Storm

A thousand pieces of God fell from a darkened sky. I ran to put out buckets and barrels, stuck out my tongue, waved my arms in greeting.

“Hello, hello, liquid God,” I shouted, so happy to have such a visit.

“Hello yourself, little fool,” God shouted back. The blessings rained down hard. They hit me and stung. I grabbed my impervious jacket, with the loose hood, and ran for shelter. I ran and ran, soaked to the bone wherever the jacket didn’t cover.

“What’s this?” I thought angrily. God was exploding around me. Drenching the little planet in snarling, dangerous blessings. Lightening ripped the sky. Trees released the younger leaves and they flew to their deaths in glorious waves of green. “Good-bye, good-bye,” they sang, the harmonies haunting, perhaps unaware they were soon to disintegrate. Perhaps not.

Blessings plastered the west side of the new house, and began to take root in the faulty, shrunken siding, originally meant to exclude such events. Before my eyes, moss, mold, mildew. Before my eyes, infestations of everything wrong with the world. Before my eyes, the drowning began.

“Stop it,” I screamed to God. “You don’t know what you’re doing. We can’t swim in this. It’s too deep.”

God seemed to relent. The lifejacket was a large broken branch that floated in the torrent of blessings. I clung to it and drifted along in the river of time, so frightened, so cold.

“You can let go, you know,” God said, quietly. “You’re going to get bruised hanging on like that.”

“Get away from me,” I said, undone, filled with disbelief.

The blessings were too sharp. Too heavy. I had gashes in my chest, and I suspected I’d broken a rib or two. It was painful to breathe. It seemed I was not among the chosen after all. Luxury liners floated by, filled with fancy people, beautiful people, gorging themselves on delicacies I couldn’t even pronounce. Their sea gleamed golden as they sailed into a fractured horizon.

“You can let go,” God said again. “Sweetheart, listen. You can let go.”