The day after the shit hit the fan I was sitting at my desk. I had been crying and screaming for a while, blood everywhere, but it doesn't really matter anymore. Not much matters anymore.

She looked at me and said, "It would be blasphemous for me to procreate."

That was her statement, along with others, like: noon is a cheap hooker and you must have spiked the gene pool, that one was her favorite. She said that one a lot to me, and she always added, only with me: and it was with cheap whiskey and soured grapes. She made me feel so good.

Her name was Mary and mine, Joseph. We were biblical but she was no virgin. She was no fucking saint. When she got pregnant and my fertility tests kept coming up negative, she said that it must be God. She said that her orgasms had been heavenly, and it hadn't been me doing it. It had been something else, something beyond both of us. Really, I think it was the neighbor or the mailman. If she had a job, I'd say it was her boss, but she didn't so I was never worried about a boss.

I told her that she needed to have an abortion, that I wasn't going to raise someone else's child, not even God's. Can you imagine how different the world would be if the original Joseph had taken Mary to the black-market-bazaar-abortionist? No Jesus, no murders of homosexuals, no KKK, no televangelists, and no fucking Jesse Jackson. Can you imagine? Talk about Paradise.

Talk about a Utopia.

In our case, we made the appointment and we went. They inserted the Fetus Vacuum 2000 and that was it. Next thing you know we were home popping her pain killers like skittles, both of us lost in the haze of sore shoulders and strained urethras. It was nice, it was clean. We felt whole again, and it didn't take a little baby Jesus to do it. It took a mutual understanding of hatred and love. Of familiarity and knowledge, of all those things that we think we have.

Then came the dream, the visit from the angel.

Don't worry it's not like you'd expect. When I think angel visitation, I think bright lights and expansive wings. I think inner peace and butterflies. Unfortunately it was not like that. As a matter of fact, if he hadn't shown up out of nowhere I would have thought he was a regular dude, walking about town doing regular things. If he had shown up in a cloud of smoke I would have thought he was a ninja, but nothing that spectacular, just a regular guy with irregular things to say in a somewhat regular voice. Mary was asleep, passed out; too many drugs and stress had invaded her body in such a short time span. Nothing quite felt right. I was uneasy, tense, and the atmosphere was thick with — something. I'm not sure. It wasn't good. Nothing was.

He said that there was definitely a Hell and I was going there. He said that it was worse than Dante's worst nightmare. I don't know about you, but I read that book and it was fucked up. He said that I had destroyed God's only 'other' child, (his words not mine) and when I tried to explain to him that it was the abortion clinic, not me who had done the work, a little flame exploded in his eyes and I felt something in my body like my kidney exploding. I was screaming and he walked over to me, leaned his face over my head, and whispered with smoky breath: you should have trusted her.

I woke up a few hours later from a deep and dreamless slumber. My body still hurt on my left side, I was screaming, kicking, crying, and bundling my body into the fetal position. Mary was groggily trying to comfort me, leaning over me, gently rubbing my back, only nothing helped.

I felt something inside of me, something writhing and jumping on all of the organs in my stomach.

I got up and went to my desk.

I told her what the angel said, I told her that it really was the son of God; I told her we could have been prolific.

She got up and walked to the kitchen, she came out a few seconds later with a knife, a sharp serrated blade that gleamed from the early morning light coming through the window.

She looked at me and said, "We could have made him a child star. He could have been on American Idol."

I was still screaming, still groaning.

She handed me the knife.

"Cut it out." That's what she said.

Just ask the Egyptians, they'll tell you, God's wrath is a motherfucker.