God's Grudge

God hates us all. Everyone knows it—deep down. Take Africa for example. More than half the continent is plagued by poverty and nowhere else do as many children die of starvation or illness. It’s the twenty-first century; Surely a benevolent God would’ve either aided these people or made them sterile to prevent the continued suffering. Dogs die when they eat chocolate. Chocolate for fuck’s sake. Why is that? I’ll tell you: God is vicious. I’ll do you one more: drugs. Drugs are bad, right? I mean, everyone knows that. But have you ever shot heroin? Oh man, it feels like the rainbow flows through every fucking vein in your body.

At that moment though, neither Africa, dogs, nor drugs were the problem. You know those filthy feline creatures people take into their homes for some reason? Hatred would be too big a word to describe my sentiment towards them. A general dislike would be more accurate. I’d pin it somewhere between my feelings towards being caught in the rain and the sound of my alarm in the morning. One of these pests, black as the night, just skittered past me on the sidewalk. I barely saw the thing in the dimly lit street and nearly kicked the suicidal maniac. I probably should have.

It’s universally acknowledged: black cats are bad luck. If our dear lord and saviour weren’t a malevolent prick, then why would he throw us so many curveballs? But it’s alright, I’ll play his game for a little while longer. One black cat, one dose of misfortune; those are the rules.

Now, see, that’s where I was wrong.

I continued down the street, a little weary of cars driving past that might catch a puddle and soak me, but none of that happened. I might argue that I’d already had my dose yesterday when my car broke down (hence my walking to the bus station at six in the morning), but that’s not how these things worked. New day, new troubles.

A slight drizzle came down and that’s when I thought, is this it? are you letting me off easy this time? I could live with that. The bus stop was one of those cheap ones without any form of shelter, just a pole in the ground. I checked the schedule. A bus should be here in three minutes. None came. The next one was scheduled for fifteen minutes later, so, annoyed, I waited. Fifteen minutes feel like an hour when your jeans start to cling to your legs and your waterproof jacket suddenly decides its water resistance was a lie. Shivering but with a sliver of hope, I sat through those fifteen minutes. You might’ve guessed it, no bus came.

Now I was going to be late for work and had to walk there. ‘Fucking cats,’ I muttered. I hadn’t walked a hundred yards when suddenly the bus came to a halt at the bus stop. I ran back the way I’d came, accidentally stepping in a puddle as I went. My shoe was soaked all the way through instantly, but if it meant sitting in the bus instead of walking through the rain for three miles, it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. My sacrifice was for naught. The engine roared and the bus drove off when I was halfway there.

When I finally did get to work, I was only twenty minutes late. Switching my walk with a slight jog to keep from freezing had also bought me some time. My boss actually pitied me as I came through the door, leaking, and told me to warm up a bit first before I got to work. ‘You’ll cut of a finger if you can’t feel them. Machines don’t know the difference between flesh and steel.’ He said before he went to look for a dry change of clothes. I nursed a mug of steaming coffee and my hands, cold as a corpse’s and nearly as immobile, regained some vigour and vitality.

The workshop was at least twenty-five degrees at any time when the furnace was burning, and my clothes should have ample time to dry before my shift ended. In the cafeteria, a ten-by-ten room without a roof in the corner of the workshop, you could hear the steady rhythm of banging metal. The mug slipped from between my damp hands and the scorching hot coffee burned my thighs and junk. ‘Ahh, motherfucker!’ I yelled. A few seconds later, summoned by my hollering, José stood in the doorway. He looked apprehensive at first, genuinely concerned, but then he saw what had happened and he laughed his ass off. ‘Oh, piss off, beaner.’

‘White boy can no hold coffee.’ He replied sniggering before he left.

Wearing some dry clothes and beat-up shoes at least a size to big for me, I got to work. I started cutting sheets of metal with the hydraulic shearing machine. We called it the Guillotine cutter because of the knife that came down and effortlessly sliced through the steel. It was an old machine which still required manual input. It didn’t only lack automaticity; it didn’t have any safety features either. Knowing my luck—and that god was a massive cheat—I was extremely careful operating the thing.

José walked over to me and asked, ‘How’s dick doing?’ still with a slight smile on his face. Normally I wouldn’t pause my work when we talked, but I didn’t want to risk being distracted and losing a finger or two because of it.

‘Better. How’s yours?’ I asked as a joke, but he didn’t get it.

‘I got painkill if you need.’

‘Thanks, José, but it isn’t that bad. How was Diego’s birthday?’ I asked him, remembering his son turned nine or ten yesterday. José immediately brightened up and took a picture from his wallet.

‘Look how happy,’ he said, handing me the picture. It was a cute kid. He brought him over one time when his wife was visiting family back in Mexico and he couldn’t find a babysitter. We showed him all around the workshop and let him help with some easy tasks that didn’t require heavy machinery. He loved it—for about two hours. Then he got bored and watched some kids show on José’s phone for the rest of his shift.

‘Look who’s becoming a real man. Give him another three years and he’ll be taller than you are.’

There were a couple of close calls with the guillotine and some sparks hit me in the neck while I was welding, but nothing major.

We’d heard rain coming down in buckets over the noise of the machines earlier, but surprisingly it had ended thirty minutes before the end of my shift. Maybe my spell of ill fortune was finally over. Somewhat optimistically I walked back home, again, in the dark. That’s the thing I don’t like about winter, you barely see any sun at all. I checked the schedule at the bus stop. Eighteen minutes. I decided not to count on the busses anymore and walk instead. If I was lucky and it did go, I could catch it at the next stop, but I’d at least stay warm if I kept walking. Thankfully, I was wearing my own shoes again. I’d put them next to the furnace, together with the rest of my clothes, and they had completely dried.

I walked past the park. Christmas lights always decorated the trees all through December. It was a beautiful sight; like sparks flying through the air on a mission to kindle a would-be couple's fire. The snow was missing, but it seemed to be getting colder with the day. It’d definitely be a white Christmas.

The park was a popular spot for couples. Tonight, he spotted three of them holding hands. Even him, a metalworker in his late twenties, was not immune to the romantic atmosphere and with some melancholy he longed for a time that had passed. Just last year he was walking there himself with Hailey. Looking back, they were an ill fit, but at the time there was a connection between them. That connection was quickly severed when she cut him across the chest with a pair of scissors in a drug-fuelled frenzy. he liked to think of it as god’s idea of forcing some character development onto him.

I gave up on the relationship and drugs the day after. Checked into rehab and sorted myself out. When I came out of the clinic, I had to find a new job as well. Going back to being a drug dealer wasn’t the best idea for a recovering addict. And that’s what you’d always be. Once an addict, always an addict, they say. But that didn’t mean you had to be an active user. It’s just that the temptation never completely left, you merely got better at fighting it. Anyway, without a diploma, the metal procession factory was the best job in the area. It paid well enough, and the work was calming most days. You could lose yourself in the routine and shut off your mind for a moment. The colleagues weren’t too bad either.

I walked on and looked over my shoulder at the park once more. That’s where I went wrong. I thought the bad luck was finally behind me, but God had one last bullet in the chamber. When I turned my head, I was caught in the death-stare of a truck’s headlights.

God hates us all, but I never got the chance to ask him why.