![]() “You see what your life has prepared you to see,” God said. Except that God was more fully dressed than Michelangelo’s Moses, wearing, from neck to ankles, the kind of long, white robe that she had so often seen in paintings of Christ. “Why,” she dared to ask, “do you look like a twice-live-sized, bearded white man?” In fact, seated as he was on his huge thronelike chair, he looked, she thought, like a living version of Michelangelo’s Moses, a sculpture that she remembered seeing pictured in her college art-history textbook about twenty years before. Beyond comic books and bad movies, who said things like that? If she had been a little less frightened, she might have laughed. He had work for her to do, he said-work that would mean a great deal to her and to the rest of humankind. The comfort of her small, disorderly house was gone, and she was standing before this amazing figure who had convinced her at once that he was God-or someone so powerful that he might as well be God. Amused in spite of her various aches and pains, she got up and went to the kitchen to find something to eat.Īnd then she was here, confused and scared. She was hungry and thirsty, and it was almost five A.M. Finally, she had stopped, turned the computer off, and realized that she felt stiff. For hours, she’d been spilling her new story onto paper in that sweet frenzy of creation that she lived for. The writing had been going well for a change, and she’d been enjoying it. She had, she remembered, been sitting at her computer, wrapping up one more day’s work on her fifth novel. This struck Martha as such a human thing to say that her fear diminished a little-although she was still impossibly confused. “Don’t you know what I see?” she demanded and then quickly softened her voice. “There’s nothing here, no one here but you.” not lying dead in a morgue?”Īfter a moment, Martha was able to take her hands from her face and look again at the grayness around her and at God. “Not at home in bed dreaming? Not locked up in a mental institution? Not. “Where is this?” she asked, not really wanting to know, not wanting to be dead when she was only forty-three. God kept silent but was so palpably, disturbingly present that even in the silence Martha felt rebuked. ![]() “If only I could wake up,” she whispered. In fear and confusion, she covered her broad black face with her hands. Martha Bes looked around at the endless grayness that was, along with God, all that she could see. "It’s difficult, isn’t it?” God said with a weary smile. As a result of the exchange, Martha settles on an original plan to satisfy God's seemingly impossible challenge. God summons Martha Bes to effectively ameliorate the conditions of humanity. In this story, Butler works through her lack of belief in the possibility of a universally appealing utopia with humor and careful consideration. Today we celebrate what would be the 71st birthday of the late Octavia Butler, a pioneer in the world of science fiction, with "The Book of Martha," a short story from Bloodchild.
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