Who Is Like God

[riicchan]

I wrote this as an assignment for Fiction Writing.  I kinda like how it turned out!

Who Is Like God

“So nice of you to arrive so soon,” he told her, sitting politely, fingers laced around his knee. The table was set for two, and the plates were made of clean glass. “Please, won’t you?”

She felt a flutter in her chest, seeing that slim hand, that inviting smile. She wasn’t too early, was she?

“Absolutely not. You’re right on time.”

She sat down as if she were afraid that she would break the chair.

Um.

“Why so nervous? It’s just me,” he said. She could see his elbows on the edge of the table, as he rested his head on the top of his hands.

Oh, no, she wasn’t nervous, she just…

“Don’t know what to say?”

Took the words right out of her mouth. She smiled sheepishly and brushed her hair over her shoulder. Yes, exactly that.

“Well, then, I suppose I could do all the talking. But that wouldn’t be terribly interesting, would it?”

And he leaned over the table and put his thin fingers under her chin.

Lord, did he ever have beautiful eyes.

And that’s about where I stopped writing because I didn’t know where the heck that scene was even going. I don’t even remember where I got that idea from, anyways. I just came home from class and wanted to write, so I did. I only get inspiration every now and then, and I know better than to let it get away from me.

It’s kinda weird, really. A total empty-room plot. Just a scene. I usually get full stories in my mind first, before scenes. Or at least ideas for the plot. Like “Hero meets Girl, they fall in love, Hero leaves, never comes back, Girl gets over it, meets the real Love Of Her Life, Hero totally gets what’s coming to him, The End!” That’s how I jot them down in my notebook, anyways.

This, this is kinda all sorts of unusual. I don’t even know the names of the characters here, never mind what the heck kinda place they’re in.

Okay, no, wait, strike that, I have an idea about the guy. Michael. I think that’s what his name’s gonna be. I dunno why it has to be Michael, he just feels like a Michael, so that’s what his name is gonna be. Yup.

And the girl’s all dressed up fancy. Like, Gothic Lolita. All in white lace and stuff.

Michael’s a lot classier. Black shirt, black pants, black hair. All black. It’s a weird sorta dissonance, like… she’s dressed up all fancy, he’s all minimalist. Why is that, I wonder?

Maybe it’s, like, a meeting of the modern and the traditional?

Maybe this has gotten all symbolic? I think I like where this is going.

“Really, you’re too much,” Michael told her, laughing. He held his face in his palm delicately, as if his head were made of glass. “You don’t need to be all dolled up for me.”

This was being dolled up? Her skirts were comforting, heavy. The room was cold.

It was white, not like snow, but like medical gauze, like ceramic.

Though it didn’t keep her from wondering if she’d melt into those walls if she stood too close to them. She was so pale, anyways. A slip of a thing. Nothing worth noticing.

Really, it was a wonder he even noticed her at all. He was so unique, here. Pure black on white.

What did he see in her?

“Really, I don’t want to be the one doing all the talking,” he told her, warm, black eyes smiling. His irises were so large that it didn’t look there were any whites to them.

“Maybe I just don’t have anything to say,” she replied. She wrapped her fingers into each other, grey eyes glancing sideways.
“Nonsense! I’m sure you have plenty to say,” Michael said.

Yeah, but I couldn’t think of anything to write so I just left it there and went to sleep. I napped a lot during the winter already, what with the nights being so long. They get me sleepy.

I drew Michael a bunch during class the next morning. All silhouette and pure black shape. Classy. I really like how he’s turning out.

And the girl still doesn’t have a name, but I think she’s got, like, curly hair or something? Kinda like mine, funnily enough. I can’t seem to picture her face in my mind much. Oh well.

And then I got another idea while walking home, so after I took my wet jeans off and put on some pajama pants I booted up my computer and started writing it.

“Really, your politeness astounds,” Michael said. “If something was bothering you, why didn’t you just tell me?”

What could she say? That she was scared to be in this place? Her home was a million miles away.

“I’m just a little nervous,” she said. “I feel out of place here.”

The walls were white, in the hallways, the kitchen, her bedroom. Everything perfectly clean. White, like she was.

Everything, that is, except for the things that Michael touched. The things that Michael owned.

The floor was black, and so were the clothes of the people that served them, and their masks. When they ate together, his plate, his plastic knife, were black. He wore gloves on his hands, and he handled his cutlery like surgical equipment.

Her plate was white.

“I know it’s your favorite color,” he told her, when she asked him why this was. “Black just so happens to be mine.”

The chairs and table were black as well.

When she was with him, she actually stood out.

Alone, she was just another white thing on a white background.

It was like that joke, about the kid that’s assigned an art project, but forgets it until the last moment. Feeling clever, he hands in a blank sheet of paper. The teacher calls him up and asks him to explain himself.

“Don’t you see, ma’am? It’s a polar bear in a snow storm.”

And that’s about where I had to stop because Alan was calling me and asking me where the heck I was, because weren’t we having dinner together?

Oh, yeah, we were.

I told him about the idea at dinner. He’d made some sorta chicken thing and we ate it on clear plates. Alan was as good at cooking like he was good at kicking my ass at Street Fighter. I just played it because he asked me, anyways, it was the least I could do.

I mean, he always listens to my weird writing stuff, because he says he likes hearing about it and he actually pays attention and gets me thinking about stuff I miss.

He tells me he loves me for my mind, I tell him I love him for his cooking, but I dunno.

I just wish he’d say I was pretty or that at least my hair looked nice sometimes, you know? It’s like when guys say that a girl has a “good sense of humor” or is “really nice.” It means that there’s nothing else worth complimenting.

But, hey, at least he paid attention to me. And he asked me a few questions about the story. “Like, where is all of this taking place, anyways?”

“I dunno,” I said, “some sorta weird monochrome dream world. You know how they say that if you dream in color you’re supposed to be more intelligent or something?”

“…no?”

I shredded the chicken on my plate again with my knife. “Okay, whatever, forget I said anything.” And he laughed.

“Cool, fine, so what’s the girl’s story?” He ate chicken like a savage, hacking the pieces apart with his knife and fork and chewing at them roughly, recklessly. God, Alan loved to eat, but he was so skinny. Me, on the other hand…

“Well, hm.”

“You can’t write a story without knowing her story, man,” he told me. “Unless she’s, like, an amnesiac and waking up here and whatever? They do that in games a lot, y’know, that amnesiac thing.”

I told him that was a stupid idea and I wasn’t gonna make it like one of his stupid anime games, and he laughed and drenched his chicken in steak sauce again.

It stayed with me when I went home, though. Went back, edited a few things.

See, amnesia totally worked. Especially with the whole black/white elements.

The girl was a blank slate. No name, no backstory.

And then there was Michael.

The first thing he really gave her was a black necklace. She had marveled for a moment, when he gave it to her. It was delicate, a chain of black metal, beautifully-made, each link fitting perfectly into the next.

“Why are you giving this to me?” she asked him.

“I thought you would like it.”

She did.

“Why are you so kind to me?”

“Because I like you.”

She felt her cheeks grow hot, and she knew, just knew, that they blushed grey.

He put the necklace on her.

“See? Now you’re even more beautiful than before.”

He thought she was beautiful?

Nobody else told her that she was beautiful.

And black was his favorite color.

Walking to her white bedroom that night, the servants in the halls, with their black masks and their black gloves, stared at her, nodding, almost knowing something.

She was his, now.

She kept the necklace on when she went to sleep in her white bed, in her white nightgown.

His.

She was still a polar bear in a snow storm, but now her eyes were open.

I spent a lot of time writing about them, after that. Once the themes worked themselves into place, that whole black/white motif.

She still didn’t have a name, but whatever. I’d let Michael give her one.

When it passed more than a couple thousand words, when it became apparent that this was definitely A Thing, I told Alan about it, and he gave me a Look.

“Okay, cool, but where is it going?”

“What do you mean?”

And he told me that it was, okay, just a lot about this girl (I didn’t tell him that I was using the amnesiac idea, he probably thought it was stupid now), and this Michael guy, and then what?

So they were flirting and stuff, but then what?

“Michael,” I told him, “is mysterious.”

Michael was the story.

I knew nothing about him.

He knew nothing about me.

But every night, they met for dinner. And it was so strange, the way that he fed her things like rice, like milk, beautiful, white, clean foods.

She couldn’t see the food on his plate that he so carefully picked apart. When she asked him about it, where was his food, he laughed.

“Oh, don’t you know? I’m eating my words.”

And she blushed and hid her face in her glass of white porcelain, marveling at his cleverness.

Sometimes she would find him in the library, reading books with black covers and white words on black paper. They weren’t his words, so they weren’t his color.

He smiled with white lips, whenever he saw her. And she thought, one day, why that was so. His white face, his white lips, his white teeth. His black, black eyes.

Did those lips belong to her?

She could feel her black heart start to beat wildly whenever she thought of such things.

She started wearing things she thought he would like. Going to the servants, asking them, “Is there anything I can wear?”

Her closets were lined with white clothes. White dresses, blouses, skirts. Ribbons, lace, satin, silk. Everything was provided for her, all of this belonged to her.

But black was his favorite color.

She wore his black necklace, and never took it off.

The servants did not reply, with their black masks, with their own black clothes.

She didn’t go to Michael, not yet. Maybe that was all she needed.

When she looked outside the window, she saw a white land, a grey sky. At night, nothing but blackness.

So the night belonged to him, she thought.

Her boyfriend was starting to get worried.

“Okay, uh… what do you mean by that?” she asked him.

“I mean to say you look like hell,” Alan said, from across the thing of shepherd’s pie. “Are you okay?”

The hell was he talking about? I was perfectly fine.

He said I didn’t look healthy, was I not sleeping well?

His food was getting cold on his white plate. I wasn’t hungry.

He made a joke about sleeping with him and I told him something I don’t remember I was tired.

I saw dark circles under my eyes as I was brushing my teeth, before I went back to writing.  I had to look nice, so I did nothing about them.

Michael complimented me on my new look. “It’s like natural kohl. Like the Egyptians.”

Michael was so cultured. Did he learn these things from his books, with the white words on them?

He ate his words so cleanly and so beautifully, like it was an art that he had long ago mastered.

She sometimes wondered if there were things he hadn’t mastered.

She sometimes wondered why she never saw him during the day.

Ah, but that was because the night was his time. It was the black time. The night belonged to him, just like his black paintings, his black gifts, her black heart.

A dress was left on her white vanity’s chair one night, a dress like the kind the servants wore, but she put it on without a moment’s hesitation, wearing it when she met with him for dinner that night.

“You look so beautiful,” he told her. “Black is just so slimming.”

“Stop it,” she said, “you’re making me blush.”

Alan never said things like that.

I wondered, for long time after that dinner, if his hands were black underneath those soft gloves of his.

Or white.

Who did they belong to?

She started to sleep more, during the day, so she could be with him at night.

Why did you have to sleep at night, who said you had to?

Nobody told her what she could and could not do, in Michael’s beautiful black house, with the white walls.

Nobody told her not to go outside, but she didn’t anyways.

The only thing keeping her awake during the day were classes. Tests. Something like… midterms or tests or whatever. Requirements.

That was the only reason to go outside.

There was a knock on the door, and she went to answer it.

“Alan? What are you doing here?”

“You aren’t answering any of my calls,” he said. He had a white casserole dish in his hands, covered with tin foil. But that wasn’t my casserole dish, that was his, so why wasn’t it black?

No, wait, that just meant that it didn’t belong to Michael.

Alan was saying something about how someone said I was maybe sick and that’s why I was sleeping so much so he brought a thing here you wanna eat it?

There were papers all over my table so we ate on the couch. I didn’t feel like moving them.

Alan talked at me a whole lot but all I could think about was Michael.

“What, you’re still working on that story?”

What? Yeah.

“So how’s it turning out?”

I told him about it.

His little nerd mind struggled to comprehend.

“So it’s… like Beauty and the Beast now, huh?”

God, could he not understand a thing? No.

See, Michael would understand this. Michael, who knew about all the things that were interesting, who had libraries with books upon books of white words on his black pages.

Alan was all colored lights on the television screen, unclean and rough and childish and okay why did you have to say that?
Okay, what did he mean by that?

Who the hell was Michael?

Even I didn’t know. Even after so many days with him, I still didn’t know.

And he said something about her cheating on him and I told him that wasn’t even a part of the story at all, could he not understand anything? It was plain enough to me.

He told me I should get some sleep. That I was sick, maybe I should see the doctor.

Michael never told me such things. Michael told me that I was beautiful, and he dressed me in black, and he said that it was very slimming.

I stayed awake for him.

And after Alan left, that was to whom I returned.

His next gift was a pair of black gloves. Like the kind his servants wore. Like his.

I still didn’t know what color those hands were, but I didn’t care.

My hands were now his hands, and with them, I wrote beautiful things.

I wrote black words on white paper. His words.

The girl’s boyfriend came back later, but she wouldn’t open the door for him.

She was with Michael.

Thousands of his words poured out from her black fingers.

Her hair, once curly, once sort of white, once frizzy and hateful, began to grow in a way he loved. She began finding black hairs in her white bathroom sink. She cut it all off when she realized this.

And it began growing in, black as black as black.

“But why did you have to do that?” Michael asked, pursing my lips together in concern. “Your hair wasn’t so bad.”

Wasn’t so bad, but not beautiful.

“Because I think it looks nice,” I said.

Michael looked at me with his warm, black eyes, in his black chair, in his black library, and he said nothing.

My hair began growing back. The servants brushed it for me, with his black brushes. My hair grew back very quickly.

“You see? Doesn’t it look beautiful?” I told them.

None of them had ever said a word to me. She hadn’t even written dialogue for them.

The only thing that proved their existence was in black words, his words, they still were his, always. And he knew this.

The only thing that still proved her existence were in the black things she submitted from home. Requirements. It was summer, soon.

That boy wondered sometimes, worried, but nothing could be done.

The days were longer. Less time with him.

“Why can’t the night last forever?” I lamented, sometimes, to him, to nobody.

I wanted more time with him.

She had written thousands of words, pouring every aspect of her self into them, every letter a tribute to him, every piece of punctuation an offering.

The nights grew so short, and my despair grew all the more.

Michael was harder to find. Where was he, when he wasn’t in his black library, when he wasn’t where I knew I could find him?

Where was he? Was he avoiding me? I was beautiful, wasn’t I? Look at how long my hair had grown. It was black, his favorite color. It was his hair. I had grown it for him.

She still had the disgusting hunks of not-black hair in the trash in the bathroom of cream-colored tiles.

See? Look at how long it was.

Michael ran a hand over my head, like a father does to a beloved daughter, like a hunter to a cherished dog, but not as a lover, not as a lover.

“Yes,” he said, “it is all very beautiful.”

But I still couldn’t find him where I wanted.

She grew frustrated. She took walks.

Where was he? Where was he?

People tried to talk to her when she passed.

Them in their black masks, they had no place talking to me. They were his and he never told them to talk. I knew this and so did he, because they were his.

Who was this Alan they were talking about?

The only name spoken in the house was Michael.

I couldn’t remember my name. I didn’t even remember how I even came to live at this house. All I could remember was Michael, and his kindness, and his house of black floors and white walls.

Michael was so kind. Michael told me I was beautiful.

Surely he felt something for me? Surely these gifts meant something?

His black chain, his black dress, his black gloves, his black shoes.

It meant that I was his.

And he was mine.

Under those gloves, I knew he had white hands, like mine. Those white lips were mine, too, and the words that came out of them.

Mine, he was mine, too.

She has written thousands of words, now, for him.

It was the shortest night of the year. June. I couldn’t stand to think of being without him. The days seemed so long. He was just gone for just so long now. He was so hard to find.

And I had met him on the darkest, longest night of the year, hadn’t I? That was almost entirely his day. Just like he was almost entirely mine.

I combed my own hair in preparation, after sleeping, getting my beauty sleep, is what I called it. There were dark, dark, beautiful circles under my eyes. Just like the Egyptians.

Oh Michael, oh Michael, the things he knew. Just like there were things I knew. I knew so much, I knew everything about him.

She told herself.

Michael was just so proud of being so mysterious, though. That was where the appeal was, wasn’t it? Being so…

She searched for words. Her fingers were skinny, pale from lack of sunlight. Her nails were long and covered in chipped black nail polish.

Enigmatic. That was it.

But he couldn’t keep everything a secret from me. He was still mine, I knew that.

She told herself.

I knew where I’d be able to find him. The house, for however large it really seemed, only had a few rooms in which I spent my time.

My white bedroom, which I despised. White, everything was white, except for his gifts to me. I had gotten rid of all the other dresses. Black was his favorite color, I had no reason to wear them.

The white kitchen, where he ate my words on black chairs, on black plates.

His beautiful, beautiful black library.

The one room I had never bothered to enter was his bedroom.

That was his place and his place alone. A black unknown-ness, undiscovered territory for me. But I had been here long enough. He was mine as much as I was his. I knew where it was.

I dressed carefully, covering my white skin with the things that made me his.

All I could see as I walked down the hallway were the things that lacked his touch. The white walls, my white teeth, the blank white eyes behind the servants who watched me pass, wearing my dress and my gloves.

The door to his bedroom was black, of course. And I opened it with black hands.

He was waiting there, on the bed.

Black walls, a black bed with an old-fashioned canopy to it, black curtains.

Everything was his, utterly and entirely.

Except for him.

He looked so small there, on those black sheets, with his white body.

And, immediately, I knew what it meant.

And I went over to him there and he held in his hands his last gift to me.

A mask.

I could not feel the material with my hands, gloved as they were.

“Come, my beautiful one,” he told me. I closed black eyes, black lips turning upward into a smile.

He took off the shoes, the gloves, the dress, the chain. I shivered from the coldness, from the disgusting white body that I owned.

And he put the mask on me, and the fabric felt like him.

“I am yours.”

He lied.