The next day I did a lot of considering. The visions began. Maybe I should have waited for my new skill to settle into focus. Maybe I could have deferred my god-man while I learned. I never saw us clearly; I doubt it.

I met him again the next night, as agreed. He had his hands on me at once. Fast authoritative hands up my back, on my ass, down my belly, between my legs. I had to squirm away, twisting quick, while I tried to pull my mouth from his to talk.

I told him no. I tried to say it again but he pulled my lips into his while he cupped both cheeks of my ass and hauled me against his mounded crotch. His kiss burned my mouth and fuzzed my tongue.

I had to knee his manhood/godhead to get free. He was very angry. I like to think there was disappointment too, but he looked like pure spite and vindictiveness.

He told me I could keep his gift of prophecy. Said something about not taking anything back. No: he made an addition to the gift. He promised I’ll always foretell accurately. But he said no one will ever believe what I say. And of course he was right.

At first what mattered most was matter. You have to think of God as pure divine sublime holy energy. Absolutely immaterial. The problem was that energy can’t perceive itself. It has to become matter to be perceived. So energy converted some of itself into matter. That’s the thing about the Real Thing, you know: it can perceive itself. In that, we are created in God’s image. You have an obligation to be as self-aware as you can, as much as you can. You have an obligation to be awake. Worship is not necessary, but awareness is. Which leads to considerations about death, and time, and saying goodbye. There’s a reason only people say goodbye…

I improved enough in foretelling that I would have seen my own rape coming, except that I avoided looking too closely at myself. I liked seeing my shape in the futures of others, but I didn’t want it all played out for me. Anyway, sometimes the self resists the focus. Then I can only see my future by looking peripherally; there is movement at the edges, gray against black, while the center of my sight is white blankness.

It was near the end of our endless war. After the death of my beloved brother for the crime of my bad brother. The water in our cisterns was polluted, the mortar in our walls was scoured by the thick blades of alien swords. Some dozens of the most favored females, frantic with panic and heated with fear, ran loose worshiping or hiding among the goddesses’ statues.

I was separated from the others in the stampede of grass-damp robes. I made it to my favorite shrine; I remember the cool of the marble through the silk across my stomach and against my thighs as I leaned over and upon the table-like sculpture. My eyes sought the kind darkness of the ground after the hot orange of our burning city. I felt the beginning of mist-like rain on the back of my neck. Then his warmth was upon me.

He never said a word. The depravity of his act, there, on that altar, in that grove, was outrageous beyond language, and I didn’t find any way to express it. He covered my back with the weight of his body, pressing me down, peeling my wet robe up and away from my legs, forcing my thighs apart, wedging his hands between marble and me as he thrust himself incurving into me, into me, around and into me all heat and pressed vigor.