2019-08-11 --- I sat quietly in the back of the clean upholstered charter bus, face to face with the man who was supposedly Jesus. He was completely bald, with a rounded head accentuated by his round spectacles, through which he peered back at me with a sense of mirth. I could clearly see the pores on his bulbous, aging nose in the reflection of the studio lights. He must have been hot in that brown franciscan robe, as the sweat mingled with television makeup, giving his already oddly gray olive colored skin an oily sheen. He nodded to someone behind me, giving the signal to begin. "Thank you for meeting with me for this, I know you have a very busy schedule. Not everyone would be willing to do this kind of interview. So, I'll get right down to it. Are you dead?" Jesus laughed and nodded, leaning forward with a bit of a leer, [REDACTED] Which pretty much answered the question in the least committal way possible. I felt a tickle of bile in the back of my mouth from when I must have thrown up a little. Well at least he was honest. On to the next question. "Did you ever feel like you were sort of a let-down? As the second child of God you don't compare well to the first. I mean, here's an entire /World/," I stretched my arms wide for effect, "farther than the eye can see, and it stretches off into the starry sky for infinity, every piece working together in complex harmony, every grain of sand and cell and atom placed with absolute perfection. How can any of your accomplishments even begin to compare with that? I mean, how do you live up to that sort of pressure?" He leaned back with a haughty look, eyebrows raised. [REDACTED] "I wonder what a DNA test would say?" I idly responded, tapping the pencil eraser to my forehead, but as I glanced down at my clipboard, Jesus suddenly stood up and stomped down the aisle, sandals flapping. He stopped halway down the aisle and turned back to face me. As he spun around his hands came out of the sleeves of his robe for the first time. On the left arm was a tiny ruddy baby's hand, jutting out of an ugly series of lumps of scar tissue, like a tree that had been pruned repeatedly. "That I was the son of Joseph and Mary" he practically spat at me, and left the bus. Interview over. It wasn't the worst it could have gone, I supposed. That hand though, that was the first evidence I really had that he was something different, not just another in a long line of imposters. It wasn't the last I would see of him. --- The court room was full of the sound of argument between the identical white male twenty-somethings with their overly large craniums, barely covered by the identical standard lawyer haircut. The one in front swiftly approached the witness stand, in which was cowering a skinny dark skinned man. "I think you will find, as time goes on, that this room becomes more and more Bryan!" one of the identical men shouted. Daniel Gernick. The lawyer reached out with the baby hand grafted onto his left wrist, lumpy section hidden under the extra long buttoned sleeve, grasping the left forearm of the "witness" and pulling it toward him. As the delicate skin made contact, the entire demeanor of both parties suddenly changed, became gentle and calm. The lawyer drew a translucent plastic straight razor from his vest pocket, opened it, and held it in the light for all to see. The witness stared at the razor through his tears, absolutely transfixed. The razor cut through the flesh at the joint with a smoothed practiced sawing motion, cleanly severing the old hand. That is, except for all the blood. --- It was night time in the school, and the naked girl was shivering in one of the classrooms on the second floor. She closed her eyes and breathed in, preparing for her next move. As long as she trusted in God and followed his plan exactly, they couldn't find her. She quickly but quietly climbed the staircase, turned down the hall, and ducked into the first open door she saw. In the darkness was a dog. It was an old dog but now it was young. She shouldn't have been surprised when it spoke. They were old friends after all. The dog said, "If they did this to me, imagine what they must have done to you." --- I was on the phone with Jesus, looking out my car window at his departing mega-jet as it lumbered through the sky out of the city. Twenty one fusion engines hung in flattened honeycomb pods from the end of each of the branching wings of the giant structure. "You did WHAT?" he screeched out of the speakers. The jet pulled up hard suddenly, wings flexing from the shifting loads as it banked into an immelman and headed back toward us.