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"It's difficult, isn't it?" God said with a weary smile. "You're truly free for the first time. What could be more difficult than that?"
Martha Bes looked around at the endless grayness that was, along with God, all that she could see. In fear and confusion, she covered her broad black face with her hands. "If only I could wake up," she whispered.
God kept silent but was so palpably, disturbingly present that even in the silence Martha felt rebuked. "Where is this?" she asked, not really wanting to know, not wanting to be dead when she was only forty-three. "Where am I?"
"Here with me," God said.
"Really here?" she asked. "Not at home in bed dreaming? Not locked up in a mental institution? Not... not lying dead in a morgue?"
"Here," God said softly. "With me."
After a moment, Martha was able to take her hands from her face and look again at the grayness around her and at God. "This can't be heaven," she said. "There's nothing here, no one here but you."
"Is that all you see?" God asked.
This confused her even more. "Don't you know what I see?" she demanded and then quickly softened her voice. "Don't you know everything?"
God smiled. "No, I outgrew that trick long ago. You can't imagine how boring it was."
This struck Martha as such a human thing to say that her fear diminished a little-although she was still impossibly confused. She had, she remembered, been sitting at her computer, wrapping up one more day's work on her fifth novel. The writing had been going well for a change, and she'd been enjoying it. For hours, she'd been spilling her new story onto paper in that sweet frenzy of creation that she lived for. Finally, she had stopped, turned the computer off, and realized that she felt stiff. Her back hurt. She was hungry and thirsty, and it was almost five A.M. She had worked through the night. Amused in spite of her various aches and pains, she got up and went to the kitchen to find something to eat.
And then she was here, confused and scared. The comfort of her small, disorderly house was gone, and she was standing before this...