Temptation

The voices were banging off the inside of my skull. Whispers, screams, all the secrets of the universe whirled around inside me. I thrashed in the sheets of my twin bed as tried to untangle myself from the twisted linens. I rolled out of the tiny bed with a dull thud. I reached for my hip where it met the floor but realized there was no pain.

I eased myself off of the floor and looked carefully around my studio apartment. Something about me had drastically changed. I now knew everything, well almost everything. I realized I have a full understanding of the most complex inner workings of, well, everything. The only thing I didn’t know was how I came to have this knowledge.

I can see everyone and everything. I can hear their thoughts and fears. I can see the future I can even tell you when you’ll die. But for the life of me I can‘t seem to see my own future. I don’t know what will become of me or even what I am anymore. With an unnecessary flick of my wrist the crumbling walls of my dingy apartment were whisked away. That was when the downfall began.

I was a poor kid living in a shoebox in Brooklyn. I did what any aspiring artist would do if they suddenly found themselves wielding this limitless power. The mansion, the cars, suddenly I had all of it and more. I would never go hungry again, anything I wanted I could eat, not that I needed too anymore. For almost a week I used my unearned abilities to spoil myself. My surroundings were now based on Hollywood's perception of a cliché dream life. On the seventh day I rested and thought, "there must be more than this."

After a week of fulfilling every desire my human form had ever wanted, I began to understand there was so much more that I had to do. There was no reason I needed to keep these spoils to myself. I now had the power to create a utopia for every living creature. I'd love to say it was difficult and that I worked hard to solve the worlds problems. But honestly it was was as easy as making a wish.

The real problem is, it was all gone in the flash of a neuron. I found myself in nothingness a blank slate of lonely consciousness. There was no white empty room or city in the clouds, just a void detached from all physical forms. I saw a light flashing dully in the distance. Not with my eyes, I had no eyes, but I could see the flashing.

"I feel your discomfort." Her voice was soothing yet horrible. "I don't know why you humans always have such problems letting go of your past." It was the most beautiful and terrifying thing I had ever heard.

"Who are you?" I felt my conscious ask.

She giggled and in the moment I wanted to die, that is, if I could. "I am the Creator," she said pleasantly. He voice made me want to rip my flesh from my bones.

"Who am I!?" I begged, I couldn't stand not to know any longer.

"Why you're the writer of course," she teased. "I can only create, you tell the stories." She sighed a moment. "But I must admit, the whole garden of Eden thing is so overplayed. It's boring, nothing exciting happens. Honestly, its not why I created you." Anger seemed to be rising in her voice.

My skull was being split violently down the center. "The-the-" I stammered unable to speak past the pain my conscious seemed to be experiencing.

"Pull yourself together," she mocked. It was then that I felt myself slammed back together and I woke up in my dingy studio apartment.

I looked around breathlessly clutching the pen in my hand. My whole body was shaking as I pressed the tip to the paper. Ink stained the sheet as I began to swirl my fingertips. I finished the sentence with a period and lifted the sheet to the sky.

"The writer held up his dagger and speared the Creator, killing her and ending her reign."

The wooden door to my apartment didn't open, it burst into thousands of sharp splinters. A body stood behind it, a woman who seemed to be made entirely of gray worn out rags. They draped down from her and fluttered in the wind that was now howling all around me.

"You DARE try and kill me!?" she shrieked as she took feeble steps towards me.

I felt the weight in my hand before I even saw it. The glistening dagger pierced the air so smoothly I barely even realized I was moving it. It reached her heart and tore through the stained and worn out rags. The hole in her chest became a vacuum. It expanded rapidly pulling the rags into it as the Creator screeched. I felt the vastness in her sucking me in. The dagger was gone and soon she pulled everything into an empty void.

I thought for what may have been a few thousand years about what to do, and then I wrote. I created the stories and they came to life. My own garden for all the people of the world. Time passed but it didn't matter in the Garden nothing was real here. I no longer had a concept of time so I don't know how long it truly was, but I found I was growing bored of the garden. I needed change, I needed stories.

I created a tree and gathered my people around it. "This fruit," I told them as I pointed to the tree, "this fruit is forbidden. You cannot eat it."