Almighty

Young Petie raises a grimy, clenched fist to his eyes. He rubs the dirt and soot from them, but it doesn't do much to help his vision; chunks of rock linger and cause his eyes to water. He blinks the tears away and charges forward, just as a mortar shell explodes near his right leg, sending a fresh torrent of debris into his beardless face.

His wooden rifle is slick in his sweaty, shaking hands. To him, in these German trenches, it feels even heavier than usual. This is neither the time nor the place for a sixteen-year-old boy. He knows this, acknowledges it, but still he feels obligated to be here. As if God wants him to be here in the middle of all hell broken loose.

Petie pushes onward, through the whizzing bullets and sprays of blood and bone.

Even as his friends and fellow warriors are being slaughtered like pigs before him, Petie cannot bring himself to kill another man. He knows it's why he's here; to kill Krauts is what he enlisted for, what he was trained for. What it sometimes seems like he was born for. But Petie refuses to follow the common ritual. Doing so will damn his soul to hell.

Tortured screams of the dying claw at his ears as he sprints through the trenches, ducking bullets and stumbling over the mutilated corpses of his comrades.

And he stops. For he has seen, bringing a creeping numbness throughout his limbs, his twin brother's body splayed across the mud. His brother's flesh has been shredded by machine gun fire, his insides sprayed across his youthful face. Still-warm blood pools around him, the same blood the courses through Petie's own veins.

It is this moment of despair that a stray mortar detonates where Petie is standing. He is instantly vaporized, his blood now mixing with his twin's. As his body disappears, his soul now escapes from its previous restraint.

Petie's spirit rises up, far above the carnage and brutality below. He keeps ascending, rising towards heaven.

When his feet at last reach the holy ground before the Gates of Heaven, Petie raises his eyes, taking in the massive golden portal looming over him. For the first time in months, as he stares at this holy symbol, he almost feels hope.

The gates groan. They open slowly, as if they haven't opened in years. Petie's feet carry him forward, through the Gates of Heaven.

He moves weightlessly, almost glides, across the sacred ground. Within moments, Petie is brought before a throne. He realizes he is in the shadow of the Almighty, before the feet of God.

Petie expects warmth and love to fill his previously empty heart. He wants to speak to God, to hear the loving voice that his Sunday school teacher had told stories of with such emotion.

He feels as dead as ever. God's face shows nothing but contempt. Contempt and... is it disgust?

This is not the God his mother had told him about, Petie soon realizes. This is not the Almighty Creator he had been told to worship in church. This God is different.

This God is cold.