What is God to an Open Wound?

There are breathing lungs in the pantry. This is, of course, abnormal.

Not that you would know. You are eight and a half. You are roughly four feet tall. You are in a house that lacks your favourite dog, in the kitchen she once slept in, in a pantry with snacks that can’t tempt her back out from under the bed, as you watch bloody tissue expand. 

“You’ll find, little one,” Grandmother says, “that it’s perhaps easier to not think about it. God isn’t always kind.” Her arm is stretching over your shoulder and past the lungs, grabbing the box of raisins you were sent for.

You are a child, and you are in the living room pulling a nesting doll apart. The wood shrieks terribly as it struggles to come loose.

“Is that the one your mom had?” Dad asks from the rocking chair.

“Mhm.” Grandmother has her eyes fixed on the television. There is news of a tragedy fighting its way into your ears. You are a child, and you pretend you don’t understand the words. The nesting doll shrieks.

“Can I see that, Squirt?” Dad says. You hand him the nesting doll. It is quiet in his hands. He rips the little women in half and sets them carefully on the table in front of him. 

You are a child, and there is screaming on the television. Your father is a man, and he has reached the near end of the nesting doll line. He laughs in nostalgic bliss and pulls out a mound of pulsating flesh. “This one always freaked me out as a kid. They fucked up the paint job or something. But it doesn’t look as bad as I remember it.” He tucks the tragedy back into the doll and returns it to you.

You’re young, and you wash your hands every hour to clean off the blood. Mom says God is kind, and you are trying to convince yourself that you believe her. Death is not a big deal. You had a dog, and now you don’t. There was a girl who took up residence in the desk next to yours, and now it’s empty. There’s no blood, just empty air and names that hold less meaning now. 

Macy Green leaves school one day and the next she doesn’t return. Sixteen of your classmates are absent on Tuesday on account of a girl who isn’t coming home. In their places are twitching muscles, hanging limply off of chairs.

Mom sits on your bed and tells you of Heaven. Macy Green is there, and so is your favourite dog, and they are happy.

“Why couldn’t they have been happy here?”

“God decided it was their time.”

“Macy Green didn’t think it was her time.”

It doesn’t matter what Macy Green thinks is far too cruel for a child. 

“She’s safe now,” Mom says.

“I don’t have a fractions partner.”

Mom leaves you there that night, and you dream of Macy Green.

All nineteen of your classmates are present on Tuesday, and Macy Green asks you if you did your homework. You count sixteen human hearts pulsing steadily in the schoolyard grass.

You don’t see blood for five more years. Mom is on the phone and she talks of cremation and says something about God and you are angry. God doesn’t deserve your dad. God is not entitled to the man who once held you.

Dad returns from work and calls you Squirt and cooks you dinner. You choke down a dish of human skin.

When Mom tells you to fear God, you don’t tell her about the people who returned home, but you think about it yourself. She says God is to be feared for his power and she doesn’t know that you built a world where you can start a stopping heart. How are you to fear God when, apparently, your will overrides his own? This is, of course, abnormal. And Mom would hate you if she knew. So you tell her you fear God.

Dad has dreams of blood and you tease him. You think, maybe, you are God.

You haven’t shared a class with Macy Green in a very long time, and when the twelfth grade begins she sits next to you and smiles. Someone complains about being sick last week and Macy Green says she hasn’t been sick since the fifth grade. Your classmates bicker and call this impossible and you are God and you’re not afraid.

But, really, if you were God, wouldn’t you be more? You are a child who sleeps with the light on and panics when Dad is home late. When you sleep you dream of your favourite dog, huffing her last breaths in your arms. Grandmother told you not to think about it, and you’re very good at that; you have killed death by not thinking about it. But you’re thinking about it now. You’re thinking about sunshine in the kitchen and her softly breathing body and you’re thinking about empty air and an entitled God and you are weeping and you are angry. And she is licking your hand. You’re in the kitchen, and she is licking your hand, and you’re dripping with blood, and she loves you. 

When you wake up you’re back to being God and you’re back to not thinking about it.

Then Mom dies, but not in a way that involves life.

She begins ranting about life without death. Her eyes are crazed, and she drips with blood, and she says Satan has come and is ending death. Maybe you’re not God. Maybe you’re a devil. She holds you and weeps in fear, blood pouring from her eyes, and if you are a devil then a devil is kinder than God, because you decide Mom never believed in him. And the tears stop. And you find her eyes in the sink later that night, but she’s smiling, so it’s okay.

Grandmother was right; it is easier to not think about it. God has no power outside of the power you lend him, and you have lended God no power, and you are God, and you’re on the kitchen floor again, holding your favourite dog, and God comes to you.

You have been on this kitchen floor enough times that you know the scene by heart. Her fur is wet. You are staining her with blood—but she licks it away. Slowly, gently, she licks your hands, and she loves you, and she is God. She stops breathing before you wake. You can restart her heart. You can do that, easy as creation. You can.

You find a rotting corpse in your bed. You sleep in the stench.