The Administrator by S. Joan Popek Read Free Book Online Page A

timid knock and asked, “Are they gone?”
    “Yes.”
    “You okay, Baby?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ll be out in a minute.”
    “Okay.” He sat down on the floor beside the bathroom door and heard the toilet flush, then the water in the shower began to run.
    While he waited, he tried to remember what his dad had looked like. The face was fuzzy, but he remembered his bright blue eyes and white teeth when he smiled, which he did a lot. When he had told Billy that he was sick and had to go away, Billy had cried, and his father had taken him in his arms and cried with him.
    He remembered his father telling him to be brave and take care of his mother. “You will be all she has for a while,” his father had said.
    “I don’t want you to go,” Billy had cried.
    “I don’t want to either, Son, but only God can decide who lives and who dies, who goes and who stays.” A far away look had come into his father’s eyes. “Only God can decide, Son, no one else.”
    Billy stared at the linoleum peeling away from the wall and whispered, “Only God.” That’s when he knew. “I am God! I thought George dead, and he died. I am God.”
    A giant roach crawled from under the peeling linoleum and began to march up the wall. Billy pictured him dead. The roach slowed its progress up the wall and dropped to the floor on its back. Billy watched its legs vibrate for an instant, then it lay still. Billy smiled.
    Later that night, his mother asleep in the next room, Billy lay on his bed in the dark, staring at the black ceiling. He thought about the other men that had come and gone since his father died. He summoned up their faces from the darkness inside him where he had buried them trying to forget them. The first was Mike. He pictured him floating face down in the river like a carelessly discarded cigarette pack. He saw in black and white images Mike’s maggot-white face half eaten away by the hungry creatures that lived in the gray slime floating on the river’s edge.
    Finally, he fell asleep with a smile on his youthful face, but he did not dream.
    The next morning he was up before his mother. He ran to the corner and bought a morning paper. Stuffing it under his arm, he walked home leisurely, smiling and waving to the few neighbors who were up and out this early. He didn’t look at the paper until he was home and settled at the kitchen table. He spread it out over the table carefully and turned the pages almost reverently as if the gray paper dotted with black ink was a holy book of some kind. He found Mike’s picture on page three. A full face photograph of him alive and grinning sinisterly was next to a reporter’s photograph of his body floating face down in the river as rescue firemen pulled him onto the slimy river bank.
    “I am God. I decide who dies,” he whispered to the picture in the newspaper.
    That week, he thought dead both of the other men that had come and mistreated him and his mother. One was found with his throat slit in an alley. The other died in a fiery, one car crash into an abandoned building.
    The next week, Miss Harkness, his math teacher, reprimanded him in class for not paying attention, and later that afternoon, they found her in the teachers’ lounge cold as stone. A sad-faced associate came into the class and explained that their teacher, Miss Harkness, had died of a heart attack during lunch break.
    That’s when Billy realized that since he was God, he couldn’t go around just thinking people dead because that probably wasn’t very god-like. I’m going to have to be more careful, he thought. He remembered his father telling him that God not only decided who died, but that He loved everyone and even sacrificed himself through his own son on a cross. That doesn’t make sense, Billy thought as he mulled it around in his ten year-old mind. If it was God’s son who died, how could he have sacrificed himself ?
    He was still trying to figure the whole thing out when he got home from school that