[ WP ] A pizza delivery boy is unwittingly sent to God 's apartment .

El Roi is a dignified scrap heap of an apartment complex tucked away right in the heart of the city, though you would n't know it just walking around the place, save for those familiar inner city cues: the absent stars, almost all of them as usual slathered in the pitch we manufacture with our lights to turn the sky into presumably more palatable swathes of congestive blacks and grays. See, though, the thing about El Roi was that it was in one of those otherwise long-dead areas of town, the parts that some 30 years ago sputtered out with one final burst of black smoke and were left behind for - literally - greener pastures and less swarthy neighbors. A strange side effect of this white flight was that these seemingly failed organs - not just the part of town where I was now, with El Roi, but all of them, without exception - spent at least some portion of the year completely swallowed up by the shadows of the newer downtown skylines, especially at sunrise and sunset, meaning the nights came sooner and stayed longer there than anywhere else. I'm sorry - I can get real wrapped up in talking about the place I live, and even though it can get to be a little too much, and often comes out sounding grim, I do n't mean to be pessimistic. I love this place, but I mean, I really love it: I love all the things about it that make it difficult to love. 
 
 Anyway, it's time I got on. 
 That thing about the shadows of new downtown? Well, that was the case today when I was making the last of my rounds, to those apartments I mentioned, and I felt the exact moment those shadows came between me and the fading afternoon sun. From there on out, I spent my drive in a twilight that was the unwanted by-product of fabricated paradise, much like the vacant lots all around me, and the scraps of news paper tossed about by the dry, tinny breeze here and there. 
 
 And, of course, the people who lived here. But I loved them too. I may be just a pizza delivery girl, but, as you might have shrewdly noticed, I can be damn romantic - capital R Romantic, I mean - about nearly anything. But that was n't the case with these people. I was trying, at least, to break with my old habits. It's easy to stop imagining people as people when you've got this idealized prototype in your head, whether it's good or bad. I've been learning how to stop that, and truthfully, I still have a lot to learn in that respect, but I think I can say I love them now. I honestly believe I'm starting to know just what that means. I've become familiar with the area over the past two years or so, formed little relationships with the people here, I'd like to think. Even if I am just a pizza delivery person, it's still nice to think that I've made some sort of fleeting connection each time I show up, lost touch and caught up with families, witnessed a birth or passing now and then. I just wish my corporate-guaranteed timely arrival did n't feel like one of the only reliable things in their lives. God. That's some real cheese right there. I'll stop, I swear. 
 
 When I got to El Roi, I checked the ticket for the customer's address. It was n't a specific apartment I'd delivered to before, but I had n't planned on getting as lost as I did. I thought I knew the place. So much for reliable. Maybe being a little less starry eyed might help with that. 
 
 Fifteen minutes I'd spent navigating the fractured layout of the place before I was thrown off by a little girl, maybe five or six years old, peering shyly through a doorway that turned out to be the address I'd been looking for. It was n't her eyes, really - though they were a beautiful bluish, speckled grey that have since been fixed in my memory - but her bare feet that caught my attention. There was n't anything that felt mystifying about them, in particular. In fact, they were pretty commonplace, given where I was. They were dirty, and many of the toenails were too long or just barely hanging off, not quite letting go of their hold on her. But there was nothing exceptionally grimy. In fact, they were very dry. I got the impression she was slowly being whittled away into something crude and sharp and desperate and left this trail of sawdust wherever she went. Yet she was all there somehow. When I got close enough to see her fingers, they looked and felt the same way. 
 
 She could n't speak. 
 
 I did n't really question it at the time. She opened the door a little wider, produced her due payment without reaching beyond the threshold and disappeared with what she ordered, leaving me weak-kneed but with time to recover on my way back to the store. I got this sensation like, well you hear it sometimes, people talking about feeling the earth move beneath their feet, but it was more than that. It was everything. It was every wanderer in the sky that I could n't now ignore, all of them spun seasick around and about and without and within and it was more than I could bare. 
 
 But it faded with the twilight. It left me catatonic for the rest of the night. I remember, vaguely, closing up shop and making one final round of deliveries, but no details really surface from the rest of that night until its close, when I'd gotten home and apparently showered and changed, and the ticket from that day's order must have fallen out of a pocket onto the middle of my floor, leaving me to puzzle even now about that strange name. *Shekhinah*. Hm. 
 
 But it's perhaps quite likely the whole thing is a fever dream and an exaggeration. Maybe being a little less starry eyed could help with that.
