The God Contest Regina

“No matter how hard the past is, you can always begin again.”

Buddha

"It is time. Authority has chosen."

"We can still turn back. If we fail, we die. If we succeed... perhaps far worse."

"We five agreed to follow this path. It's what must be done. It cannot continue as it has in ages past."

"But to place our fates in the hands of a mortal. Are you certain, Oracle?"

"I am certain of nothing, except that we will fail without her."

"Then we are agreed. Oracle, the next move is yours."

***

Bethany saw the city a full twenty minutes before she arrived. That was the way of the prairies. Nothing could ever sneak up on you.

First, she saw the lights, faintly glowing in the distance, shining as though they were stars in the darkness. And then the morning sun began to crest over the eastern horizon, spreading its rays over the city. The glass office towers in the city centre became visible and reflected the golden rays of the morning over the neighborhoods that stretched beneath them.

The scent of the golden wheat and purple flax fields that surrounded the city filled Bethany’s red 2008 Honda Civic through the rear passenger window, which had long ago lost its ability to fully close.

Bethany wiped the sleep from her eyes, her excitement keeping exhaustion at bay as she drove down the highway towards the city. She glanced down at her dashboard for just a moment. She had less than a quarter tank of gas left, but she had made it.

Regina wasn’t just a city. It represented a new life. A better life.

Everything she owned was in the back of her Civic, stuffed into a single tattered suitcase that had once belonged to her grandmother. The faded yellow and pink floral patterns on its surface resembled her grandmother’s favorite dress. The one she had worn every Sunday at church. The one she was now buried in.

Bethany shifted her gaze, trying to dislodge the thought from her mind. Her grandmother had been the last positive thing in her life. She had left Bethany some money in her will, but Bethany’s father had taken it, a wicked smile plastered on his face. To hold until she was eighteen, he had told her, as if he had not intended to drink and gamble it away. It had taken him less than four days to spend it all. The only thing Bethany was given was a bruise across her cheek when she asked about the money last night.

This journey would have been so much easier with that money. Her eyes fell on her passenger seat. One hundred thirteen dollars and fifty-two cents. All the money she had in the world. She had been working since she was fifteen years old, taking on odd jobs after school that paid in cash. Cash let her hide a fraction of what she earned in a metal lockbox hidden in the woods behind her house, before her father demanded the rest. Two dollars here, five dollars there. Bethany squirreled away every penny she could.

She had bought her Civic a month ago, from a farmer just outside town. It was permeated with rust, the seats covered with cigarette burns, the radio broken, the windows loose, and had over 300,000km on the odometer. It looked like it would fall apart at any moment. But the price was right, and the farmer said she could store it on his property until she needed it. That was important. She couldn’t take it home. She couldn’t let him know what she was planning.

Next to the money on the passenger seat lay a single, half-eaten chocolate chip muffin. Her birthday gift to herself, purchased in a gas station convenience store just after midnight. Her swollen cheek made it difficult to eat, so she had to chew on the other side of her mouth. The muffin was dry and chalky, but she did not care. It was hers, and it was a start.

“Happy birthday to me,” whispered Bethany, her voice breaking with emotion.

Her eighteenth birthday. Her classmates spent their eighteenth birthdays with friends, passing around bottles of whatever they could sneak out of their parent’s liquor cabinets. They would laugh and smile, and dream of what lay ahead when high school was finally over. Or so Bethany would imagine. She had never been invited to those kinds of parties.

Instead, she had spent her final hours as a seventeen-year-old sneaking her grandmother’s suitcase out from their storage closet, wincing at every creaky floorboard that threatened to give her away. She nearly had a heart attack during those final steps into her room when her father had risen from the couch and stumbled into the bathroom, slamming the door hard enough to make their tiny, rundown house shake. But a moment later his snoring resumed, no doubt crouched over the toilet, nose barely above the waterline.

She had packed the suitcase in minutes, filling it with what meager possessions she had. Jeans and T-shirts, socks, and underwear, and a tattered ballcap that fit her head just right, the hole at the back perfect to thread her long brown ponytail through. She added her birth certificate, a photo of her grandmother, her journal, the towel she had used for six years, a set of sheets, her thin blanket, her even thinner pillow, and the ballpoint hammer she kept under that pillow for when things got rough. She decided to forgo her toothbrush and comb, stored in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Her father was there, and it was not worth the risk.

There was still lots of room left in the suitcase. But she no longer had anything left to pack.

She had winced at the squeaky hinges as she opened her bedroom door, and carefully carried the suitcase to the front door. She winced again as she opened the warped door, a small piece of splintered wood finally breaking off with a crack. She had called the landlord months ago to fix the door. He didn’t show up. He never did.

She did not look back as she passed through the front door. She did not look back when she strode into the woods and opened her locked box for the final time, fishing out her cash and car keys. And she did not look back as she strode towards the farmer’s home, dragging her suitcase behind her on the dark, gravel road.

There was nothing behind her she wanted. Everything good lay ahead.

An hour later, she had driven her Civic off the farmer’s land. And left her old life behind.

* * *

Welcome to Regina

The welcome sign dislodged Bethany from her thoughts. She blinked hard, struggling to stay awake. She had been driving all night, trying to put as much distance between herself and her old life as possible. She didn’t know if her father would come looking for her, but the further she got, the less likely he would be to find her.

Ms. Johnson, her eighth-grade teacher, had once told her that she should always run towards something, not away from something. The advice had stuck with Bethany, and she pushed the thoughts of yesterday from her mind.

“Yesterday is over. It is now today. And today is exciting,” thought Bethany, taking a deep breath to calm her nerves. She was here. She was free.

The City of Regina. Capital of Saskatchewan. Home of the Roughriders, beacon of civilization across the great prairies. And…umm…

Bethany struggled to find another description of the city. Even that last one was stretching it. At just under a two hundred and fifty thousand people, Regina was hardly Canada’s leading tourist destination. It was a working town. A government town. Perhaps that is why Bethany had chosen it to start her new life. While her classmates were fantasizing over being actors and millionaires in metropolises like Los Angeles or New York, Bethany just wanted a simple place. Where she could build a normal life that was all her own. Where she could one day buy a house with her own little garden and live her life in peace.

Where she could live her life without being afraid.

Bethany shook her head again, banishing her last thought.

“No. I’m free. I’m here. Think positively,” she repeated, staring at herself in her rearview mirror. “Think of everything the city has to offer.”

She had spent a day in Ms. Johnson’s class learning about Regina and she had fallen in love with it, despite its lack of glamour. Or perhaps because of it. It seemed so simple. So practical. She had read how Regina had been founded as part of building the nation’s railway. The location was selected because it was near land that the Lieutenant-Governor owned. It had a creek, which had been dammed in the 1880s to provide the fledgling settlement with a small lake to serve as a water source. In the 1930s, a make-work project to employ people during the great depression had transformed that small lake into one of the largest parks in North America, over nine square kilometers right in the middle of the city. The capital building stood in that park, open to tourists in the summer. That tour was on Bethany’s to-do list.

The land around the city was as flat as you will ever see, with hardly a tree in sight. Every inch that could be farmed was farmed, growing grains and lentils, and raising animals in farming operations both big and small. It was an export province, feeding and fueling the world.

The cityscape itself stretched over 150 square kilometers, centered around the downtown core that had drawn Bethany’s eyes. How many towers rose into the sky? There must be six! Maybe more. And each one must be over twenty stories high! Around the downtown core, business and residential districts were spread throughout the city in a semi-planned fashion. A mix of old and new in the fast-growing city.

In the back of her mind, Bethany knew her classmates – former classmates – would laugh at her excitement. They had seen more of the world than she had. Some had taken family trips to America or Europe to cities many times larger and far more glamourous and with rich, millennia-long histories.

Bethany did not care. Regina was still amazing to her.

A yawn tried to escape her throat, but she willed it away as she took the ramp off the highway and into the city. Into her new home.

It was a city on the verge of waking up. There were a few vehicles on the street, those who had to be at work at the crack of dawn. Supermarkets and giant stores sped by on either side of the road, and she felt giddy as she thought about which she would visit first. Her eyes glanced down again at the money on the passenger seat. Her stomach growled but she ignored it, as she had all night. She needed to be careful with her money. No foolish purchases.

She turned left onto a residential neighborhood, away from the stores. The houses in the city were so large, and the streets were lined with large elm trees. She had borrowed a book on Regina from their tiny local library when she was sixteen and read that each one of the tens of thousands of trees in the city were hand planted, since few large trees grew naturally on the prairies. It was so different from her home in the north, where the forests stretched for miles.

Her father had thrown that book into a fire when he caught her with it. She’d had to dip into her savings to pay the replacement fee. The library wouldn’t let her keep borrowing books without it. The library was the only place that she had felt safe, so she had paid.

“Stop it!” uttered Bethany, her voice sounding shaky and far away as sleep threatened to overwhelm her. “Future. Think future. It’s in the past.”

But this time, it was harder to shake the thought. Her head was swimming as exhaustion began to overtake her. Fear had pushed her on through the night, and excitement had given her a second wind. But now she had used up that second wind and needed sleep.

“What do I do now?” Bethany asked herself. She had spent so much time planning her escape, and so little time planning what she would do when she got here. Perhaps she had never truly believed she would make it this far.

There was a small sign on the side of the road - Les Sherman Park – and Bethany took a sharp turn to pull into its empty gravel parking lot. There was a baseball field and walking paths, all backed on to Wascana creek. It was part of the interconnected system of parks that ran from east to west across the city, with Wascana Park at its centre.

More importantly, it had a public washroom. Bethany had not realized how much she needed one until now. Suddenly, it seemed like the most important thing in the world. She walked quickly towards it, tugging on its heavy metal door. It was unlocked, thankfully, and she ducked inside.

A few minutes later she was back in the car with a full water bottle, washed face, and empty bladder.

“Not bad. Not bad,” she whispered to herself. She placed her hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn and recoiled at the smell of her breath. She looked at her money on the passenger seat, scooping it up and stuffing it in her jeans. “Toothbrush and toothpaste. The first purchase.” She stifled another yawn, “Right after I rest.”

She reached into the back seat, gently opening her grandmother’s suitcase. She fished out her blanket and pillow and leaned her seat back as far as it would go. She locked her doors and then, out of habit, grabbed her ball-peen hammer and placed it at her side. She felt safer that way. Then she leaned the seat back as far as it could go, stuffed the pillow behind her head, and was asleep before she could lift her blanket above her waist.