One morning, our little son declared himself God. We laughed and prayed to him at breakfast, thanking him for our meal. He blessed the strawberries, and when we ate them, we became the man, the girl who had picked them, and we knew how they had lived, we felt their tongues in our own mouths.
The teacher called from school, her broken ankle healed during art period. She requested a copy of his school photo, to take home for a small shrine.
When he came home, he wept three hours at the pain of the world; we made him hot chocolate and rubbed his feet. After an episode of “Bluey,” he felt better, and half hour later, the news announced polar bears not endangered after all.
In the evening, my mother called with the news that her hearing had returned, and she was listening to her Linda Ronstadt record, and she no longer planned to kill herself.
We thanked our little son for our dinner, and as we ate, our bodies felt for a moment like maybe the temple the teacher had made in her home, our little son’s face flickering in candlelight. At dessert, he told us that he forgave us, and we knew exactly what he knew, and we looked away.
At bedtime, he told us how we would die. His delivery was calm, and we understood the information to be a gift. From now on, everything would have meaning. He held our fingers and kissed them. He didn’t tell us what would happen after we died, and we didn’t ask.
We bathed our tiny god, and he played with his plastic dinosaurs for whom he grieved once again. We poured a pitcher of warm water over his head, and when we went to towel him off, he was already dry.
We dressed him in his train pajamas, and he asked for a bedtime story. All of us knew the words by heart: “Toad sat and did nothing. Frog sat with him.”
For a moment, we felt a certain temptation. Our parents had said it to us, after all, when we had misbehaved – I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it. His body was so small, so fragile under our large hands. He was not (yet) a god of wrath, but had we not bore witness to his tantrums, to his casual if childish cruelty? His hard slap to our face in the grocery store line over the denial of sugary snack foods, the flushing of a small beloved doll down the toilet in his cousin’s bathroom, hours playing at war and always winning, books on the Titanic, Shark Week, superviruses, black holes, asteroids. What divine rule could these facts portend? Alone, I don’t know if I could have abided him knowing what I knew he knew about me, the power his knowing gave him. I wanted that power back, didn’t I, the power of which I’d been robbed?
But the moment passed, and together, we prayed for the world. He kicked off his blankets, and we felt his skin flushed with heat. We put a cold washcloth to his head and sang La Vie en Rose. He fell into a deep sleep, and in the morning, we read of his miracles and gasped. After breakfast, he declared himself God no longer, and we recognized he knew of our temptation, and he would not forgive us because he was not God anymore; he was our child again and made in our image. We counted the days until our deaths, minus one, and felt meaning press against our necks.
What would today’s God bring? We held our breath and were afraid. ●