God is a Mortician

By Finn Briscoe

With green aliens, interplanetary travel and rampant sex, God is a Mortician is a parable about society, politics, morality and more, as up to date as the latest headlines, and more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

 

Aliens have found a way to suck up mental energy from earth's minions.  In fact, aliens from all over the galaxy can use earth as a pit-stop to refuel their ships by drawing off this crazy energy from the minds of humans.

 

Meet the characters: God (Bubba), Jesus, our hero Miguel and his alien-turned-nympho lover, Sho-shota. The subject matter and unabashed mockery won't appeal to everyone.

 

Some readers may be reminded of Kurt Vonnegut and others of Hunter Thompson, but one thing is certain: Finn Briscoe is a fearless writer, unafraid to go where his imagination takes him.

 

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sugar Grove Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734703412

Finn Briscoe

A reformed hippie who became an engineer and tech entrepreneur, Finn didn’t make it big. He made it bust and became a writer, starting with two series of memoir stories told in a sardonic Missouri voice: Finn on the Farm and Fun Loving Finn. He also published a punk sci-fi novel in 2020, God Is A Mortician. You shouldn’t read it if you’re religious or not a little kinky.

Book preview

1

How Green Aliens with Fifteen Eyes Contract the Universe and It Disappears

My son saw a movie about weird alien monsters that were as big as lions. They eat people and regurgitate the half-digested mess for their big mama queen’s consumption. Her minions are constantly fighting the humans, but she’s living the good life, eating her fill of semi-digested people. However, everything goes bad at the end for the queen bee monster because the humans get some newly invented black powder inside her and blow her up. Matt Damon was the star of the movie ( The Great Wall ), lending it an ounce of credibility that he will never get back. Man, what will Hollywood come up with next?

My son needs a dose of reality after seeing that ridiculous fantasy, and since he just turned eighteen, I’ve decided to teach him a history lesson and finally reveal to him the difficult truth behind his astonishing origin. I’ll even include an X-rated part or two along the way to keep him interested.

Real life is just as surprising as the movies sometimes, but at least it’s real life, and they say those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat the errors of the past. Not wanting my son to be one to repeat errors of the past, including my own, I asked him to open up the scope of his thinking beyond what’s taught in school. Only when you widen the range of your thinking do you start allowing the outcomes that seem reasonable, as well as those that are a bit reasonable but barely plausible, and so on up the chain of existence until you get to the absolutely outlandish, which is where things start to get really interesting.

Let’s begin with the fact that a while back, one in fifteen thousand planets had life on it in the form of vegetation. On one particular planet long ago and far, far away, the vegetations fucked each other and became aliens—more specifically, green aliens with fifteen eyes (‘GAWFEs’ for short). They were somewhat human-like, but they had fifteen eyes. They had lower limbs, enabling them to move efficiently across the surface of their planet, and they were also very intelligent.

How they became these alien creatures from their parents the vegetations is a big jump, but when you keep an open mind to the vast number of mutations and permutations possible at every minute fraction of existence in a temporal continuum, you begin to appreciate the variations in intelligent life that exist throughout the universe. Fancy sentence, simple concept. On Earth, what most people know is fairly limited. What they think they know is much more wide-ranging, which causes problems.

It was many years after the vegetations copulated and miraculously produced the amazing GAWFEs that they became intelligent enough to produce motorcycles. Here on Earth the same outcome took about four and a half million years from the time man stood up on two feet in Ethiopia and remarked to his companion, Honey, did you see where the hell I left my tail? until we had our first motorcycles. So one could speculate that that’s about how long it took the green aliens with fifteen eyes to get to this critical evolutionary juncture.

Not long after they learned how to make motorcycles, the GAWFEs formed motorcycle gangs. Except they didn’t get into big fights, deal in drugs and guns, or have bad-ass biker babes riding around with them. They were just nice green aliens with fifteen eyes riding on motorcycles, cruising along the roads of their beautiful planet.

Green Alien with fifteen eyes on motorcycle with smile on his face; he has many fingers on his hands

They could have been driving cars, but no. They had evolved to motorcycles due to the following four fascinating facts:

—Cars isolated them from each other, and they were nothing if not sociable.

—They had scrape-proof knees, scrape-proof elbows, flexible bones in their appendages, and helmet-like skulls to protect their big brains.

—Rain didn’t get them wet.

—They liked the wind in their hair spikes.

The GAWFEs continued to evolve as a species and were prescient enough to make a quick conversion to alternative sources of energy once the gas emitted by their motorcycles began polluting the atmosphere of their planet.

Pretty soon they had a totally renewable energy system and had brought their planet into a happy population equilibrium whereby the resources consumed by the intelligent population as well as the lesser species were no more than those produced by the recycling processes they had devised.

Everybody was peaceful and content and could have lived happily ever after, except they didn’t. It’s just not that simple. Maybe you’ve been really happy once or twice in your life, but did you live happily ever after? Fuck no. I mean right now I’m pretty happy, but I might have to go to the dentist. You think that will be a happy moment? And if you’re a male over fifty, how about the proctologist or urologist or whatever that guy’s name is who puts a glove on, greases up his index finger, and shoves it right up your ass? I wouldn’t call that happily ever after either, although it’s certainly better than waking up in a war zone during a bombing run.

By the way, there are people who might not object at all to a proctologist’s examination. You’ll learn about one who became the President of America in this history lesson, just to throw in a little foreshadowing or foreplay, whichever you want to call it.

The green aliens with fifteen eyes continued to evolve and became smarter and smarter. Before long they had solved some of the more elementary problems in physics, such as nuclear fusion and fission as well as semiconductor technologies, and progressed on past the speed of light barrier. It wasn’t long before they were traveling to other galaxies and forming motorcycle gangs everywhere they went, happily tootling the surfaces of planets all over the universe spreading peace and love, renewable energy, and population equilibrium. You might think that happiness was achieved by the majority of the species they dominated, and you’d be right.

For some reason, the green aliens with fifteen eyes thought that happiness was of the utmost importance, which is very different from how things are on Earth today where happiness is less important than money, which doesn’t always bring happiness even though it helps. Because you don’t have to work all the time and you have more time for sex, reading, and beach blanket bingo.

But some people on Earth want to keep on working even when they have plenty of money because they want power, and then they really lose sight of happiness and just crave money and power, and happiness becomes insignificant. They forget about the reading, the sex, and even the beach blanket bingo. All they can do is think about how to screw over their neighbor. There was a guy like that who became boss of America, and—spoiler alert—you’ll learn about what happened to him in this history lesson, too.

Sorry, but I keep getting off the track with foreplay. Okay, it’s really called foreshadowing but I like the sound of foreplay better. It brings sex to mind, and apologies if you’re a prude, but you might as well put this down if you don’t like reading about sex because there’s going to be a healthy dose of it in this history lesson. That’s one reason I waited until my son turned eighteen to tell him these little-known facts.

Exuding happiness, the universe now ruled by GAWFEs was in a pretty good state and getting better all the time. As a matter of fact, nobody anywhere called them aliens, they were called ‘undocumented extraterrestrials,’ and in return they had respectful names for everybody else. The GAWFEs were nothing if not politically correct because they had discovered that it was a nice way to evolve their species.

The motorcycle gangs enforced the political correctness as they rode around the planets they controlled all across the universe, and no race or species was made to feel any less than good about itself. The green undocumented extraterrestrials with fifteen eyes dominated the universe totally until one day a very strange thing happened. For some reason which modern-day physicists will be unable to explain for several millennia, the universe reached a tipping point and began to contract, fueled by the overwhelming happiness pervading it. In what must have seemed like an instant, a fugitive chronological moment in time so ecstatic, so entirely full of happiness and joy that it could exist no longer, the universe went YOOOUUUP and totally disappeared.

Or seemed to disappear, because in reality it had collapsed into a spec, and what do you think happened next? BANG! That’s right, a big bang blew billowing bellows of uncertain and unhappy matter, mixed with a touch of happiness and joy for seasoning, and out of that speck a new universe began expanding rapidly.

That was about fourteen billion years ago, and the rest, as they say, is history. But there’s a helluva lot of history that you don’t know about. Even I don’t know everything, and I’m the omniscient narrator. Or wait—maybe I’m just the first person.

Well, there’s one thing for sure: you’re the second person and my son’s the third person. So stick with me and you’ll learn some history along with my son. It’s finally time to give that boy some important facts about the world we live in. I think you’ll both find that reality is even more bizarre than a Matt Damon movie about a big queen bee lizard.

2

What Happened to the Dinosaurs

When I told my son about the loss of the first happy universe, he wondered how I knew about something that happened before the present universe was formed.

Look it up on the internet if you don’t believe me, I replied, but when he googled what happened before the big bang, he found a number of different cosmological theories, from big bounce and big crunch to white holes and chaotic inflation theory, but nothing about the true story of green undocumented extraterrestrials with fifteen eyes.

Did you try just googling ‘green aliens’? I asked. Once again, he found nothing on the history of the happy universe before this one, but he found a lot on green aliens. We spent fifteen minutes reading the 92 entertaining reviews for Rhode Island Novelty Bendable Alien Toys, including this one from Al Hosbro:

– I bought a boatload of these bendable green aliens and have been putting them all over the city I live in, places where they are not easily removed. Now they’re everywhere. On stop signs, in windows and bus shelters—one even hangs from a bridge.

Al was definitely the boldest bendable alien toy reviewer. I’ll bet you anything that even the members of the Junior Civic League in most cities are not doing anything like that. Sadly, their bridges are probably bereft of bendable green aliens as a result.

I want my son to grow up to be like Al. Okay, maybe more like Neil deGrasse Tyson, but Al is a man of action who knows the importance of undocumented extraterrestrials in our past and wants to remind the population of their historical significance by putting little bendable ones up on stop signs, kind of like how Neil deGrasse Tyson does on TV with cosmology, except on a grassroots level. Al is out there encouraging young people to learn the lessons of history instead of watching sci-fi movies or sexting or twerking or engaging in malicious malarkey.

I hope to do the same with my history lesson and keep my son interested as I lead him through some important but unknown historical events before telling him exactly where he came from. I have to make a few leaps forward in time to get to the important parts. Like most kids, he was fascinated with dinosaurs when he was in grade school, so I believe he’ll be attentive when I tell him the scientific truth behind their disappearance, what paleontologists have yet to discover.

After the green aliens with fifteen eyes contracted the universe and it disappeared, a new universe appeared with a big bang. Fast forward 13.7 billion years, and there was a lot happening on planet Earth. All sorts of life had sprung up and was running all over the place. Little creatures were already being stepped on by big creatures. It was good to be big most of the time. Like humans today. It’s good to be tall so you can see over everybody else at a concert, or for playing basketball or changing light bulbs without a ladder. But sometimes (like on an airplane), it’s not so good if you’re tall. So there’s a limit to everything.

The dinosaurs were the epitome of that trend. They lived for a really long time, because they were big and strong. But something happened and they disappeared. Turns out it wasn’t all that great to be big. Just think what happened the first time aliens showed up on Earth. Okay not aliens, undocumented extraterrestrials, or Extras for short. Do you think the first things the Extras noticed were the lizards, or the cockroaches, or the ants? No way. It was the dinosaurs that caught their immediate attention. And that wasn’t good.

At first the Extras tried to make the dinosaurs their pets. These Extras had a large purple head-like appendage at the top of their body with one eye and one hole in the forehead area that they used for connecting themselves together. They had a tail that could stick in their mate’s head when they wanted to travel together. It’s not clear if that’s how they reproduced because nothing ever came out of that hole, just the tail of another Extra got stuck in it from time to time. Their young came floating out of their eye, seemingly weightless, and had to be pulled in by their parent to a pouch that they had under their chin. This was pretty protective, and it had to be, because the Extras were about 70% formative brain matter at birth, and even upon reaching adulthood, their brains were more than half of their body size. They were pretty smart but they weren’t that strong, so they had to be careful around the dinosaurs. It didn’t take them long to learn the creatures’ language, or should I say the creatures’ dialects, for there were almost as many dinosaur dialects as there were dinosaurs.

At first they tried the positive approach, but even though the Extras whispered sweet nothings in their ears, like modern-day horse whisperers, they couldn’t gain complete control over these massive would-be pets. So they resorted to more drastic measures, inserting electric prods into their butts. That’s right. They went from the carrot to the stick. Guess what? Compliance improved. They were able to mount the dinosaurs and ride them all over the place, and even began to use the beautiful long-neck brontosauri (the plural of brontosaurus in case you didn’t know) to help them explore the tantalizingly different flora and fauna Earth offered up to them in all its bounteous glory.

Green Alien with fifteen eyes on motorcycle with smile on his face; he has many fingers on his hands

The Extras discovered that a combination of sweet nothings and butt prods was how they could get the most out of the dinosaur population, and soon they had the whole lot of them under their control. They rode around on velociraptors like polo players, prancing and dancing all over the planet wherever they felt like it. They could even get a number of Extras hooked together with tails in their head-holes on the back of a brontosaurus for an evening stroll.

One day, a particularly daring Extra came up with the idea of inserting the tail of a tyrannosaurus rex in his head-hole and teaching it to fling him off in one direction or another. Amazingly this pastime caught on as a competitive sport, and pretty soon there were contests where Extras were being flung great distances by their pet T-Rexes, if you can imagine that. Although an Extra’s body had no stiff bones and they weren’t at risk of serious injury unless the dinosaur tail got stuck in their head and they weren’t released properly, it didn’t seem like something an intelligent species would get involved in, almost as stupid as hot-dog eating contests