Jewish Horror Story - Rough Draft - A Little More

It's Shabbos, and the Lord our God, King of the Universe, is on his day off, and He of so many names: the Kaddosh Baruch Hoo, Adoshem, Elokim, Adoshem Elokim, Kel, Kel-Kelyon, and Kel-Shaddai; He who is Infinite, was waiting for an opponent to challenge him to a game of Mah-Jong at Game Night in Club Tohu vaVohu, a rock and dance club where he'd gone every Friday night for 1500 years. At the next table over was King David, Lou Reed, and Golda Meir playing Exploding Kittens. On the other side of G-d was Elijah, Matthias Macabee, Franz Kafka, Herod the Great, Menachem Begin, Anne Franck, Benjamin Disraeli, Hannah Arendt, and Leon Trotsky playing Secret Hitler. 

Just for the Holy One, Blessed Be He, the club converted on Friday nights to game night. It used to be a trivia night, but eventually the bartender, Jerry Thomas, summoned the effrontery to tell the Eyn Od and Eyn Sof that people were tired of playing trivia with an omniscient. For three hundred years, a special table in the corner would be reserved with the same placecard on blue contact paper, and magic marker scrawling out the letters 'Yud-Key-Vav-Key'. When Ribbono Shel Olam arrived, Jerry would have a Wissotzky tea waiting for him, just the way Hashem liked it - with a twist of Slivovitz and heated to exactly 194 degrees. The brave among the club's regulars would converse the ultimate questions while playing the Tetragramaton in games like Go and Minecraft which cannot be won, or at very least, play him in partially solved games like Chess, Reversi, and International Droughts, at which G-d could wow knowledgable watchers by displaying a small corner of the games' infinite permutations.

And yet Shekhina was tired and just wanted to play a simple game of Mah-Jong, that Chinese game which, like so much Chinese food, had attained or been appropriated to honorary Jewish status. No regular would dare play him. Hashem knew the only player who would take him on, but Ha-Shaitan, 'the adversary', had been thrown out in 1667 for breaking a chair over Samson's head - Samson was an old friend of the owner, he'd helped tear down the old building and bought all the linens that decorated the walls (they'd looked really clean for the first 100 years). Truth be told, Samson didn't mind al-Satan all that much, but he was, after all, very particular about his hair, and the owner, Charles Kilkenny, thought it better safe than sorry to do Samson the favor to let Satan know through mutual acquaintances that he should lay low for a couple hundred years. 

Nevertheless, it looks a bit spiteful to keep a local celebrity out of one's establishment for more than three-hundred-fifty-two years. Even the new bouncer knew to let in the Evil One without ID, , and all the old regulars - Jonah, King Saul, Dathan, Mike Ignatowsky - greeted him as though it was still 1536. All the same inside jokes as ever before were swapped about all the Mary's in the New Testament, about Noah's children sodomizing him (Noah was, as usual, playing janga), about the Devil stealing, as Jacob did Esau, Hashem's birthright for a bowl of soup, and about all the sinners who say, as St. Lawrence did, "I'm well-done on this side, turn me over."

Hashem waited patiently, enjoying his hot tea and Slivovitz, paying no mind to all the unsuspecting customers in this reasonably large one-room club who could not help but gaze straight onto the rays of blinding light in the bar's northeastern corner, knowing in their souls that such light could only emanate from one source.

Eventually, Satan makes his way over to the table, and as he charges over rather determinedly, the evil one says 'Fuck Mah-Jong, I have a much better game!'

"Lucifer, you pro..."

"What the hell is a promise from me?"

"Alright, yeah, I should have seen that coming..."

"Knowest thou Alef-Khet Kharlap?"

"Oh fucking god, not him."

Jewish Horror Story - Rough Draft - Beginning

It's Shabbos, and the Lord our God, King of the Universe, is on his day off, and He of so many names: the Kaddosh Baruch Hoo, Adoshem, Elokim, Adoshem Elokim, Kel, Kel-Kelyon, and Kel-Shaddai; He who is Infinite, was waiting for an opponent to challenge him to a game of Mah-Jong at Game Night in Club Tohu vaVohu, a rock and dance club where he'd gone every Friday night for 1500 years. At the next table over was King David, Lou Reed, and Golda Meir playing Exploding Kittens. On the other side of G-d was Matthias Macabee, Louis Brandeis, Franz Kafka, Herod the Great, Menachem Begin, Anne Franck, Benjamin Disraeli, Hannah Arendt, and Leon Trotsky playing Secret Hitler. 

Just for the Holy One, Blessed Be He, the club converted on Friday nights to game night. It used to be a trivia night, but eventually the bartender, Jerry Thomas, summoned the effrontery to tell the Eyn Od and Eyn Sof that people were tired of playing trivia with an omniscient. For three hundred years, a special table in the corner would be reserved with the same placecard on blue contact paper, and magic marker scrawling out the letters 'Yud-Key-Vav-Key'. When Ribbono Shel Olam arrived, Jerry would have a Wissotzky tea waiting for him, just the way Hashem liked it - with a twist of Slivovitz and heated to exactly 194 degrees. The brave among the club's regulars would converse the ultimate questions while playing the Tetragramaton in games like Go and Minecraft which cannot be won, or at very least, play him in partially solved games like Chess, Reversi, and International Droughts, at which G-d could wow knowledgable watchers by displaying a small corner of the games' infinite permutations. 

And yet Shekhina was tired and just wanted to play a simple game of Mah-Jong, that Chinese game which, like so much Chinese food, had attained or been appropriated to honorary Jewish status. No regular would dare play him. Hashem knew the only player who would take him on, but Ha-Shaitan, 'the adversary', had been thrown out in 1667 for breaking a chair over Samson's head - Samson was an old friend of the owner, he'd helped tear down the old building and bought all the linens that decorated the walls (they'd looked really clean for the first 100 years). Truth be told, Samson didn't mind al-Satan all that much, but he was, after all, very particular about his hair, and the owner, Charles Kilkenny, thought it better safe than sorry to do Samson the favor to let Satan know through mutual acquaintances that he should lay low for a couple hundred years. 

Nevertheless, it looks a bit spiteful to keep a local celebrity out of one's establishment for more than three-hundred-fifty-two years.