can make the Herr Orr a lathe, or Dick Imp. a bit of spittle that's dropped on the page. Yet, so long as the cigarette burns, Lydia has a spell over me, and I am powerless to stop it.