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

afternoon. He unlocked the door quietly and tiptoed into the living room. His mother was passed out on the couch again. She huddled in a fetal position wrapped in a dirty, green robe. Her unwashed, un-combed hair was a tangled mass around her face, and dark, puffy circles lay underneath her red-rimmed eyes as she opened them and tried to focus on Billy. She groaned, made a half-hearted attempt to reach for the vodka bottle on the floor beside her, groaned again and fell back onto the dirty pillow. She had been this way ever since the George incident.
    Billy didn’t understand her. She should have been happy to get rid of the jerk.
    He got a soda out of the refrigerator, turned on the TV and lay down on the floor. Thinking of the contradictions of being God gave him a headache, and he wanted to stop thinking for a while. He slid a game in the slot and reached for the joystick. When he reached level six in the game, he realized what he had missed. Being God is like a game. You have to go through all the levels before you know what’s really going on. He laughed aloud and decided what he should do to reach level two.
    The next morning he didn’t go to school. He waited for his mother to wake up. He made her coffee and toast so she would be good and awake when he talked to her.
    She stumbled into the kitchen about ten o’clock. “What are you doing here?” She asked. “Is it Saturday already?”
    “No, Mama. It’s not. I just wanted to talk to you. To tell you something.”
    “Oh, Honey, how sweet. You made coffee.” She poured a cup and sat down. “What do you want to tell me? Are you in trouble? Something happen at school?”
    “Yeah, Mama, something happened, and I need to tell you something else that’s very important. Miss Harkness died yesterday.”
    “Oh no! First George, then Mike and Charles. Now her. Dear God, who’s next?”
    “Whoever hurts us, Mama,” Billy answered.
    “What? What did you say, Honey?”
    “I did it, Mama.”
    “Did what, Billy?”
    “Killed them, all of them. I wished them dead, and they died.”
    Her face crumpled into tears. “Oh no, Darling. You didn’t do it. It’s not your fault.” She rushed around the table and hugged him to her bosom. She kissed the top of his head and whispered, “What happened to George was horrible. That you had to witness such a thing makes me sick. It must have affected you more than I thought. But you mustn’t blame yourself, Sweetheart.” She looked up at the ceiling as though beseeching it to help her. “Oh I have been so stupid and selfish. Neglecting you and drinking so much, wallowing in my own self pity.” She hugged him tighter and laid her cheek on his hair. “I’m so sorry, Billy.”
    He raised his head and looked at her. “No, Mama. It was me. I did it because I am G....”
    She shushed him with her delicate hand gently covering his mouth. “Shh, Dear. Don’t blame yourself. Oh, God, I wish your father was alive. He’d know what to do, what to say.”
    “Do you, Mama? Do you really?”
    “Oh yes. More than anything, but that’s not possible. He’s gone forever. We just have to do the best we can without him.”
    The snakes were back in Billy’s stomach, writhing and squirming. His throat was dry. His heart pounded. Being God is hard, he thought.
    He glanced around the room seeking something—an answer—anything. His gaze stopped on the old, yellowed, gold framed picture his mother had hung on the kitchen wall the day they moved in. It was his father’s before he died and was the only thing they could keep when they lost the house. After the funeral, there wasn’t enough money to pay all the bills, so he and his mother had moved to the tenements. Suddenly the snakes in his stomach stopped squirming, and he knew what he must do.
    “Take care of your mother,” his father had said right before he died. Then he had said something about God loving the world and about God’s only begotten son dying so others could