Week Thirty One: Story about God's favorite who falls...

Don't panic: the quotation marks above stand for "Story about." The scribbed idea before it also started with "Story about..." and so I was trying to save myself the agony of having to write it twice, which I have now done anyway, lo all these long years later.

So the complete prompt reads:

Story about God's favorite who falls, but doesn't know it.

I think originally I wanted to do some kind of epic/badass tale of a fallen archangel who's gone rogue and is still inflicting Old Testament wrath (now that I type all that out, it sounds suspiciously like the Kevin Smith movie Dogma), but this gives me an idea for a short play that could be both funny and meaningful. Pointed, even. 

Who else wants to attempt this one?

Comments

[Victoria Athena]

I said I was in (like sin) so herewith is my contribution:

Les Jardins

God looked over all that had been made and he saw that it was very good.

Released from the weightiness of His marble halls, he stood in front of the imposing façade of his Palace, gazing out over the vastness of space. Before Him, an unblemished pavilion unfurled; a zen desert of smoothed gravel, bracketed by two panels of water and backdropped by a low mass of greenery. The sky sailed freely above it all. The space was defined without human population, sculpted out of nature, its elements simple and precise.
Gathered around the parterre d’eau, His rivers were arrayed in the likeness of lounging bathers around great pools, languid and meandering, not disturbing the laws of complexity and consciousness. God progressed forward to what appeared to be a void or omega point. In the hazy distance an indefinite sort of avenue was suggested, but He could not yet see what lie directly ahead. Goat-faced urns lined the central allée. Then God reached the top of a staircase and before Him burst forth such dizzying vistas of admirable design. A feeling of overwhelming ecstasy came over Him.
Latona, inundated by jets leaping from the mouths of lizards and frogs, posed rapturously in her oval basin, bathed in an aureole of light and framed by viridescent trees. God averted his fixed leer and focused on the tapis vert, slanting gently between the trees to meet the Bassin d’Apollo, the Grand Canal––and beyond––the overriding sky. His gaze moved rapidly down the emerald expanse, but when it hit the water it literally took off, no longer adhering to conventional forms of perception, but instead it glided––sliding across the water to the sky reflected within.

God found himself transported to infinity, liberated by an indefinitely expanding space, without optical limits. Before Him, as if in a mirage, Apollo rose out of the waters––the jets d’eau seemingly thrusting him forward in space. God beheld the resolution and power embodied into Apollo’s four horses of the Apocalypse and the four elements their chariots represent. Here he found Nature, ordered and controlled, with all its dangerous potentialities revealed, bursting forth on a cosmic scale––all at his command––the gloire of this palatial expanse which had once been no more than a humble marshland, fit only for waterfowl and deer.
Who, if not God, had rendered such masterful design? Only one of God’s most intelligent subjects could have grasped the possibilities lying within those putrid wetlands. Only one of God’s favorites could have had the vision to plan on such a scale––a patron of the arts, accorded with the perception to create avenues that appeared as tunnels for light, whose dreams were illuminated by nymphs dancing within basins, aroused by white hot jets of foam. Whose chiaroscuro phantoms played over the statuesque herms fronting the hedged façades guarding the green rooms of the bosquets––those hidden cities of fantasy, of vanquished giants, of talking animals.
God bellowed, calling forth His subject, His superintendent of landscape, Nicolas Fouquet. He appeared, gliding on a gondola across the Grand Canal, leaning heavily on an oar, surveying the world he had created. As Fouquet advanced through the gardens, his face shimmered with the fugitive expressions of intelligence that illuminate the soul. His eyes gleamed with wit and charm. Bounding up the Grand Staircase, he was enlivened with a sense of irony and capriciousness.
God exclaimed that the landscape was indeed a masterpiece.
Fouquet postured with flattery and swagger, boasting that the parterres and waterways were fashioned as a pourtraiture, drawn on the surface of the ground, civilized and mannered, in the veritable image of God. A portrait of beauty in bloom and a fête of frolic. Fouquet waxed lyrical, decrying with poetics in iambic pentameter and lamenting in heart-wrenching rhyme.

“Before thee were once no more than the wild marshes of pasture,
Hidden within those marshes was a glorious parc, prised open by a master.
He created gardens royale and punted on canals with only a rod
Like a King sailing under the Sun, propelled by the staff of God.”

God was attempting to halt the flowery rhyme which was becoming tedious and harboring on malice, sans aforethought. Fouquet could be somewhat of a self-aggrandizing bore. So God cut to the chase and spouted out loudly above the jets d’eau:
“How much did this cost?”
Fouquet was flabbergasted, flummoxed and floored.
“How can one put a price on heavenly light, the axis and the crown, the basin jets cascading at night?”
God exhaled a roar of hurricane force, rousing the serene basins and causing the trees to shiver in their viridescent groves.
“Seven billion écus,” Fouquet spit succinctly.
“That’s sixty percent of the planetary budget!”
“But it’s only eight hundred seventy five écus per hectare. And what’s a realm without chateau? And what’s a chateau without a jardin? And what’s a jardin without an Orangerie? Oh, wait, You haven’t even seen the Orangerie yet! Over there––across the Parterre du Midi. Come and see!”

Fouquet dashed over to the balustrade facing the southern exposure, where below was spread an unexpected forest of palms, a circular basin at their center, behind which lay a vast rectangular pool, curving expansively into infinity.
God fumed. Fouquet had gone too far. God was infuriated by the cavalier flourish of expenditure. The sky had been daubed in the purest azure pigment and the sun comprised of the warmest bursting rays. A zephyr wafted through the air to tickle His skin. God had created all of Nature at no more cost than time. And time cost Him nothing.
Presuming God to be at a loss for words and overwrought with pleasure, Fouquet bowed and backed away silently. He leapt down the Grand Staircase, skipped past the endearing Latona and danced through the verdant tapis.

“Fouquet will learn the cost of time,” God damned him.

God neither hemmed nor hawed. While Fouquet punted away on the Grand Canal in his gondola, God resolved to punish him. God marched up and down the Parterre d’eau, hatching a plan that would reward Fouquet by sending him falling into darkness and banishment. He would put Fouquet in charge of designing and building the most labyrinthine bosquets of the underworld: The Catacombs.
Incarcerated in the limestone quarries, he would spend the rest of his life in the dark maze of passageways, never to see the sun reflected in a pool, feel the spray from the jets, or taste a freshly plucked orange again.

God decreed it and it was done. And so ended the sixtieth day. God was tired. God needed a rest. As the sun set, Apollo, his four horses and his chariot sank into the basin. The tapis vert blurred into a carpet of velvet. Latona gazed longingly at the palace façade and its Galleries des Glaces. A violet pigment coated the expansive sky and descended into the verdant bosquets of boxwood. When God, in his wrath, swept past them, the nymphs ceased their frolics and wept into the fountains.

On long summer evenings, you can still hear them when you stroll through the gardens of Versailles at twilight. If you listen closely you can hear them weeping their songs of lament, les chants des eaux, as the jets of the fountains spout froth into the zephyr breezes, tickling your skin.

[Brandon]

Ha! I loved when they started debating money. Thanks for sharing this.