Sunday mornings I go to the pool hall.  My mother calls my cell around noon to talk about how much she enjoyed the service at church.  It breaks her heart that I don’t go.  I tried once to tell her I play billiards to see the universe through God’s eyes but it came out sounding like cheap sarcasm.

The atoms of the universe crowd tightly around a dark, dense center.  All is stillness.  Then, in an instant, all is chaos; matter separates and scatters to the farthest limits of space.  Colored spheres collide with one another, sometimes aligning, sometimes forming patterns that seem too perfect to be the products of random chance.  Indeed.

White is the color of My divine will.

Running the mechanics of the universe is great fun.  I live for it.  But a time comes when all things must end.  One by one, the white strikes each striped or solid mass from the fabric of reality.  Each disappears into the void, unreachable even by My hand, until all that remains is the dark matter; the black hole to which all matter clings in the beginning.

White is the color of everlasting miracles.  White is My avatar.

I call the pocket; I shoot.  Yang strikes yin and the number eight disappears from my view.  I hear it roll away beneath the surface.  Now the table is empty.  I check my right pocket for quarters.  Nothing.  The cue ball and I stare at each other blankly.  Is this God’s fate?  Eternal boredom?  My thigh vibrates.  Ah, yes.  Of course.  God will never be lonely so long as his mother calls him every Sunday.  I reach into my left pocket for the phone… and discover five quarters I’d forgotten I’d received from a faulty vending machine last night.  NO VEND, it had proclaimed.  Splunk, splunk, splunk, splunk, and splunk.

My mother has long since gone to voicemail.  My phone vibrates once, signifying that she has finally finished talking to nobody about church.  I lift from the table a holy shape: the plastic Trinity that has just shaped the form of a new, unborn cosmos waiting before Me.

The game begins again.  It always begins again.

Let there be white.