God's Voicemail

“Are you there, God? It’s me again. Yeah, still dead. Sorry to bother you.”

I tap my fingers against the rotary phone’s receiver, listening to the endless dial tone. The white room hums with fluorescent light that comes from nowhere and everywhere. No windows. No doors. Just me, this bolted-down chair, and a glass table with a vintage telephone that only dials one number.

God’s voicemail.

“Look, I get it. You’re busy. Running the universe, answering prayers, deciding who gets cancer and who wins the lottery. But it’s been… I don’t know how long it’s been, actually. Time feels weird here.”

I pause, half-expecting an answer. Nothing comes.

Three days ago (if days exist here), I died. Crushed beneath a vending machine while trying to retrieve a bag of expired cheese puffs during a thunder storm. Not exactly the dignified exit I’d planned. Then again, planning wasn’t my strong suit. Just ask Elena, my ex. Or my former manager. Or the audience at the Chuckle Hut who watched me bomb spectacularly the night before I died.

The phone clicks. A voice—neither male nor female, neither young nor old—speaks.

“Hi, this is God. I’m not available to take your call right now, but if you leave a message after the beep, I’ll get back to you… probably.”

I blink. “Seriously? Voicemail?”

The dial tone hums.

"Fine. Whatever. It's Mitch Farrow. Again. Atheist, stand-up comedian, recently deceased. I'm still in this waiting room or purgatory or whatever cosmic DMV this is. If you could send someone to explain what happens next, that would be great. I'm not expecting pearly gates—I've said some things about religion that probably disqualify me—but this limbo thing is getting old."

I hang up and stare at the blank walls. My reflection stares back, distorted. Mid-thirties, unshaven, wearing the same faded Radiohead t-shirt and jeans I died in. No blood, though. No crushed bones. Just me, looking tired.

The phone rings.

I snatch it up. “Hello?”

“Remember the turtle,” the voice says. “You know the one.”

Click.

I sit frozen, receiver pressed against my ear. The turtle? What turtle?

Then it hits me. Third grade. The class pet. A red-eared slider named Franklin that Mrs. Hoffman let me take home for spring break. I thought it died—it stopped moving, stopped eating. So I flushed it. Later learned turtles hibernate. It wasn’t dead. I killed it.

The walls don’t just shift—they melt like watercolor in rain, edges bleeding into each other. The fluorescent hum becomes the whir of a bathroom exhaust fan.

Suddenly I’m eight years old again, standing in my childhood bathroom. The toilet flushes, water swirling. My mother knocks on the door, her voice muffled by wood and years.

“Mitch? What are you doing in there?”

My throat tightens. “Nothing.”

“Where’s Franklin?”

I stare at the empty plastic habitat on the counter, its tiny palm tree toppled over. The guilt sits heavy in my chest, foreign and enormous for such small shoulders to carry.

“He died.”

“Turtles live for decades, honey.”

“This one didn’t.”

The memory dissolves slowly, like waking from a dream. The white room reassembles itself piece by piece—first the chair, then the table, then the walls clicking back into place like puzzle pieces. I’m clutching the phone so hard my knuckles ache.

“What the hell was that?”

The phone rings again.

I grab the receiver, heart pounding. “What do you want from me?”

“There’s a woman in your past you never really said goodbye to. Find her again.”

Click.

This time, the transition is gentler. The white fades gradually, like theater lights dimming, until I find myself sitting at a counter in Mel’s Diner. The place where Elena and I used to go after my late sets. The vinyl stool squeaks beneath me. Coffee steam curls from a chipped mug. Outside, rain streaks the windows, blurring the neon signs into abstract art.

And there she is. Elena. Sitting alone at the far end of the counter, stirring her tea with mechanical precision. Older now—we both are—but still beautiful in that quiet way that made my chest ache even when I pretended it didn’t. She’s wearing reading glasses now, the kind she always said she’d never need. A paperback novel lies open beside her cup—something with a faded cover I can’t quite make out.

“Elena?”

She looks up, dark eyes widening slightly. Not surprised to see me, exactly. More like she was expecting someone else. She removes her glasses, folds them carefully.

“Mitch.” She sets down her spoon. “You look… the same.”

“You look good,” I say, because she does. Her hair is shorter now, streaked with premature silver that catches the diner’s fluorescent light. She wears a cardigan I don’t recognize—forest green, with small wooden buttons. The kind of thing she’d have picked out for herself, not the flashy colors I used to buy her.

“Are you real?” I ask.

She tilts her head, studying me with that particular expression she’d get when I was being deliberately obtuse. “Are you?”

Fair question. I slide onto the stool next to her. The waitress—a woman in her sixties with kind eyes and flour-dusted hands—refills Elena’s tea without being asked, then moves on to another customer. She doesn’t seem to see me at all.

“I think I’m dead,” I tell her.

“That tracks.” She sips her tea. “You always had a flair for the dramatic exit.”

“A vending machine fell on me.”

Her laugh is sudden, genuine. “Of course it did. What were you trying to get?”

“Cheese puffs. Expired ones.”

“Even better.” She shakes her head, but she’s smiling. “Remember when you got your hand stuck in that gumball machine at the arcade? You insisted on calling the fire department instead of just asking for help.”

I do remember. The embarrassment of it. How she stayed with me anyway, making jokes while the firefighters worked me free.

We sit in comfortable silence for a moment. The diner hums around us—other patrons talking about weather and work, silverware clinking against ceramic, coffee brewing in endless cycles—but it all feels distant, like listening to a radio from another room.

“I’m sorry,” I say finally. “For disappearing. For the mess I left behind. For never calling after we broke up.”

Elena studies me over her tea cup. “You know what your problem always was, Mitch? You thought being cynical made you special. Like seeing the worst in everything was some kind of superpower.”

“I was afraid,” I admit.

“Of what?”

“That if I stopped laughing at everything, I’d have to start feeling it instead. That if I let myself care about something—about you—I’d mess it up. Which I did anyway.”

She reaches across the counter and takes my hand. Her fingers are warm, real, with the same small scar on her thumb from the time she cut herself opening a can of tomatoes for the pasta sauce she never got to finish making.

“You were funny when you weren’t trying so hard to be,” she says. “Like that time you did the voices for all the different dogs at the park. Or when you made up that story about the grocery store clerk who secretly wrote poetry on the receipts.”

“You remember that?”

“I remember everything good about you, Mitch. The problem was, you never did.”

The words hit deeper than I expect. “I mocked a kid once. In high school. For praying in the cafeteria. Made a whole bit about it at the talent show. Everyone laughed.”

“I remember,” she says quietly. “That was Kevin Abernathy. He lost his mom that year. Cancer.”

The shame burns fresh, but different now. Not the burning of guilt, but of recognition. “I never apologized.”

“No, you didn’t. But you could have. Kevin worked at the club, you know. The Chuckle Hut. He was there the night before you died.”

“I know. We talked.” The memory feels both distant and immediate. “He told me he forgave me.”

She smiles sadly. “See? You finally got the joke.”

I don’t understand until the diner begins to fade—not dissolving this time, but gently retreating, like the tide going out. Elena’s hand slips from mine as the white room draws itself back into existence around me.

On the table beside the phone is a notebook that wasn’t there before. Inside is a single line, written in my handwriting:

“The punchline was loving you anyway.”

The phone rings.

I stare at the notebook for a long moment before answering.

“Well? Was it funny?” God’s voice asks.

And suddenly, I laugh. Not bitterly. Not nervously. A real laugh that starts somewhere deep and rises up through my chest like a bubble breaking the surface of still water.

“No,” I say. “It wasn’t funny at all. That’s what makes it perfect.”

For the first time, the line goes quiet. No beep. No click. Just silence that feels full rather than empty.

Then: “Good. Now try being kind.”

The walls shimmer like heat waves rising from summer asphalt, and I surrender to the pull of memory.

I’m backstage at the Chuckle Hut, my last night alive, though I don’t know it yet. The crowd was thin—Tuesday night in a town where Tuesday means early shifts tomorrow. My set bombed. Five minutes in, I could feel them slipping away, so I got mean. Picked on a couple in the front row for holding hands like teenagers. Made jokes about the bartender’s wandering eye. Scorched earth comedy.

Now I’m packing up, shoving my notebook into my backpack, when Kevin Abernathy walks in. Older than I remember, balder, wearing a janitor’s uniform with “Kevin” stitched above the pocket in neat blue thread. His face is kind, lined with the sort of patience that comes from years of cleaning up other people’s messes.

“Great set,” he says, and I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic.

“Thanks,” I mutter, not meeting his eyes.

“You probably don’t remember me.”

I do, though. The memory fresh from seeing Elena, from the phone call that started this whole thing. “Kevin. From Westlake High.”

He nods, surprised. “Yeah. I clean up here nights. Been doing it about three years now.”

An awkward silence stretches between us. The club around us is winding down—chairs being stacked on tables, glasses being collected, the sound system clicking off with a final electronic sigh. I should say something. Apologize for being sixteen and cruel. For turning his grief into a punchline for my own desperate need to be noticed.

Instead, I zip my backpack. “Well, good seeing you.”

“My mom died,” he says suddenly, his voice steady but soft. “Back then. That’s why I was praying. Not because I was some religious freak or anything.”

My throat tightens. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For making fun of you. For the talent show bit. For being a dick when you were hurting.”

Kevin studies me, then picks up an empty beer bottle from the small table where the comics wait between sets. His movements are careful, practiced—a man who’s made peace with cleaning up after others.

“It was a long time ago,” he says finally. “You were just a kid too.”

“Still. I knew better. Or I should have.”

He sets the bottle in a plastic crate with others. “You know what’s funny? I still pray. Every day. Not because I think anyone’s listening, necessarily, but because it helps me remember her. Keeps her close.”

I nod, not trusting myself to speak. The room feels smaller now, intimate in a way it never did when filled with laughter and cigarette smoke.

“Anyway,” he continues, glancing toward the windows where lightning flickers behind rain-streaked glass, “there’s a storm coming. You should head out before it gets worse. These old buildings, they lose power easy.”

I look at him—really look at him—for the first time in twenty years. See the man who survived losing his mother at seventeen, who found work that lets him take care of spaces where people come to forget their troubles, who learned to forgive even when forgiveness wasn’t asked for.

“Thanks, Kevin.”

As I turn to leave, he calls after me: “Hey, Mitch?”

“Yeah?”

“I forgive you. I forgave you a long time ago, actually. But I figured you should know.”

The memory doesn’t fade this time—it settles, finding its proper place in the architecture of who I am. I’m back in the white room, but it feels different now. Less sterile. More like a space between spaces, where transformation is possible.

The notebook has a new entry:

“The joke isn’t that no one’s listening. The joke is that everyone is, and they love you anyway.”

The phone rings.

I pick up the receiver one last time, but my hand is steady now.

“You finally laughed at the right joke,” God says.

“Which one was that?” I ask.

“The one about forgiveness. About how it’s always available, even when you think you don’t deserve it. Especially then.”

I run my fingers over the notebook pages, feeling the slight texture of the paper, the indentations left by the pen. “So what happens now? Heaven? Hell? Reincarnation as a dung beetle?”

“What do you think happens now, Mitch?”

I consider this, weighing the question like a new bit I’m trying to work out. “I think… I think I wake up.”

“From what?”

“From this. From death. From the story I’ve been telling myself about who I am and who I have to be.”

The voice chuckles, warm and familiar. “Not bad for an atheist.”

“I never said I didn’t believe in anything,” I reply. “Just that I didn’t believe in you. Not the way other people seemed to.”

“And now?”

I look around the white room—at the phone, the notebook, the chair bolted to the floor like an anchor in uncertain waters. “Now I think maybe you’re not what I thought you were. Maybe you’re not some bearded guy in the sky keeping score. Maybe you’re just… the part of us that knows better. The part that forgives when we can’t. The voice that calls us home to ourselves.”

“That’s a start,” God says.

The walls begin to dissolve, but differently this time. Not rippling into another memory, but fading like mist under morning sun. The white room becomes translucent, and I can see something beyond it—not bright light, but the soft, ordinary glow of dawn through hospital windows.

“Wait,” I say quickly. “One more question. Was any of this real? The room, the phone, Elena, Kevin… was it all just in my head?”

“What do you think?”

“I think I’m talking to myself. I think I’ve been talking to myself this whole time.”

“And if you are?”

I smile, understanding finally flooding through me like warmth returning to numb fingers. “Then I’m a better listener than I thought.”

The phone crackles with static. “Goodbye, Mitch.”

“Goodbye… me.”

The white room vanishes completely.

I wake to the harsh beep of hospital monitors and the antiseptic smell that can’t quite mask the underlying scents of human fear and hope. My body feels heavy, distant, like I’m wearing someone else’s skin. A fluorescent light buzzes overhead, but this one has a source—a fixture with a crack running through the plastic cover like a small lightning bolt frozen in time.

My mouth tastes like copper. Every breath sends sharp reminders through my ribs that I am, improbably, still alive.

A nurse notices my open eyes and hurries over, her sneakers squeaking against linoleum. Her name tag reads “Joy”—the kind of name that seems too perfect to be real, but her tired smile suggests she’s heard that joke before.

“Well, look who decided to join us,” she says, checking the monitors with practiced efficiency. “You gave us quite a scare, Mr. Farrow. Your heart stopped twice in the ambulance.”

My throat is raw, each word scraping against damaged tissue. “What happened?”

“Vending machine. You were trapped under it for almost twenty minutes before someone found you.” She adjusts something on my IV, and warmth spreads up my arm. “Lucky that janitor was working late. Kevin something. He’s the one who called 911, stayed with you until the paramedics arrived.”

Kevin. Of course.

“Your heart stopped for eight minutes in the ambulance,” Joy continues. “Guess somebody up there wasn’t ready for you yet.”

I almost laugh, but it hurts too much. “Something like that.”

As she leaves to check on other patients, I notice a small notebook on the bedside table. My notebook. The one I use for joke ideas, its cover worn soft from months of being shoved into back pockets and forgotten in bars. I reach for it, wincing at the sharp protest from my ribs.

Inside, in my handwriting, are two lines:

“The punchline was loving you anyway.” “The joke isn’t that no one’s listening. The joke is that everyone is, and they love you anyway.”

Below them, in different handwriting—neat, precise—someone has added:

“Hope you’re feeling better. The turtle forgives you too. - K”

I stare at the page until the words blur. Through the window, I can see the hospital parking lot, where a row of vending machines stands against the far wall like mechanical sentinels. One of them hums to life as I watch, its lights flickering on in the gray dawn.

My phone—cracked but still functional—sits next to the notebook. Seven missed calls from Elena. I pick it up, dial her number, and wait.

“Mitch?” Her voice is thick with sleep and worry. “Oh my God, I heard about the accident. Are you—”

“I’m okay,” I tell her, and for the first time in years, I mean it. “Elena? I was wondering… would you like to get coffee sometime? When I get out of here. I have some things I’d like to say.”

There’s a pause, then: “I’d like that.”

“Good,” I say, settling back against the hospital pillows. “That’s good.”

Outside, the vending machine continues its quiet song, and I close my eyes and listen.