God, oh, God, we didn’t mean it. It’s the most worthless prayer, but it’s true.

We were just hungry, so long without land in sight, all the food we’d brought with faith in our hearts and a song on our lips already a week gone. Nothing left but crumbs and tuneless pleas, burnt, dimming eyes searching forever for a coastline, any hope, do you understand?

We waited for days even after we realized that God, the great faith surging and singing along under our feet, was alive and might be good to eat. Might be able to spare a few morsels of flesh, at least, for the children who wouldn’t live otherwise to see the promised paradise. For days, we listened to our children cry, but who could endure listening to those cries weaken with salvation just underfoot?

And who, hands quivering with hunger, cutting into good meat, wouldn’t be tempted to slice off just a few meagre bites for themselves? We never meant to cut so deep. Honest to the god floating motionless under our feet, we didn’t.

Such a gout of blood, soaking our hands, our shoes, the sea all around us. And then nothing. For days now, nothing. Just the corpse of God floating in a slick of fouling blood, the heathen sea stretching without hope of succour to every horizon, and arguments just as worthless as our prayers in the end, about whether to eat the rest of that holy flesh before it spoils.