key word "sculpture" title "on your own" in misc. flash fiction

God sat at Her desk, being interviewed for some documentary: “Humans, not my best work, I’ll admit. Kind of a rush-job. I was having trouble with the husband at the time, most of R&D was tied up in that Creating Whales project I was overseeing. To be honest, we were all doing a lot of cocaine back then. Loads of the stuff. We had three angels just for procuring all the nose candy we were going through in the head office.”

“Biggest mistake I made with you people,” God mused to the documentarian, as She futzed with a fidget spinner, “was giving you all TOO much of a survival drive, for survival as individuals, anyway. Metastasized into a million kinds of jealousy fear greed and cruelty that’ll doom you all, collectively, by and by. Ended up so afraid of not surviving, of needing more, of needing to cheat death and secure legacies that you’ll organize into teams and kill each other over resources. Even when you already have far more than you could ever would need.” God sighed. “This one’s for prime-time ear so I won’t swear but I have to say, Carol, that’s where the trouble started. That’s where I royally effed up. You all want survival so bad you’ll die for a lack of collective effort while trying too hard individually. It’d be funny as hell if it weren’t so disgusting and sad.”

She sighed, rose out of her chair, looked out the window of Her gleaming office building at a statue of Herself the humans had built in the breezeway between the buildings. “I didn’t ask for that sculpture, for example. Had the guy in the sandals write down a whole thing about graven images. I don’t think it’s out of genuine gratitude that you build statues, anyway, you’re just sucking up, hoping I’ll kill your enemies for you, probably, so you can have even more stuff.”

God laughed sadly, “You don’t even just pray for more stuff, Carol, when you want more stuff. You don’t even just ask me to wish you more stuff. You ask me to kill your enemies for you so that they can take their stuff. That’s how twisted some of you are. That’s how much I effed up.”

“Don’t worry, Carol, I’m not saying I’m ending your project entirely,” God said settling back into Her chair, “one out of every six or seven of you mean well and, really, the best punishment for the rest of them is to let you keep killing each other over gold or salt or Bitcoin or whatever you imagine has more value than human life does this week. I’m sorry I screwed up that badly.”

She looked straight into the camera then. “I’m just saying, if you’re wondering why I haven’t directly intervened in your lives in forever, that’s why. Because you waste your resources on guns and sculptures of me instead of just helping each other. That’s why you’re on your own.”