The God Contest Regina

“The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

Hunter S. Thompson

Bethany sat beside her grandmother’s urn. The funeral home was empty, save for her father arguing with the undertaker.

“The engraving on the urn is in English. It is not in the language of the Gods. How can she be saved if she does not speak their language?” her father asked nonsensically, a hollowness to his voice.

“I was in a hurry,” explained the undertaker, matter-of-factly. “Do you know how many of these I need to make today?”

He gestured across the room where thousands upon thousands of bodies were lined up on tables, awaiting their turn in the oven. There was a stillness to the room that disturbed Bethany, yet she could do little but watch the scene unfold.

“No one told me there would be a line,” complained her father, folding his arms. “I would have had my mother die earlier if I had known there would be a line.”

“There are more to come,” informed the undertaker. “Few will survive to the end. Do you want to make a reservation for her? You could skip the line.” he asked impassively, pointing at Bethany seated next to the urn.

“Her? Perhaps I should. She does not have what it takes,” said her father, waving his hand dismissively in Bethany’s direction.

Bethany just stared, trying to understand their words. She heard the words, but they seemed unfamiliar. Distorted. As if she were hearing the voices while her head was under water.

The undertaker strolled over to Bethany, knelt, and lifted up her chin. The undertaker’s eyes were solid black. Cold, lifeless, and calculating. He tipped her head left, then right, inspecting her as if she were being presented at a horse auction. “Good stock. Tougher than you might think. Perhaps she will surprise you.”

“Surprise?” asked her father in disbelief. “No, she will fall first. She is weak. Feeble. She doesn’t even know what she has gotten herself into.”

“Neither did they” replied the undertaker, gesturing towards the bodies. “Yet she is here, and they are not. So who gets the point?”

Her father marched forward and grabbed her chin as the undertaker had done. His eyes were molten fire, endlessly deep. His breath smelled of alcohol, as it had on so many nights. Her heart fell. She knew what came next.

“You are ugly and worthless, Bethany,” he said, softly. “Better to die quick at the beginning than to suffer until the end.”

His hands reached out, encircled her neck, and squeezed. She just sat there, paralyzed with fear, as she felt her life slipping away. Her lungs ached, her skin burned, and she could feel her pulse pounding against his tightening fingers. Why would her body not respond?

“You only have one life to live, Bethany,” came her grandmother’s voice from the urn, her final gift to Bethany. “Be brave, Little Bee.”

Bethany’s hands started moving, groping blindly as consciousness threatened to leave her. They came to rest upon her grandmother’s urn. With her last ounce of strength, she thrust the urn towards her father and smashed it against his skull. He staggered backwards, a shard of pewter lodged in his eye and his face covered in her grandmother’s ashen remains. The skewered eye drained itself down her father’s face, its molten core leaving a trail of burned flesh before it fell to the floor.

“Get away from me,” shouted Bethany, standing up and backing away from her father.

“I gave you an easy way out,” her father shouted, his voice now deep and malevolent, and sounding nothing like her father. “Now you will suffer.” His head seemed to shift in the shadows, bending and folding until it was warped beyond recognition, a decaying skull sitting atop her father’s shoulders.

“I deny you,” spat Bethany. “With all the strength I have, I deny you.”

The undertaker walked over to his workbench and opened a black notebook.

“A point for life then,” tallied the undertaker, before looking back at the thousands of bodies. “Don’t worry, malevolent one. You are still ahead in the count.”

“She won’t survive,” her father hissed. “No one ever survives.”

“Perhaps it shall be different this time,” countered the undertaker, as they both turned their backs on Bethany and strolled into the darkness. “We will know soon. After all, it begins in two days.”

Her father and the undertaker vanished into the darkness, their words dying in the silence. And Bethany stood there alone, feeling a thousand lifeless eyes staring at her.

* * *

Bethany eased open her eyes, letting in the early morning sunlight. She stared out across the water, her eyes falling on the great fields that stretched beyond the city limits and into the horizon. Her head was spinning. The dream had felt so real, as had the one the night before. She could still feel the urn in her hand, smashing against her father’s face. Had there been…but the bodies….and those molten, malevolent eyes.

“Stress,” Bethany whispered to herself, rubbing her eyes as if to banish the memory of the dream. “Stress and hunger. You’ve had a rough couple of days, Bethany. You are bound to have nightmares.”

She leaned forward in the reclined passenger-side seat, feeling the small of her back tighten and pop. She groaned, reaching over to her toiletry bag stashed behind her. “I’ll feel better once I am cleaned up.”

An hour later, Bethany emerged from the washroom clean and with a bounce in her step. She plopped herself at the picnic table, facing towards the lake to the south. She placed her diary in front of her, tapping her pen on the blank page to help her think.

“Alright, Bethany,” she said in an artificially upbeat tone. “You’re on your own now. Big city. Big world. You are safe…well, safer than you were. Where do you go from here?”

Bethany flipped to the inside of the front cover of her diary. There, written in bright purple ink, lay the plan she had developed almost two years ago.

It had been her sixteenth birthday, and she had spent the night in the emergency room. Her father, having lost his job earlier that day, had smashed her in the chest with a beer bottle. It had shattered and the shards of glass had sliced down her left forearm. She had bled so badly that her father had no choice but to take her to the hospital. Her father told the nurses that Bethany had attempted suicide, but he had stopped her in time. Bethany had just nodded, feeling faint from blood loss. Her grandmother’s dementia had been growing worse, and she needed to be at home to care for her. She could not risk being taken away from her.

The nurse had not questioned her father. She made a referral to a psychologist and handed Bethany a journey to record her thoughts and emotions, telling her the psychologist would want her to do so. Her father never took her to the psychologist. He never took her to the hospital ever again. But she did make effective use of the diary.

That night, when the house was still but for the heavy snores of her father, more scared than she had ever been, she wrote a simple list.

Get a car and money. Hide both from dad.

Escape at night with grandma.

Drive to Regina

Find us a safe place

Find a job

Find us a place to live

Live a better life

The page was stained with the residue of many night’s tears. Whenever her life became too much, she would always flip to this page and recite the list, over and over, to remind herself that she had a plan to escape. Her plan had changed two weeks ago, when her grandmother had passed away. She was supposed to be here with her. She was not supposed to be alone.

A fresh tear fell on the page and Bethany shook her head, slamming the diary shut before any more fell. She wiped her eyes, frustrated at her weakness. “Pull yourself together Bethany,” she scolded herself. “You’ve escaped. You are in Regina. You’ve found a safe place. It even has a washroom. Sure, it is not what you imagined, but remember when father forgot to pay the water and power bill and we went without either for a whole month? This is luxury compared to that.”

She tapped her pen on the diary cover, remembering the list. “Step five. Find a job. That’s it. Simple enough. Make a resume and find a job I’m qualified for. There must be something I can do. Officer Shepherd said something about job search services at the library. I’ll start there.”

Her stomach growled, and her eyes turned towards the car and her remaining sausages.

“First breakfast, then library.”

* * *

The central branch of the Regina Public Library lay in the middle of downtown, an older, two-story box-like structure that lay nestled between city hall and the downtown office towers. She had taken an hour to walk there, wanting to save money on gas and parking. She needed to be careful with what few dollars remained.

The library was busier than Bethany expected. The school library had only a small collection of books, a single computer tucked away in one corner, and a printer she could never afford to use. Except for Bethany, no one ever went there.

But this library had thousands of books, spread throughout the main floor and second floor mezzanine. Two dozen computers lay in the middle of the first floor, each with a private workstation. You could rent instruments and art, read comics and reserve private rooms. There were a dozen free classes advertised on the bulletin board in the front lobby.

Bethany was giddy, and practically skipped over to one of the workstations in her excitement. She smiled at an older woman, stacking books on the shelf, and she smiled back. “If you need anything, luv, just ask.”

“Thanks, I will.” responded Bethany cheerfully as she dove into one of the workstations, excited for what lay ahead. She logged into her e-mail, where she had kept the resume she had been working on for the past year. She had never had an opportunity to use it, but today that all changed.

Bethany spent all day in the library, sending out resumes to every job she felt qualified for. Waitress, cleaner, dishwasher, fast food. It did not matter what it was. She needed something soon, before her dwindling savings ran out.

Bethany had just finished submitting her twelfth job application in the early afternoon when a man in an ill-fitted suit and tie ran into the library and started yelling at the ceiling.

“Does no one else see them? The creatures crawling on this building? Crawling all over so many buildings. They manipulate the fabric of reality! They laugh and point, mocking us as they work! Tell me I have not gone mad! Tell me another can see them!”

The man was in his early forties, with short brown hair styled in a military cut. He was muscular and well-built, healthy but for his mental state.

The man rushed over to a bookcase near Bethany and started waving his arms wildly, as if fighting off a swarm of wasps. “I won’t let you do this! Stop laughing at me. I see you there, horned one, sneaking up on me. I shall wipe the grin from your face and the soot from your eyes.”

Library security rushed over to the man, trying to calm him down. He briefly swung his meaty fist in their direction as a warning, before turning his back on them and shouting at a nearby window. Security moved in, grabbing him firmly but gently by the arm, and they led the struggling man to an office behind the counter. The man provided only a token resistance, still preoccupied with the figures in his mind. As if the real world were a distant consideration.

“Watch out! They stare at you now, malevolence in their eyes. Can you not see it? Can you not feel it? Can you…” his words were lost to Bethany as security closed the door.

Bethany was shaken. She glanced around the library, as if trying to find what the man had seen.

“I wonder what he was on?” asked a young man next to her, breaking her focus. “Whatever it was, I want some! Am I right?” He laughed without waiting for Bethany’s response, then returned to the game he was playing on the computer, once again oblivious to the world. Within moments, the rest of the library patrons returned to their normal business. The man was already forgotten.

But Bethany did not forget right away. Even as she continued to send off resumes, the man’s words stuck in her mind. Between her father’s drinking and her grandmother’s dementia she had seen her share of erratic behavior. This had felt different. The man had seemed lucid, yet he rambled nonsense. It played through her mind even as she walked back to her car in the early evening, trying to make sense of it all.

When Bethany arrived back at her car, she noticed a piece of paper shoved under the windshield wiper, flapping in the wind. Had she gotten a ticket? She’d never gotten a ticket before. Her mind started to race. Would she have to move? She felt safe here. She had everything she needed in this spot, at least for the short term. Where would she go? She sped up, quickly closing the distance to her Civic.

It was not a ticket. It was a note. She carefully unfolded it.

Hello Miss,

I am overnight security for the Science Centre. Your car has been parked in the Science Centre lot for the past two days. Normally, we do not allow overnight parking in our lot, or use of the picnic sites in the evenings. But you seem to need a helping hand, so I have not enforced it. I’ve been in your shoes before, and I know how important small kindnesses can be.

As long as you do not cause trouble or create a mess, your car can remain here for tonight. It is my overnight security shift. But you should move it soon, as the regular security guard returns from vacation, and he is unlikely to turn a blind eye.

I’ve slipped something through your back window. I hope it brings you a little happiness as you find your feet.

Steve

Bethany wiped a tear from her eye, folded up the note, and looked at the back seat. Two chocolate bars lay on top of her suitcase. She smiled and looked towards the Science Centre. She could see no one there but gave a wave in case Steve was watching.

“Only one more night?” she said, worry creeping up within her. She felt safe here and was loath to leave. Would she find another place that would be so accommodating?

The thought consumed her as evening fell and she ate her supper of beans and corn, watching the final light of the day sink beyond the western horizon. She stared up at the stars revealed above, dimmed in the light of the city, and wondered if she would be able to find another place that would equal her day-site. Eventually, she climbed into the passenger seat, wrapped herself in her thin blanket, and let the silence of the night close in.

And in her worries, the library man was forgotten.