Free Hello God by Moya Simons

Hello God,

    I’ve decided that you must get a bit lonely up there, so I thought I might have a chat with you each night. When I curl up in bed. I’ll snuggle under my blankets and whisper or speak to you in my head. It makes no difference how, because you’ll know it’s me talking.
    Hey, how does it feel to know everything? Do you ever suffer from brain meltdown? Sometimes our computer breaks down. Dad says there’s too much information in it. That we have to delete the old information we don’t need. A press of thebutton and that’s it. Do you do the same? How do you decide what’s important and what isn’t?
    In case you’ve deleted any of my files, my name is Kate. No, it’s not short for Katherine or Katrina. I’m just Kate. My parents say it’s a strong and wonderful name, like me, but I don’t feel strong or wonderful a lot of the time.

    I have short, brown curly hair and blue/green eyes. If you saw me in a crowd I wouldn’t stand out, though you might notice that I have a nice smile. Everyone says so.
    I live in a house near the beach. We have a big, bushy garden and Mum plants sweet native trees, so lorikeets can come and eat the nectar. The lorikeets are brightly coloured, and perch on the branches. It’sas if bits of rainbow have fallen into our garden and landed on our bottlebrush tree.
    Our house is a bit of a mess. Mum and Dad say the heart of the family goes into the house, so I think this might mean we have a muddled family. We have books everywhere—on couches, on beds, some even on bookshelves! Our kitchen has a lot of pots and pans, and they sometimes fill up the sink because Mum is busy reading and Dad’s in his office thinking great thoughts. Mum is a collector. She says proudly, ‘Our home is filled with knick-knacks.’
    Do you know what knick-knacks are, God? Well, of course you do. You’re God. Our knick-knacks are lots of brick-red pottery and ornaments of clowns and old houses, and plates that have pictures of small cottages with gardens of roses and lavender painted on them. We also have a collection of small elephants. They are black and white and grey and we have a baby one beside his mother. Our knick-knacks sit on shelves in thelounge room. We have miniature ceramic toilets on the bathroom shelf, seven dwarfs on the kitchen window ledge, and every spare corner of space in our house is filled with bits and pieces.
    My school is just at the end of the street, so even if my schoolbag is full of books and really heavy, it doesn’t matter because I get there in no time at all.
    My dad is an astronomer. That’s a space scientist. Scientists are people who try to find out why things happen. Like how the stars and the moon came to be, and why deep down in the Earth it’s nearly as hot as the sun, and yet our feet don’t get burnt at all. You’d like Dad. You made all this and he’s trying to find out how and why. So you have a lot in common really.
    Mum works in a library. I keep forgetting that you know everything, but just in case you’re busy and her file isn’t up to date, let me tell you. It’s the big library at the shopping centre. Mum’s the Children’s Librarian. She likes everything aboutbooks. She says that when you read, your mind becomes a movie set and all the faces and actions of the book characters become real. They frown at you, smile, climb mountains, fly spaceships, and can have green slimy skin. She even likes the way books smell, especially the old, old ones. She says that when you sniff an old, old book, you smell a bit of each person who has borrowed and read it. I’m not sure I feel happy about that. So I sometimes check the books I borrow from the school library to make sure that I like the person who has been reading the book. Some of the kids I know stink, so it makes sense, God.

    I get told a lot by Mum and Dad that I’m lucky. Lucky to be born in a wonderful country, and to live near the beach and especially lucky to have a mum who tells me