Black Hole


Summary: If you’ve lived a life where God never existed, how would you view your life in terms of faith? A thought-provoking perspective on God from Lance’s POV.

A/N: I was inspired to write this after writing a paper for my AP Language class. This is NOT anti-God. I personally do believe in God and the existence of a higher being. I’m not atheist and this is not written to offend anyone’s beliefs. If you’re extremely sensitive on the subject, then don’t read it! This is from Lance’s POV, and he has some things against God. The reasons why are in the story. This story does not mirror my own beliefs. I respect everyone’s beliefs, but after writing my AP Language paper, I realized that a lot of people don’t look on faith from the perspectives of people who have less reason to believe. This is just a different perspective of looking on it that I don’t think a lot of people realize.


Before my old man started drinking, he would drive me out in his pick-up truck and take us out to this open field a little ways behind our trailer park come nightfall. I was about six then. Lying in the back with a rolled-up blanket to cushion my head, I would listen to him as he pointed to the stars that lay scattered above us, telling me the names of the constellations that he knew.

He would talk with a Kool cigarette dangling from his mouth. I never told anyone, but the glowing embers on the end reminded me so much of the stars above us, except that they seemed angry. One thing he taught me was how to find the North Star. He explained that it would always be there, no matter what. It anchored the rest of the stars in space and it was our guide when we were lost. One night, I told him that I always thought of him as my guide on Earth. He looked over at me and grinned, then tousled my hair. "You little rascal," he laughed, but I knew he understood the truth in my words and that I felt safe when I was around him.

After he started drinking and beating up my mom, I would go out and walk to the field alone. Wearing nothing but a sweatshirt in the cold, I watched the stars and would pick out the North Star among them. It was my guide. I’d never learned about God, but I’d heard of him and I knew God helped those that believed in him. Using the North Star as my cross, I would pray to the Heavens.

I didn’t know any special prayers, but I asked God to give me back the old man before he’d started drinking. The man who’d been my hero, my father. The crazy, violent man he’d become had to be a mistake because my mom and I had never done anything wrong. I prayed for God to turn my mother thin and pretty again because then my dad would stop beating up on her. I prayed for my dad to get a job back at the plant because then we would have some money and he wouldn’t be able to take his anger out on us if he was working. When my dad would start cursing and screaming and hitting my mom, calling her a whore and ripping at her clothes, I would hide under the bed, crying, and beg for a police car to come by and rescue us. In bed every night, I prayed for God to help my family. I prayed when our house shook with my parent’s screaming and prayed when the house was quiet. Sometimes I prayed so hard that my head would hurt and I would go to sleep exhausted, truly believing that THIS time, God had heard me.

I did this for years, slowly adding in bargaining, questioning, and out-right begging. I screamed out my thoughts, SCREAMING, but no one seemed to hear me. God never stopped the beatings, but worsened them. He never sent any earthly intervention. The cops never arrested my father. The neighbors never reported the screams. My old man never changed.

When I turned eight, my mom left. I went into the tiny kitchen to see my dad sitting at the broken table alone. When I asked him in a quavering voice where my mom had gone, he grunted something unintelligible and walked out the door. After he left, I went into their old room to find that all the drawers on my mom’s side was empty.

Sitting in the empty trailer, I’d thought God’s way of helping my mother would’ve been different. I didn’t think he would save her but leave me with my old man. And I cried. I cried for my mom, my dad, but mostly for myself. I didn’t understand why my life was Hell and why God wouldn’t help me. I’d prayed so much and I’d tried so hard to be good, why was he punishing me like this? I cried the rest of that day. It was Tuesday and my dad didn’t come home till late.

The phone was ringing when he stumbled through the door, drunk. "H’lo?" He slurred into the line. It turned out that it was the school, demanding an explanation for why I hadn’t been in school today. "Huh, you mean Lance?" He looked over at me as I watched him silently from my doorway. "You son of a bitch," he mouthed at me, before turning back to the line. "Uh, Lance had a touch of the flu, he’ll be back in school tomorrow. Uh huh, thanks, bye." He hung up, then turned on me. "Why the hell weren’t you in school today? You trying to get me in trouble?!"

I was terrified of him. His hair was wild and uncombed and there was three days worth of beard on his red face. He advanced on me, his callused fingers clenching. I could only back away, feeling the tears start as he raised a hand to hit me. I could only feebly back into the corner, sobbing, as he started smashing me. I put up my arms, but he would just pull them away and hit my tear-stained face. "You stupid, worthless bastard!" He screamed, spitting saliva into my face. He grabbed my hair and forced my head back so that I had to look into his crazy eyes. "I guess that’s what I get for fucking with a fat-assed whore!" Then he grabbed me and threw me across the room. I crashed against the open door, cracking my head on the edge. There was blood streaming down my forehead and I could barely turn my head before he’d covered the distance between us and kicked me in the stomach. Gasping for breath between sobs and spitting out blood, I watched in terror as he removed his belt. I felt the first several lashes, but I soon blacked out after.

These beating went on for three years, until I was eleven. One day, when I came to school with two black eyes and a face so swollen that I was completely unrecognizable, I was called down to the principal’s office. They informed me that they’d looked into my family situation and that I was going to be removed from my father’s care and put into a foster home. I just looked at them through swollen eyes, thinking, ‘I’ve come to school looking worse than this for over three years, and it took you blind, fucking bastards this long to realize what the hell was going on at home.’ If I can pin-point the moment when I first started hating authority, that was then. Before, they’d never been there, and I’d never counted on them. But now, here they were, smiling like they were concerned, and NOW they felt bad that I was a kid that got beaten up by the man who was supposed to protect me.

Things changed after I went into foster care. I never let myself care. God had left me alone this long. Now he was going to make it up to me? I think a part of me was thankful, but I soon realized I had nothing to be thankful for. My foster parents never beat me, but they said things that hurt more than any beatings, even more than the time when my old man forced my arm into a pot of boiling water. Under their constant criticism and snide degradation, I was forced to toughen up so they wouldn’t see me cry.

By the time I was seventeen, I became the one who hurt my foster parents. It felt so GOOD. After being hurt for so long, I could finally hurt them back. Since I was a ‘rebel’ and ‘trouble child,’ I never stayed in any one foster family long. By then, I never thought about God at all, then something happened that changed all that.

It was my last foster family before I got recruited into the Brotherhood. Their names were Jim and Karen, and they took me to church with them. I think it was Presbyterian, but I don’t remember. I just sat in the pew, terrified, as I looked around at my surroundings. To have been ignored and beaten by God, and now be in a shrine that devoted themselves to him just TERRIFIED me.

I was shaking and headed straight to my room when I got home, and my foster parents didn’t understand why I was so upset. Considering I was always the ‘tough guy,’ they were more than a little concerned, but probably glad that they’d ‘broken’ through my shell. Not that it was going to do them any good. Karen knocked on my door. "Lance, are you all right?" She asked in that soft voice tinged with motherly concern.

"Just leave me the fuck alone," I snapped back. Never mind that I heard her muffled gasp. I stared at the closed door and could hear her moving away from it, no doubt traumatized that I’d uttered such cruel and vulgar words. Fuck that rich, ignorant bitch.

Staring at my walls, I could only remember that I’d always been alone. God wasn’t real, or if he was, he didn’t CARE. A real God that cared didn’t leave children to be beaten by their drunken fathers or get abandoned by the mothers they prayed for. God wasn’t good and he didn’t love us. He only took care of the rich, spoiled bastards in high society who didn’t deserve it, and what kind of justice was that? I couldn’t count on God, and I would NEVER walk into a house that believed in him, much less worshipped him.

Out of pure luck, I met Kitty, sent down the school building, and got picked up by Mystique soon after that religious incident. So that was the end of Jim and Karen and church.

But even in the Brotherhood, it didn’t last. Magneto and Mystique bailed out on us before even a year was up. I got left in charge and I’m the one who has to take care of the five of us. It’s me, Freddy, Todd, and Pietro, and now I guess Tabby. We all get along okay, as well as you would expect five teenagers who’ve dealt with nothing but shit their entire lives. I’d thought my life was bad until I heard some of their stories. Todd and Tabby’s were especially bad. I didn’t realize it would be so much harder on a small kid with mutant powers or a pretty girl that developed too early.

I’m the one who takes care of all of us, and while our life is tough, I’m happy for the first time in my life. And you know what makes it so different this time around? In the Brotherhood, I never let myself count on anyone but myself. I didn’t ask God for help and I never let myself put too much dependence on Mystique when she was around. What I have now is through ME. When shit gets tough, I deal with it the best I can. The only people you can count on and believe in are yourself and the people who’ve been through the same stuff as you.

By counting on myself, I’ve come so much farther and I actually see the hope that’s ahead of me because of what I’ve worked for. Yeah, I know my life will always be hard. Not just for me, but for all five of us. And the rich people (God among them) are always gonna throw down stuff to hurt us. But we’ll get through, or deal with it as best we can. So no, I no longer believe in God. Yeah, I think he exists, but I don’t think he’s out there to help us. He’s in the same class as the government, the rich people, and the X-Men. They all look down on us, throw down shit for us to slip on, then pretend to be sorry while secretly laughing. I’m not optimistic and I never will be.

When I’m out at night, smoking Kool cigarettes, I’ll stare up at the sky sometimes. When I think of all the smoke that must rise up from all these cigarettes, I’m thinking it must be filling up the whole sky. If God is anywhere up there, I’m hoping he chokes on it. Some kid in one of my foster homes tried to choke me to death during a bad acid trip. It’s not as bad as some of the other ways to die. At least you kind of start floating at the end. It’s not as bad as being beaten, taking every bloody blow, and praying like hell that you’ll black out before actually dying, so you don’t have to see Death and your murderer in one sight of vision. In this world that always seems to suck away the light, I can only see the red star that sits in front of me, and that’s the closest that I’ve ever come to being touched by a star.

~ So…a different look on faith. This isn’t written as well as I want it, considering I did all this in one sitting and didn’t even get to read the entire thing over as a whole. Hopefully, I got my point across though. Again, I didn’t write this to offend anyone! I have my own idea on faith, and it’s not Lance’s, but everyone’s is different. Tell me what you think, but if you’re gonna flame, at least put in a good reason for it. I keep saying that this isn’t meant to offend anyone cuz some people are extremely sensitive about this subject, but if you have questions, opinions, or comments, I’d be more than happy to respond to them.