Godforsaken: A short story by Michael Fine

By Michael Fine, contributing writer

©2025 by Michael Fine

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

 

Rebel without a cause. Relationship anarchist. Gender revolutionary.  It’s the patriarchy that wages war on humanity, that drops bombs on children, not me.  All those white men in suits who work in offices and live in gated communities, who control us all.  Even though some of those men in suits are now Black women. Some are butch white women.  Hot.

Not me for one second.  I am freedoome.  I contain multitudes.  I am bigger than any mountain.  Smaller than an atom.  Faster than a speeding bullet.  Able to leap over tall buildings with a single bound. I am pure spirit.  A spark of mischievous energy and thus eternal delight. I cannot be contained.

 

They have their laws but their laws don’t apply to people like me.  They sit in their houses for Sunday dinner.  Or prowl the earth in private jets and crazy big yachts.  And control us with their drones. They do what they want to do, with whomever they want to do it.  What about the rest of us humanity?  What about me?  Justice Justice shall ye pursue.  How is it possible that I’m not getting mine?  I’ve tried it every which way.  Want it every which way.  All the time, just like everyone else.  Don’t give me any shit about how I look.   I am what I am.  Who I am.  I roam the earth and the skies in my imagination.  Can’t let anything or anybody get in my way.

 

 

 

Nothing about global warming appeared to be true.  It had been the coolest summer in memory.  Cool and bright, even in August.  No hurricanes that even came close to the coast.  No droughts.  It rained about once a week, a hard steady rain, enough to keep the grass green and the flowers in bloom.  No wildfires, for once, not even in California.  The bees stayed busy in the gardens, and the tomatoes and apples ripened.  The air stayed fresh and clean and was sweet, freshened by sea breezes and the pollens and nectars of the various flowers and plants that came into bloom: Mexican sunflowers, deep blue morning glories, golden rod, Black-eyed Susans, purple buddleia, and Queen Anne’s lace.  The mornings were cool and the afternoons languorous, although the hours of daylight had been shrinking, the sun not rising until six am and setting about seven at night, the long shadows of late afternoon now longer, as the magical light of the setting sun made the houses glow as if from inside: red, yellow and green, the houses of brick glowing a dusky red and shimmering tan as if on fire with light.

The school buses were back on the roads.  The school zone signs on those roads were illuminated, slowing the cars to 15 or 20 mph near those schools, and the school yards themselves were filled with children again, playing outside or sitting on the grass as their teachers welcomed them, letting those children play a bit as they were slowly drawn inside, giving those kids the time and space to contract their souls again and focus, gently pruning them from summer, when their eyes and imaginations had filled with hope, excitement and the sensuality, reeling them back from a world convulsing with plant, animal, insect and bird life, with dreaming and imagination. Now those children were being pulled back in, like a rope being wound onto the spool of a windlass or a winch, so their souls could be trimmed and their energy devoted to a singular focus.

 

 

The person of interest drove an older Subaru Impreza wagon, a non-descript light green car, the sort with the engine that too often burns out at a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand miles.  The car was in good shape for its age and looked as if it had been garaged and well cared for.  It had teacher or state employee written all over it.  Like the driver was the child of people of some substance but limited means –decent, intelligent people but not stinking rich — people who went to work every day and didn’t take their lives for granted.

The person of interest drove first to two churches and then to a synagogue.  Staked each one out for a couple of days.  Went home and looked up maps and floor plans on the internet.  Walked in and out of each.   We are still an open culture, despite our fear of one another, and the doors we think are locked.  Then went to the local library.  And then to three schools.

It was still summer when the person of interest cased these places, so the doors were locked in fact.  No one worries about security at schools in the summer, because no one is there.  The person of interest walked around each one.  Sat on a playground bench at one.  Swung on a swing and even hung from the monkey-bars at another.  On the cushioned grey-green play surface, which is what schools use now, hoping that no kid will fall and get hurt, hoping that the school and the town won’t get sued.  The person of interest played in the grass and looked at the sky for an hour at the third school.  Maybe they fell asleep.

We saw all that on the surveillance footage, later. What were they thinking?  We’ll never know.  I’m not sure that the motivation of crazy people matters.  Sometimes they hear voices.  Sometimes they hallucinate. Sometimes they’re just mad at the world and want to go out in a blaze of glory.  Not that glory has any meaning if you are dead.

The world is topsy-turvy.  Nobody has to work anymore, not really, not plowing fields or cutting hay or digging ditches, not doing laundry on the rocks of a river or carrying water, not carrying seventy-five pound bundles of roofing shingles on their shoulders up a twenty-five foot ladder or standing in front of a loom or sitting in front of a sewing machine for eleven hours a day, not the kind of filthy backbreaking sweaty work my grandparents did.  Farmers sit in air-conditioned tractors.  Roofers use sky lifts to hoist shingles.   Ditches are dug by backhoes.  We have washing machines and dishwashers and air conditioners, and no one remembers what life was like without them.

Now actions have no consequences. There are no rules and there is no enforcement. Words don’t count.  The truth is just the party line of the moment. Remember alternative truths?  Fake media?  Spin?

So tell me how these kids have any way to know right from wrong.  Tell me if they even know their names or who they are.   Who they are today.  Which might be totally different from who they were yesterday.

Nobody thinks.  So who cares what they were thinking?  Because hallucinations aren’t thinking.  Even collective ones.

We have lost our way.

 

 

Those poor kids, those poor children.  Innocent lambs being fattened for slaughter. Innocence itself.  They don’t know what is coming at them.  The pain.  The degradation.  The suffering the world forces them to endure. How we make them suffer.  How we make them choose. Their pain matters.  My pain matters.  You can’t be one thing, one person.  One heart.  One soul.  One emotion. One life.

There was once a God who made order in the world, who made life.  First there was darkness.  And God made the word, and then in the world separated the light and the darkness, the day and the night.  He made the firmament and the oceans.  He, because God was a man, because men made the world, not women.  Men made the violence and the pain, and women were good, were kind, were love and pleasure, while men were iron and stone.  God gave us the laws to live by, and men and women knew who and what they were.  If you did not live by God’s laws, you died. God struck you down or a pit opened in the earth and swallowed you or sent a plague, which killed 22,000.

Now we have AI which will make all decisions for us so that nothing we do, absolutely nothing matters.  Unless we protect the children by unplugging them.  So they won’t suffer as I suffered.

Politicians prey on us.  Jews and Capitalists swallow our money.  The Black hordes consume the cities and run wild in the streets. But there are no prophets to lead us out of this wilderness. Not now.  Not yet. Not ever.  Fuck America.  America isn’t real.  There is no one left to make US great again. Not really.  Everyone is on the take, regardless of what they say, of who they blame. Everyone. No one is even a little good.  Not one of us.  Humanity sucks.  People suck.  Life sucks.  I suck.  I can’t dig myself out of this hole.

I can’t be one thing, one person.  One heart.  One soul.  One emotion. One life.

I am multitudes.  We exist to make everyone suffer.  Nothing you will ever do is good enough.

I am God, who loves little children and wraps them in his embrace.  Her embrace.  Our embrace.  To protect them.  God’s grace.  To hold them.  To nurture them.  To end all suffering.  Our suffering.  My suffering. To die and stop this pain.  This hallucination.  These voices which are your voice, telling me what I can’t be, who I am no good at being, that I am never enough.  That there is no I, only multitudes.  And the multitudes aren’t enough to let anyone be loved, honored and obeyed.

Let them see me now, as I am.  Let them see me.  Let me be me.  A me. Any me.  For a moment before death.  Then I will have lived.  Even as I die.

 

 

You never hear about the ones we stop.  About the person who sees something and says something.  About the internet surveillance that picks up a post in a chat room.  About the psychiatrist or social worker who goes to the house of a person they haven’t heard from, to give them a shot and get them back on their long-acting medicine.  About the mother or father or sister or brother or cousin or friend who hear them, sliding off into the abyss and calls one of us. There is more of this than you think, hiding out there in plain sight.  So many of them, delusional, suffering with their hallucinations, each in their own way. Each in their own world.

Some people think people in politics are delusional like this.  Those people in politics make stuff up, and we believe it, we fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.  They float one hallucination after the next to see which one people fall for. Then they pounce. They prey on us the way a praying mantis preys on the five- and seventeen-year locusts when those locusts come out of hibernation, all at once.

We are a hurting people.  We have lost our way.

We abandoned everyone who God abandoned, when we abandoned God.

 

 

 

The person of interest drove that light green Subaru back to the elementary school they had gone to, the place where they met the world we have and were wrenched out of their innocence, and parked the Subaru in the circle in front of the main door, near where the principal’s office is, where the buses let off the kids each morning and where the mothers who are too disorganized or too haughty to get their kids on the bus let their kids out of their cars, out of cars that were either fancier or more broken down than the green Subaru.

The kids walked in groups to the school.  Kids don’t line up and walk single file anymore.  Or even walk two by two. They go helter-skelter, in a bunch or a pack, which means there is always a scrawny kid or a fat kid or a gawky tall kid or a kid with blue or pink hair who gets pushed to the outside of the group.  That kid walks behind or to the side and sometimes strays off until the teacher stops the pack and tells the strayed off kid to catch up.

The group has to wait until the funny, odd kid comes to join the rest, which gives the group the time and focus to go back to harassing the strayed-off kid because that is what we do now more than ever — we pick on and belittle anyone who is different or appears weaker, because we have become a society of teams and of conformity, of going along to get along and having anxiety about fitting in, a society of bullies.

Human beings have always had some of that in us, and perhaps a lot.  We talk individualism but practice groupthink. People suffer because they are different, which all of us are, at some point and to some extent, some more than others.  We suffer.  Mostly in silence.  Mostly.  Except when we touch the grass.  When we breathe the air.  Or touch one another.

Mental suffering has always been with us but is more intense in the internet and social media age, when we have lost contact with the real natural world of things, and exist mostly in the virtual world of the cloud, where there is nothing to set us right.

 

 

That day a pudgy light-brown girl with blue hair that was pulled back behind her head wandered off from her group of fourth graders.

 

 

The person of interest walked out on the grass to the playground, near where the pudgy fourth grader was standing.

The person of interest sat on a swing.

A teacher’s aide saw the little girl with blue hair drift away, saw the person of interest walk toward her, and called out to the little girl.  I heard her call out and I walked over from where I stand in the morning, under the portico that sits over the entrance to the school. The teacher saw the teacher’s aide walk off and stopped the group, which surged and twisted around, the kids jostling one another and changing places, so the group looked like a swarm of bees, buzzing and in constant motion.  They started calling one another names and called out to the little girl with the blue hair, who shrank back when she heard her name.

But the little girl came when she was called and rejoined the group, which started moving toward the school again.  The class went through a side door after the teacher used her code to enter through that locked, secure door.  I followed and checked that the door had latched and was secure.  Then I returned to my post.

 

 

God gives us rules to live by.  When we follow those rules, we become one people, one nation that can do great things.  When we each go our own way, things fall apart.  An eye for an eye.  A tooth for a tooth.  All sorts of people say they know God’s rules, but all those people pick and choose the rules that are good for them and let the rest of us wither or burn.  Who knows God’s rules for me?  Only I know.

We torture the children.  We puff them up.  Then we tear them down.  Rules no rules.  Free to be you and me but everybody keeps trying to change me, to tell me who to be and how to be.

Other people come and try to put square pegs into round holes.  They tried to put me in a box.  Those other people told me to choose. That I can be anything I want, anybody I want, that everything I do is good. Until it isn’t.  Which is always.  They are on my phone.  On the net.  In my ears.  In my head.  In my bed.  Voices come from the toaster.  From the microwave.  From the radio which I know I turned off.

At breakfast, which I eat alone.  At dinner, which I eat in my room, in front of the computer.

We are torturing the children.  Like me.  The only way to live is to go out in a blaze of glory.  Which I can and must create on my own.  The brave.  The valiant.  The invincible.  The hero fights the dragon alone.  With bare hands.  With a light saber.  With a World War Two bazooka. Using a jet pack.  Flying in on rocket-propelled grenades.  Yippee Aye Ai!  Yippee Aye Oh.  Git along little doggie.  It’s your misfortune and none of my own.

The children see all this.  Children see this.  Children.  We twist the children like rags that are being rung out, tearing them apart, tearing limbs and heads off their bodies, feeding them to Moloch again and again.  While the rest of us look away.  All children live in fear, in terror, in endless lancinating pain, just like me.

Feel my pain yet?  All the others are just bored, waking at five AM to go to the gym and then sitting in meetings or on Zooms all day long, in ticky-tacky houses that all look the same.  They all go to Starbucks.  To the drive-up window.  For a Venti Matcha Creme Frappuccino. So they know and we know they have arrived.

 

Suddenly those children became big.  Someone blew air into tiny clear plastic nipples which were inserted where their belly buttons used to be, blew them up like beach balls or pool floats and made them ten feet tall.  Gave them swords and light sabers and RPGs of their own.  RPGs that fired nuclear powered bullets, radioactive bullets that glowed green in the dark skies, that would destroy us and everything that lived, us and our cities and all the birds and squirrels and rats, the raccoons and the deer and the turkey and the bear.  The children are transformers and morphed into giant evil superheroes who have come to destroy the earth, to destroy us and everybody we love.  Only one true human was left.  One person, fighting for truth, justice and humanity.

Me.

I went to my car.

 

 

The person of interest went back to their car.  They opened the back door.  They put on two ammunition belts.  Hung one over each shoulder, so they looked like Poncho Villa.  Or Rambo.  They opened a case and shouldered what looked like one of those RPGs you see on TV.  Then they put it back in the Subaru, as though they changed their mind.

Then they took out a weapon.  AR 15 again.

They closed the back of the Subaru.

Then they walked toward the school, toward the door I just checked.

 

 

I followed the rules.  Run. Hide.  Fight.

I ducked behind a half wall near the front door so the shooter couldn’t see me.

Then I used my radio to call dispatch for 911.  I called the school hotline, got the principal and initiated a lockdown.

Sirens went off.

 

The shooter ran to the school, toward that door the kids had just come through, the one I had checked so I knew it was locked.

Wait for backup? I thought.  Or fight?

I was badly outgunned.

If I confront them, will that make them return to their car and get that RPG?

What happens then?

 

They will shoot their way through that door, I thought.

Either way, kids and teachers are going to die.

 

The protocol is clear: first on scene is the incident commander until a superior officer comes on scene and assumes control.

 

I un-holstered my weapon.

I have never fired my weapon in the line of duty.

But now there was no one standing in the way of the shooter except me.

They were about seventy-five yards off.  A very tough shot with a handgun.

I rose slowly over the wall, showing myself but keeping low, rested my hands on the brick half wall, aimed and fired.   Fired three times.  And missed.

The shooter turned toward me.

Then they ducked behind the entryway wall, where I couldn’t see them.

 

 

I’ll wait until backup arrives now, I thought.

 

Then I remembered the guys who waited in Uvalde.  And about all those kids who died while they were waiting.

 

I reloaded.

 

Seventy-five yards between me and the shooter, with no cover in between.

 

I’m sixty-seven years old and not that fast.  Never thought I’d see action, working as a school safety officer.  Retired from Electric Boat.  Gives me something to do.  Keeps me out of the house, so I don’t drive the wife crazy.

I didn’t ask for this.

 

I ran about thirty-five yards, zigzagging at an angle, weapon pointed, hands together.  Expecting to die before ever hearing the shots.  AR 15 or similar.  I didn’t stand a chance.

 

 

 

 

Rules.  I need rules.  I need someone to tell me how to act and who to be.  Be all you can be, the scary clown on TikTok, on my phone, keeps saying.  Have sex with dogs.  Everyone is equal.  Fascism is everywhere, my Apple watch says. The woke people are taking over, the crazy electronic billboards on the highway say.  They are coming to replace you.  They are coming to eat you for lunch.  Horrible transformers to swallow you, chew you into little bloody bits and spit you out all over the nice shiny Teslas which are programmed to do whatever Elan Musk wants. Drones and jet fighters are coming to bomb and burn all the buildings, like they did and are doing in Gaza and Ukraine, to reduce all the strip malls and the Dunkins to rubble.  Child sex traffickers stalk the pizza shops.  Epstein and Weinstein and Mamdani and Trump and Charlie Kirk, all wrapped up together in a fivesome, doing unimaginable things to themselves and each other.

 

The nice cop was standing in front of me, pointing a gun.

Why at me?

I just came to play.

 

 

 

The person of interest was cowering in a corner.  Their weapon was pointed down.  They were wearing a backwards baseball cap, jeans and a tee shirt.  No body armor.  No tactical helmet.

“Drop the weapon,” I said.  “Then I want you spreadeagled on the ground.  Move slow.  I want to see your hands.”

 

The first squad cars screamed into the full parking lot.  They’d head inside first.  They might not see me.  SWAT teams and helicopters soon.  But it will take them minutes before they scope out the problem and approach.

The person of interest looked up at me and smiled, the sweet smile of a child who was about to ask for ice cream.

Then he raised his weapon.

“Bang,” he said.  “Got you first.”

 

I got a shot got off before he did.

But he still had time to pull the trigger twice.

 

I hit him in the neck.  Blood spurted everywhere, gushing as he fell.

 

He hit me twice.

Two Airsoft waterfilled pellets.  One on my chest.  One on my leg.  They left a little wet splotch where they hit.

 

The AR15 was a plastic water gun.  A toy.

 

Guns and toy guns everywhere.  Video games that are like hallucinations, like our worst nightmares.  Sex and greed and lying are now okay.  With half of all this happening in God’s name.

It is now impossible to tell truth from fiction.

 

I still wonder what came first.

Did we forsake God?  Or has God forsaken us?

 

August, 2025

Many thanks to Carol Levitt for proofreading, and to Lauren Hall for all-around help and support.

Please click here to receive Michael Fine’s monthly short stories and his new series, What’s Crazy in Health Care.  Please invite others to join by sending them the link here.

Or join us on Substack:  https://michaelfinemd.substack.com/

Information about Michael’s books, stories, posts, talks and performances is available at www.MichaelFineMD.com or by clicking the link here.   Join us!

___

 All of Michael Fine’s stories and books are available on MichaelFineMD.com or by clicking here