The Pymander General came down from Heaven to tell us that God had seen all of our sins and was totally cool with them.

“Really?” asked the filthy adulterer.

“Oh yeah, for sure,” The Wondrous Pymander replied.

“I don’t know,” said a man who kept show-horses. “That doesn’t seem right.”

The Pymander screamed with the volume of a hundred angels. “Who are you to question God!?”

The horse-man began to cry. We trembled in fear, rubbing at our ears, which were now bleeding from being ripped apart by The Pymander’s sonic fury.

The Pymander looked down at all of us and our bleeding ears and sighed. He pulled his glorious asbestos-laden shearling tight around his shoulders and tried again. “Look, guys, I’m really not here to yell at you. This is good news. God just wants us all to be happy, how great is that?”

“Then what was up with last month’s famine?” asked a woman picking scabs from her ear canal.

“Well, he also wants to build character. You know, like Job.”

“Ah, yes.” “Of course.” “That guy!” “Uhuh, like with Job, whoever that is.”

A man in a tracksuit cleared his throat. “Mr. Pymander Supreme, is that why only six friends posted on my wall for my birthday? So God could build my character?”

“Um…I was meaning more with, droughts and plagues and things like that, but I guess–”

“Piemaker, I would like to make a confession,” a woman in the sun announced.

“That’s really not necessary–”

“I saw it was Paul’s birthday but I didn’t post, ‘cause I felt weird that only a few people had done it.” Somewhere in the crowd, Paul gasped. The woman offered up her wrists. “Okay, take me away, boys.”

The Pymander tried to hold it together. He could feel his anger roiling in him like the eternal flesh-melting flame of Hell. “No, there is no need for that! God does not care about birthday posts or things of that nature! He loves all His people and wants them to be joyful and glad!”

A man broke out into a wide smile. “Does this mean my clinical depression is cured?”

“Uh, I don’t know about that…”

Another exclaimed, “Sayonara, juvenile diabetes!”

Things were not going as The Pymander had hoped they would. “I can’t make any promises about curing any illnesses!”

Some of us began to boo and jeer.

The Pymander curled his fists so hard his fingernails pierced his palms. His golden blood dripped down onto the ground. “Don’t you understand how incredible this is? Just as the World is for Man, now so too is God! You don’t have to feel bad anymore, whatever you’ve done!”

“Even if we stole?” we said.

“Even if you stole!”

“Even if we murdered?”

“Yes!”

“Pillaged?”

“Uhuh.”

“Cyberbullied?”

“Yes, yes, yes! It’s all okay! God says everything is okay!”

We all looked at each other in silence for a few moments. And then we began to laugh.

A young man slung his arm around The Pymander’s broad, muscular shoulders. “You had us for a second there, O Spectacular One!”

“Good one, thou of infinite greatness!”

The Pymander looked at all of us, his iridescent, all-seeing eyes narrowed. He threw up his hands, revealing technicolor wings that had traversed the deep reaches of the cosmos.

“Forget this!” he bellowed. “Sure, fine, why not! You caught me! Haha, just kidding! Go relish in your perpetual suffering, you feebleminded specks of dust! I wash my hands of this!”

The Pymander then burst into a curling pillar of smoke and fire and was gone.

We laughed and laughed at the strange coming and going of The Pymander, until night fell and the smoke from his exit drifted far off, into the distance.

Corinne is in the Columbia College Class of 2020. At Columbia, she majored in Creative Writing and was on the pre-med track. In her free time Corinne likes to keep fish, write, and work on the 126.5th Annual Varsity Show (the first ever virtual Varsity Show, premiering this coming winter). She is currently living and working in NYC.