three micro/flash
by Maxim Volk
I(fag)o Dei
Is God a faggot? I asked myself the question the last time my lips were wrapped around a cock. It was not the first time: neither the first time that I fellated some anonymous man that I met online nor the first time that I wondered if perhaps God could be like me. Imago Dei, I have always been told. I am made in His image. Lilting, limp-wristed, cock-sucking me, made in the image of God.
If I am to take that statement as truth, then God must be a faggot. Does God respond to poorly-angled dick and ass pics on Grindr with a promise to hook up without knowing the face to which it belongs? Does God see a shirtless man running on a summer day and follow the sweaty, naked torso with His gaze? Does God become giddy at the newest episode of Drag Race, shouting “Gag!” and “Mother!” as queers in dresses parade down the runway to quips and music by RuPaul? Does He have wet dreams of making out with actors from the newest action movies, sandwiched between unrealistic body standard abs and pecs? Does He dance at the club to bad music, gyrating His hips against another man’s ass? If I am made in His image, then are my indulgences His indulgences too?
I have often been told that God hates fags. Before I ever knew I was one, I pitied the people who God had created in His image only to reject for the attributes that He Himself ascribed. I imagined God to be a sculptor, creating art with only a mirror and His body for reference. For every ten human beings He produced, each perfect and unique and fully reflective of His majesty, there was one that turned out not quite right, and, like all great sculptors, He would discard those aberrations in disgust and move on to something new and immaculate and perfectly heterosexual.
The Bible tells us that God does not make mistakes, and yet so frequently I heard that I was one: a deviant from God’s plan, choosing to revel in my transgressions. For too long, I did not revel. I hated myself for being so unlike God. I wanted to do God the favor and remove myself from his creation. If humanity was God’s masterpiece, and I was a mistake, then would it not be best for me to remove myself entirely, so that His creation could be more whole?
If we are mistakes, then God made so many that one could not help but distrust Him. If one in ten tasks at my job were done incorrectly, I would be fired before a week was up. If one in ten maneuvers in my car was done in error, I would no longer be allowed to drive. Why then, is God allowed to continue to create if He makes so many mistakes? There are billions of us, ostensible fumbles, stretched across history, fucking like rabbits, polluting all that God has created. He is all powerful, of course. He could easily clear his mistakes: send another flood to wipe us out and start over, like a child destroying his tower of blocks in frustration that it is not quite perfect. These reflections of Him are tainted—funhouse mirrors, stretching out His features into unimaginable horrors. And yet, for some purpose, He continues to create us in His image, faggots one and all.
Perhaps the reverends of my childhood were correct all along. God does not make mistakes. He sculpts each of us, using His reflection as a reference. In fashioning me, He created a version of Himself that is perfect. I am no blunder in God’s masterpiece. I am a faggot because God is a faggot, and I am made in His image.
The Music of the Spheres
Handel’s Messiah sounds through the sanctuary, a hundred young men and women singing “Hallelujah” again and again, and the stained-glass windows reverberate with the sound of worship. In the audience, old ladies weep, and men fall prostrate at the resounding veneration, joining in the song to honor our Savior’s birth.
And I sit, unmoved, rolling my eyes harder at every utterance of that meaningless word. I have heard the song before. I even sang it in the choir for several years. It provides little comfort or other emotion save frustration. It is dull, repetitive, and uninteresting. “The Hallelujah Chorus” brings me to cursing more than it brings me to worship.
When the tedious song is sung, and the parishioners have gone home for the night, and my parents have driven me home, speaking the praises of the choir who sang for several hours. I steal away to my bedroom where, under the cover of darkness, I search for music that I know will bring me to catharsis, some song that I have been told is antithetical to God’s natural order. A rock song, perhaps, or hip-hop, or even a generic pop song. I play it softly, so that no member of my family might hear it and think me a heathen—lost in my transgressions. The song begins, and I feel the beat bumping through my body, and there, alone in the dark, I begin to dance.
Wayfarin’
The pastor begins his weekly exegesis, and before he reaches the first mandate from the Most High, my teenage mind has slipped away, floating over the congregation of parishioners, each there for a service that I care little about. I glance around the sanctuary, searching for something that grabs my attention, something to distract me from the boredom that is sitting on my chest. There is the old woman with the bad perfume that I can smell halfway across the vast expanse of pews. I wonder when she will start crying, an inevitability of a Sunday-morning service. She will weep and wail and gnash her teeth while the pastor reads some verse from one of the Thessalonians. Then I see the pastor’s son, attentively watching his father’s gesticulations behind the pulpit, and I remember the time I accidentally walked in on him in the shower room at church camp, seeing his cock lathered with soap, frustrated that I found such an odious dullard attractive for even a moment as I watched the soapy water run through the thick patch of hair on his groin. I blink hard three times, trying to expel the image of his lithe body from my mind. I continue scanning the congregation and spot the woman who has recently returned after a brief excommunication for the sin of drinking a glass of wine with dinner. Thankfully she is back, and her brief foray into alcoholism has not left her any worse for wear. I look to see who else is in the service that morning, and my eyes settle on my one friend, also bored, and we make faces at each other until my mom tells me to stop fooling around and pay attention to the word of God that spills forth from the pulpit.
As the God’s vessel continues his tedious exhortations, my grasp on the present once more slips away, and I begin to plot some ridiculous story that I tell myself as an escape from my cruel reality. I am the captain of a spaceship, and I have a crew made up of people I call friends and a lover, secretly male, though I often tell myself that it is a woman to hide from the all-knowing Savior my deepest fantasies. My craft explores the cosmos, searching for a place that I might call home, this earthly plane no sanctuary for my listless being. We fight alien pirates and meet ancient deities and debauch ourselves in the dens of trivial iniquities that my sheltered mind can conjure. I am propelling through the corridor of the mothership of a particularly nasty alien imperator when I feel a tap on my shoulder. My mother has noticed my wandering thoughts, directing me back to the sermon at hand. I have long-since forgotten what it was about.
I try to give my attention to the reverend for a few minutes, but he has been speaking on the same three verses in Thessalonians for nearly a month now, and I soon find myself envisioning my own church, where I am the pastor, preaching only on things that interest me. David and Jonathan. The antichrist and the end of the world. Jonah and the whale and Esther the queen. I would not deign to spend an entire sermon on something so dull as Thessalonians. Then I begin to think about what hymns we might sing in my conceived parish, and I grab the hymnal in front of me to devise a suitable program. My father wrenches the book of songs from my grasp and returns it to the pew in front of me. The sermon continues, and I am annoyed.
Finally, the sermon ends, and I am pulled out of writing a masterpiece of a memoir in my head about my life as a Christian homeschool kid, fluctuating from a comedy to a tragedy to a melodrama, from moments I find humorous to graphic scenes of the abuse that I endure to those little moments where I sit alone and cry into my hands. The pastor calls for anyone who was moved by the sermon to approach the pulpit to surrender. I missed exactly what I was supposed to surrender to—perhaps a call to become a missionary or a promise to donate all of the money I made washing dishes to fund the new addition to the pastor’s swanky house—and so I stay put, wondering what will be served for lunch. I begin to make a menu in my head. Pizza, probably. And French fries. Ooh, and fresh-squeezed lemonade.
BIO: Maxim Volk (they/he) is not in a cult anymore. Now they write things. Their work has appeared in the Palisades Review, Bipolar Poetry, Acorns, and more. Their first book releases in June 2026 from Slashic Horror Press. You may find them on Instagram @Maximvolk1.