Six Feet Under God

an Easter story

I wrote this story ten years ago, and it remains a personal favorite (sometimes I feel like I say that about all my stories). I had trouble finding a home for it, until John Kenyon of Grift Magazine accepted it with, “I’ve never read anything like this before.” I am thankful that he liked it, and I hope you will, too. I miss his snappy little journal.

Cover detail of Towing Jehovah by James Morrow, an enormous inspiration.

Six Feet Under God

by Thomas Pluck

​One morning I awoke from uneasy dreams to realize I was the same sorry son of a bitch I was when I passed out drunk the night before, except with a massive existential hangover. It felt like I woke up inside a gong. I cracked my eyes to my dingy office, I rolled off the sofa and staggered to the window. The hammering wasn’t all penance for the night before. The cheer of a parade assaulted me from down in the street.

The sun hit my face like the devil’s flashlight. I squinted down to see broads in bonnets arm in arm with their doughy husbands in suits, their brats holding hypnotic lollipops the size of their noggins and watching buttoned-up band boys march behind a goof in a bunny suit.

It was Easter Sunday.

I don’t know what the hell they were celebrating. God was dead, and nobody would do anything about it.
​I splashed some water on my face, felt my sandpaper stubble, gave my rumpled suit a sniff. Maybe it was time to stop bellyaching, and do something about it myself. After all, I was a private dick. 

I scratched my sturdy chin. If I figured who’d iced the Almighty Father, it would be a boon to the whole disrespected profession. Finding out who punched the Big Man’s ticket wouldn’t be easy, but if I was a quitter, I’d have done the Dutch years ago. So I took a slug of bottom-shelf rotgut for breakfast, put the cork back in my lunch, and scrawled a note for Maggie. She answers the phone for me. Shouldn’t be in ‘til Monday, but I knew she’d check in.

God is dead. We all know it. No one’s doing anything about it. Except me. —Kelsey

I dug my iron out from between the couch cushions and threw the TV remote over my shoulder with a fistful of change. It was a Colt 1911 that Gramps used in The War. Whoever took out the Prime Mover was no piker, and this I could trust. I mashed my hat on my cinder block of a melon and headed to suspect number one, the one who’d announced it when Jehovah took the lead pill.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

* * *

​I parked my DeSoto outside his crib in Liepzig, and banged on the door.

​“Open up, you philosophical freak.”

​A mustache opened the door, attached to a little egghead with his hair slicked back like a jazz-loving hop-head.

​“Guten morgnen, vas ist das?”