Prayers Answered - Sometimes: Fantasy

The front of the temple was plastered with holy icons and images from people whose prayers had been answered. Discarded crutches, little baby layette outfits, money that had been laminated flat and affixed. He regarded it cynically. Might as well have a big sign out front saying, "Prayers answered--sometimes." He knew well that more than half the time, the prayers would not be answered. It didn’t seem to make a difference how worthy the prayer or the pray-er was, the god chose randomly who to answer and who not to. He'd even gone through and found a comparison report that put together the offerings by the people making the requests and the success of the outcome. Happily, there was a slight negative correlation. A big donation would not be necessary. Neither would a pure heart, or good intentions. This was good, since he had neither of them and at the moment, no money either. Steps had been put into play that might fix that, and praying to the god of maybe was one of those steps. If his prayer was answered, it would make things that much simpler, and although he did not believe in the god, not in the sense of worshiping it or even necessarily believing that it was what other people would call a real "god", it would be foolish not to hedge his bets. Hedging his bets, of course, was what got him into this mess in the first place, you might say.


Inspiration: Had a dream about L. Newman and I attending some odd meeting thing called Cooking Without God, which was half philosophy and half cooking and entirely boring...but while I was there I had an idea for a story where the premise is that one person gets a prayer answered, which affects a second person negatively, but the second person's prayer is not answered. So this was a story idea within a dream.
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Eh. Kinda trite, actually, as many dream ideas end up being.