God Whale

To whomever,

Whenever,

I was a good boy.

Every night, before I went to sleep, I’d pray, and it’d go a little something like this: “Dear God, thank you for this day, so please let me see dinosaurs real soon, and if not, I’ll just pray again tomorrow night.  Thank you, God.”

And one day, I prayed with my eyes closed, and when I opened them, I saw a little whale tucked into my covers.  A person-sized humpback whale.  And he rolled over and looked at me (from one eye; the other was on the other side) and said, “Hey kid.  You know, you can see the dinosaurs if you really really want to.”

I thought hard.  I remember my dad once saying something about not going into strangers’ vans for candy, but he never said anything about dried up whales in my bed.  So I said, “Sure, Mister Whale.”  But then it hit me.  “Wait, are you God?”

“Yes,” he said.  “That’s my first name.  You got the last name right too.  God Whale.”  And he smiled the biggest whale smile I’d ever seen a whale smile.

“So how can I see the dinosaurs?” I asked.  “I wanna see the compies.”

“Oh, those little buggers, eh?” He sniffed his nose.  “Listen, if we go faster than the speed of light, to some place far, far away, like Neptune, we can take out our handy dandy telescope…”  And he brandished the handy dandy telescope from his pocket.  “We can take out this handy dandy telescope, and look back on the world, and there’ll be dinosaurs.  And those little compy buggers.  Because light has a speed, and it’s still traveling from them.  We just gotta beat the light.”

“No way!” I said.  “Let’s do it!”

So we did.

It was mighty windy on Neptune, and it was pretty hard to breathe, to the point where I actually couldn’t breathe, so I said, “Mister Whale, can we do the telescope thing later?  I wanna go back.”

“But you can’t go back.”

“But I wanna go back.  I really really do.”

“Then you’ll just have to wait.  We can’t undo what we just did.  Look,” he pointed with his whale flipper to the Earth, “dinosaurs.”

“Wait,” I said.  He waited.  “So, let me get this straight, if we go faster than light, we can see the light that was still reflecting from the Earth bajillions of years ago?”  Mr. God Whale nodded.  “So if we go back there at the speed of light, the light will still be there from the dinosaurs, but everything will still be the same.  So we’ll see dinosaurs, but we’ll actually feel people.  They’ll be like ghost dinosaurs, like projections, and people will be invisible, right, Mr. Whale?”

God Whale trembled and I think his brain melted a little bit because there was some gooey pink stuff seeping out of his ear holes.

“Kid, let’s just wait.  It’s been a long day.”

Author's Note

There's a never-ending debate on the line between fiction and non-fiction.
I'm not implying anything.
I'm just throwing that out there.