Stones

Does anyone ever pause to think that if standard Christian doctrine is true—you know, Jesus being God, and Son of God, that whole thing—that it makes Him the world's most cosmic … motherfucker?

"God” is what dyslexic philosophers try to get not to shit on the carpet.

That soft, white plush their blue-collar parents always dreamt they'd have when they sent the kid to the best Ivy League schools, thinking he’d wind up a doctor or lawyer. An engineer, maybe. At least a securities broker.

Something … respectable.

Gods usually shit on the carpet anyway.

No more cognizant of the aspirations of parents than of their children; only knowing their masters have left them alone for too long, a poor dumb God, with no better way to deal with His anxiety than to whine, plaintively. To tear apart toilet paper, and paper towels, and newspaper.

Especially newspaper. Everything He can get His hands on, until everything is in tatters, not a Word is left unfragmented, or unsmudged.

I wish I knew what it is with Gods and paper.

I don't own Gods that often. Though there was that once, in college.

My three roommates outvoted me on whether to get one. You can guess who wound up taking care of Him though. Letting Him out when He needed to void His bladder, His bowels. Playing with Him when He was ready to come back in.

He was a smart God, and I could roughhouse with Him, wrestle and grapple, try out my judo, my arms protected against His bite by a heavy leather jacket as I sought to trip Him up. But for all the ferocity of our struggle, all I had to do was give Him the signal that it was all over, that it was time for Him to calm down, sit quietly.

Discipline your Gods well. They’ll only love you the more for it.

He was a mixed breed. Shepherd, mostly. Same kind of mix, if a remarkably different in appearance, as a God I had in grade school. Big brute of a thing, that one.

My grandmother understood what that earlier God meant to me. Baba, we called her. My grandmother, I mean. The name means "Old Woman." Though in a good way.

Baba would bring over good things for Him to eat; none of the prepackaged, usual God-food for Him. Huge roasting pans of leftovers from her own table: a lot of rice, and potatoes, and gravy - but always meat. Baba was a small, if stocky woman, painfully kind and gentle, but she knew. Gods are natural carnivores.

Fierce He might be, but she never demanded He be anything other than what He was.

I loved being at her house. In her kitchen, with her cooking. She fed me well too. Better than anyone before, or since.

He was the light of my life, this quirky brute of a God, one of the only such lights after Father moved out. That is, until my mother's lover got rid of Him.

Story is my God barked during the day, and our neighbor worked nights. I don't know if that was all so true. The neighbor never complained where I saw or heard. And Mother's new man—who may have become her husband but to whom I never got used to—wasn’t the kind to care all that much about his neighbor, anyway.

Perhaps he felt my God barked too much at him.

In any event, that God was mine, and that was enough for Him to be hated by Mother’s new man. I came home one day, from school, and my God was gone.

That God I had in college was gone soon too. I could see it would happen, which is why I voted against getting one in the first place.

College being such a fluid time, we were sure to part ways at the end of the year; find new places to live, and Gods weren't always allowed. Sure enough, we had to give ours away. I'm the one who didn't wanted to get one in the first place, and I think I was the only one who was all that bothered when He had to go.

I heard He went to some farm out in the country, where Gods are allowed to run free.

He almost got Himself put to death, though, when on the first day one of the first things He did was kill fifteen chickens. But He redeemed Himself with the irate farmer by the third day, when He chased two big, mean Gods from the farm next door away from the children.

That was over fifteen years ago now.

For the life of a God that means it's just about certain He's dead by now.

Sometimes I wonder how.

I wonder if He had someone there, someone to scratch behind His ears gently, holding him, while that needle slipped into the vein, just under the skin.

Kind of like Baba died, in my arms, on a spring night not too far from Easter, with snow falling outside windows that would not open, no matter how many doors had closed.

A good God deserves that much.

You can keep all your bullshit about how to treat a God. Keep all the stores that specialize in high-priced, jewel-studded God-collars for Him; keep your high-tech electronic tracking chips so you can find your God when He gets lost. To hell with all your millions of brands of kibble to feed Him with, agonizing over it as if it makes a difference, just because all the other God-owners do.

Me? I'll wonder whose really there for Him at the End. Who will sit there with Him when there is no one else; to stroke His time-wearied head softly. Give Him an embrace.

Grace Him with one last kiss.

When Time comes, as it must, to ease that poor bastard's passage, out of this world.