Thank you for calling the 24/7 GOD HOTLINE. Your call is important to us. Your soul, less so. This conversation may be recorded for purposes of celestial litigation.

Belzebub used to command legions.

Now he worked in a cubicle with angelic duct tape holding the corners together, a coffee ring that had bled into three dimensions, and a landline older than original sin.

It wasn’t supposed to be permanent. Technically, this was a “transitional role” while HR figured out what to do with his unique combination of charisma, noncompliance, and incident reports involving plague vectors. Once, he’d charmed a basilica into sinking. In his defense, they started it.

But the problem with divine restructuring is that no one ever finishes the org chart. Somewhere between the Department of Sacramental Logistics and the Choir of Passive-Aggressive Benedictions, his reassignment form got blessed, lost, found, and archived all at once.

Still, he didn’t fight it. Not this time. What he needed, and desperately wanted, was time. Time to write.

He kept the manuscript tucked in a battered leather folio beneath his desk drawer. It smelled like ash and old rosemary. The pages had warped from humidity and weeping ink. He never digitized it. The words had to pass through his hands, or they didn’t feel real.

He’d started it four centuries ago and rewritten it seven times. He'd never yet sought publication nor shared it. This was not a confessional or a cry for validation. It was a story.

And it didn't contain demons or damnation or cosmic warfare.

It was about a gardener. A simple human. And the boy who fell in love with him while planting root vegetables in a stubborn, stony field. There was a kiss under an apricot tree. A scene where they argued about soil pH. A long silence in winter, and a reconciliation in spring.

He hadn’t told anyone. Not even Lucifer. Especially not Lucifer.

He needed this job to stay quiet. He needed minimal interaction, something gentle and unimportant, something that gave him long, uninterrupted stretches of silence where he could put pen to paper and remember how to make things grow.

The desk lamp was one of those soft golden ones, the light warm like candle halos. His desk plant, which was a sickly pothos he'd named Malcolm, curled around the base of his inkwell like a friend pretending not to listen.

He picked up his pen.

The gardener wiped his brow with a dirt-caked wrist and said, “You never told me you hated radishes.” The boy stared at the sky. “I didn’t hate them. I just didn’t think we’d need thirty.”

He smiled. Just a little. Just enough.

The phone hadn’t rung in months. He assumed it never would.

Until the glitch arrived.

On a Tuesday.

Which, frankly, offended him. Mondays bore the weight of expectation. Wednesdays carried cosmic inertia. But Tuesday? Tuesday should have stayed out of it.

It started with an unusual volume of requests about pets.

The first was a whispered plea from a five-year-old in Arizona. The second came from a teenage girl sobbing into her bathroom sink. The third was a letter burned ritually in a shoebox altar made of pink glitter glue and Popsicle sticks.

Belzebub suspected a viral prayer chain.

Probably some well-meaning mortal whispering promises into the void, hoping God still had the bandwidth for fur and feathers. These things happened, little outbreaks of prayer contagion and sentimental liturgy spreading like incense through the cracks in mortal reason. He once traced an epidemic of spontaneous weeping statues to a poetry slam in Austin.

He routed the first thirty-nine to the Department of Sentimental Interventions, where retired saints sorted them by species and likelihood of resurrection without mess.

But they bounced.

Every call and every heartfelt plea came back to his desk. Back to him.

Call Log #98824391

Caller: Child, panicked.

Request: “Make Grandma not be dead. Please. I said the prayer right.”

Belzebub: “…Have you tried turning her off and back on again?”

Outcome: Escalated to Department of Unresolved Mortality.

Status: Auto-archived.

The voice was small, shaped more by hush than by sorrow, and it carried a stillness that sank beneath the skin and settled where certain silences tend to stay.

He’d stared at the receiver for a full minute afterward, unsure what emotion was pressing down on his shoulders.

Guilt? No. That was an angel thing.

He poured himself coffee. The machine had a sign over it that read, Brew Unto Others As You Would Brew Unto Thyself.

He took a sip, grimaced at the taste, and resigned himself to burnt coffee again.

Then the calls multiplied. It was no longer just pets. It was everything.

There were prayers for parking spaces, divorce papers, vindictive office revenge, and unanswered text messages, each one tossed into the void with the same quiet desperation. One came in from a stadium where a desperate sports fan screamed, “Please let me not miss this field goal I bet my soul on it, man, c’mon!”

Another was a polite Australian woman asking for a second chance at marriage. The prayer wasn’t for her own marriage, but for her neighbor’s.

Each divine whisper landed like a fruit fly in his coffee.

He flagged the system for tech.

FROM: b.belial@hotline.infernum

SUBJECT: Routing error 17C–All Prayers Rerouting to Extension 666

BODY:

My queue is full of mortal nonsense. This is not my job. Please unf*** this.

IT replied with their usual eloquence, which was a corrupted emoji, a .gif of a shrugging seraphim, and the words "3–5 business eternities."

He stared at the screen.

He stared at the phone.

He picked it up.

The next call was someone trying to pray forgiveness for a podcast they made in college.

The one after that was a mailman asking for rain so he wouldn’t have to finish his route.

Next came a man begging, “Please let my band make it big.”

Belzebub blinked. He could hear a guitar in the background. Off-key. Ambitious.

“Define ‘big,’” he said.

“Like record deal. Singles on the radio. Maybe a Tiny Desk Concert?”

He marked it as delusional but harmless, noted that it had been redirected to Musicians Anonymous, and left the case awaiting divine muse clearance.

He still hadn’t written a single sentence, and his nerves were wearing thin.

By the end of the day, he was rerouting prayers like chain mail. Each one hit his queue. Each one demanded attention he didn’t want to give. He hadn’t asked for this. He was still technically on probation after the incident with the Vatican’s holy water filtration system.

But the Archangels were off-grid. The memo called it a “Nonlinear Sabbatical,” and someone had to answer the divine line.

He sighed. Logged another miracle request. Set the coffee to reheat. Then the walls shook.

Internal Memo: Divine Routing Center

FROM: Heaven IT

SUBJECT: Prayer Routing System—Critical Glitch Detected

MESSAGE:

Due to a backend issue involving deprecated deity protocols and legacy metaphysical code, all incoming communication is now being routed to Extension 666 (Belzebub). We regret the inconvenience. Do not attempt to fix it yourself. Last time, a plague happened.

The next day, the frogs started in Belgium.

They fell in slow spirals, green and croaking and mildly confused, drifting from a perfectly blue sky that offered only stillness and light, until amphibian rainfall touched down over Ghent.

Someone had asked for peace. It was a vague, hopeful plea scribbled in crayon and dropped in a hospital chapel.

The system, misreading "peace" as "pees," misrouted to Agricultural Miracles. The resulted in atmospheric frog dispersal. Amphibians were heaven’s go-to biological symbol for cleansing during the Old Testament years. Apparently, the server remembered.

Belzebub logged the incident. He attached a clip of confused meteorologists trying to maintain composure as frogs bounced off camera lenses.

Frogfall Report 27B

Request: “Please give us peace.”

Outcome: Phonetic misrouting to Agricultural Miracles.

Collateral: 3,482 frogs. One biblical reenactment society thrilled.

Status: Flagged “Amphibian Loop.” Pending divine clarification.

He refilled his coffee mug. The sacramental wine bottle under his desk had somehow refilled itself. He chose not to ask.

Somewhere in between escalating a heretical bakery's request for yeast multiplication and de-escalating an exorcism gone romantic (“He kept levitating, but they really liked each other”), Belzebub carved out some time to write.

He did so quietly, maintaining a tradition of longhand exclusively.

And the story continued about a gardener and a boy, and the quiet, unremarkable love that took root between them, growing in its own time, far from the reach of gods or demons.

He flipped to the latest page. Ink smudged beneath his thumbprint, not because of haste, but because of warmth. His hands were rarely warm these days. But now he was finally in his element.

The gardener left the second half of the fence unfinished. “It’s a boundary,” he said. “Not a wall.” The boy didn’t reply. He just handed him the last nail.

He wrote slowly. No more than a page a day. The ink bled into the paper like memory.

Sometimes he imagined the boy had horns. Sometimes the gardener did. But they never noticed. That was the point.

Above him, the hotline lit up again.

Incident Report: Unauthorized Miracle #199A-3

Request: "Let them see the truth."

Outcome: Global hallucinogenic overlay. Thirty-six million humans experienced simultaneous visions of themselves in mirrors they did not recognize.

Collateral: Stock market collapse, spontaneous musical numbers, one confirmed unicorn sighting.

Status: Marked as “No Further Action.”

He rubber-stamped it and filed it under “Transformative Experiences (Accidental).”

Then opened the notebook again.

The next passage came slower. He chewed the end of the pen for a minute before writing:

The boy asked, “Do you believe in God?”

The gardener stared at the dirt. “I believe in compost.”

He paused at the line, letting it settle like silt in a riverbed, and chose to leave it untouched.

The glitch worsened.

Prayer volume peaked at thirteen thousand requests per hour. Routing algorithms began writing apologies to themselves. One intern at the Department of Divine Compliance got caught in a recursive loop and now only speaks in errant prophecy.

Belzebub traced the interference back through three layers of reroute logs, two quantum metaphors, and a celestial firewall made of unresolved childhood trauma.

He found the source deep beneath Purgatory, in a server cavern lit by glow-stick halos and flickering stained glass monitors.

There, hunched over a keyboard made of bone and nostalgia, was Greg.

Greg, Minor Deity of Petty Misfortune. H who was the patron of stubbed toes, forgotten umbrellas, and printers that jam at 99%. Greg was officially archived three millennia ago. And now he was unworshipped and altogether unremembered.

Except now, somehow, Greg had found a loophole.

"Belzebub?" Greg squinted from under a knit beanie that said ‘Cursed But Trying’.

"I thought you were redeployed to Pestilence."

“I was,” Belzebub said. “They said I was too ‘relatable.’”

Greg gestured sheepishly at the makeshift server altar. Candles burned low around duct-taped routers, post-it notes were scribbled with intercepted prayers, and a bowl of Werther’s Originals sat half-melted beside an offering of expired cough drops.

“I wasn’t trying to fix anything,” Greg said. “I only rerouted a few requests. The ones that never seemed important to anyone else.”

"You're breaking the system," Belzebub said.

“They never ask for much,” Greg replied. “They just want to be heard.”

Belzebub didn’t argue.

He could have reported it. He could have pulled what little rank he still held and shut the whole thing down. But instead, he sat beside the server and said nothing, letting the silence stretch between them.

"You should've filed a reinstatement appeal through Proper Channels," he muttered.

“I did,” said Greg. “Six hundred years ago.”

Belzebub sighed. He took out his notebook and added a paragraph about tomatoes.

In the garden, the boy held up a misshapen fruit. “Is it supposed to look like that?”

The gardener laughed. “Nothing’s supposed to look like anything. It just is.”

The boy turned it over in his hands, reverent. “Good.”

They sat in silence.

Outside, a miracle collapsed into interpretive dance. Somewhere, a vending machine became sentient and began dispensing hope.

Greg smiled, tired but content.

Belzebub finished the page.

Then, one night, the line rang.

It was not a glitchy loop or an overflow echo, and it carried none of the frantic desperation of a misfiled summoning or the breathless panic of someone pleading for divine help over a lost wedding ring. It was steady, and it was clear.

Unmistakable. The Original Line.

It was old as breath and wired through dimensions no longer mapped. It hadn’t rung in centuries.

Belzebub stared at the blinking red light like it had personally insulted his haircut.

He didn’t move.

Not for thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. The room was quiet—eerily so. Even the background hum of divine data traffic had gone still. Like the universe was holding its breath.

He picked up.

Nothing.

The line was steady and open, filled with a quietness that held intention, as if something ancient had paused just long enough to listen.

“Hello,” the voice said.

The voice moved with the softness of something long buried returning to light, steady and unadorned, as if it had always been there, waiting to be heard.

Just a voice. A feminine that was tired in the way stars are tired and quiet in the way sea floors are quiet.

“This is God.”

Belzebub didn’t speak.

“I see what you did,” she said. “All of it.”

He waited.

“You let it break,” she said, “so they could see themselves again.”

Another pause. The line went warm.

It wasn't hot and it wasn't holy. It just was.

“You did what I couldn’t.”

And with that, the call ended.

No crash. No judgment. Just silence.

The Hotline died twelve seconds later.

Phones buzzed with internal heat, shorted out, and fell silent. The backup servers in Limbo caught fire in alphabetical order. IT sent out one last auto-message (“we regret nothing”) before vanishing into glitter and smoke.

The routing software unraveled into raw code and scattered into the void like birds freed from a wireframe cage.

Divine Communications was no more.

Belzebub sat in the dark.

He didn’t turn on the light. Didn’t reach for another file. Didn’t try to reroute the end.

He opened the folio.

Hands still ink-stained from centuries of failure. But they didn’t shake this time.

He wrote.

He wrote like the world wasn’t ending, because maybe it wasn’t.

He wrote about dirt and sun and the way people bloom in silence.

Final Page (of the manuscript):

The gardener knelt in the soil, pressing a seed down with his thumb. The boy was beside him, quiet. Neither spoke. Neither needed to.

Overhead, the wind did not part. The sky did not break open.

The only sound was the rustle of leaves.

Something small, and green, and stubborn began to grow.

He closed the folio and left it on the desk bearing no signature or dedication.

Only a story.

Then Belzebub stood.

He stepped over the fallen cord of the divine phone and walked through the lobby, quiet and open, each step carrying him farther from duty and closer to whatever waited beyond.

The hall was still. The air was his own. The way forward belonged to him.

He kept walking.

Maybe toward a garden.

Maybe toward the dirt.

Maybe toward something that would bloom.

Thank you for calling the 24/7 GOD HOTLINE.