The Big Scoop

by Rod Drake

It was the scoop that every reporter dreams of and schemes for; through lots of hard digging, following up on a million random tips, calling in every favor owed me and a few dirty deeds committed here and there, I finally had the interview of a lifetime: a one-on-one with God. Yes, the Almighty, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the King of the Universe, the Eternal Everlasting One, the Tetragrammaton, the Alpha and the Omega, the Big Guy Himself (or maybe Herself). I was to meet the Master of All Things, interestingly enough, in an anonymous dive in a rundown section of Brooklyn (after all, who could understand the Mind of God?). The bar, called the Afterlife, was pretty empty on a Tuesday afternoon, and as I searched out the dingy place, I had a feeling that I had been stood up, when I spied what had to be my interview Subject, but not at all what I had expected God to look like – Odin; one-eyed, ravens-sitting-on-his-shoulders, fully attired in Nordic battle armor, wearing furs, swords and a big red swirling cloak. He bid me a hearty welcome, and seeing my confusion, told me the Truth with a capital T – God, Yahweh, was indeed dead, having died back in 1966 when Time magazine announced it to everyone in their April 8 issue, cover headlined “Is God Dead?”, and since the universe hates a vacuum in its order, Odin was tapped to take over ruling the firmament, et al., in His place. A million questions shot frantically through my brain for a story that would stun the whole world, when Odin, omnipotent and all, winked his good eye at me and remarked, “No one will ever believe you, and I have no idea why things happen as they do in life either; no instruction manual came with the job,” and he laughed so hard and loud, that I couldn’t help but join in.

6S

Rod Drake, author of In the Wall, believes that if wishes were indeed horses, he would have an awful lot of horses to corral. Check out his longer stories in Flashes of Speculation, Fictional Musings, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward and MicroHorror.)