i have been thinking about this, because i am 5'2 and was raised catholic. in churches, the body of christ lingers ever in the air, on the back of our tongues, in every sconce and shadow. close your eyes. can you draw the shape of white jesus - bent and always muscled, rangy but masculine. i know the slant of his body from every tortured angle. his serene and pleading face - underfoot and rising above. white jesus is always either a baby or he is a 33 year old man, and the halo is goldleaf. jesus on the crucifix is almost always depicted sagging, a little hollow between his back and the wood of the cross.
god fell out of heaven yesterday, and fox news wasn't pleased about it, because god was 5'3". in our picture books, god takes up the whole sky. god can lift a mountain. god removed my brother's rib. my father is a deacon and showed me a diagram of the piece that adam used to form eve, and now "all women" have extra ribs. i was 7 and wanted to talk about if faeries are real or if trees can hear or if magic works, which was not favored. good catholic girls do not look like white jesus. they do not look like white old father-god. they might look like mary (virgin, always an adult, always demure). my brother is 6'0", so the lack of a rib did not stunt his growth. maybe i am smaller because the weight of eve's sin is pulling me down.
they didn't want to do an autopsy on god, which was ironic, because, like, didn't we say god made us in his image? and if god has (according to transubstantiation) been inside my body, can't we, like, get inside of god's body? that feels fair. i was mad particularly because when i tell people i am nonbinary, they talk about cutting open my grave and peeling back my gender so all the pulp of it shows. when i am dead, they tell me, they will uncover my "real" gender like a butterfly and pin her to the board. but god was 5'3".
the problem was that god was 5'3". first of all god was measured in imperial units which was kind of fucked up. the corpse landed inside of a townhouse in baltimore, which was bad for the insurance adjuster. that was not how the rapture was supposed to take place. also, the rapture is not covered under insurance, before you ask. the corpse of god was left overnight due to a confusingly-worded twitter update. i got in my car and drove south for over 9 hours, listening to the radio and my audiobook. i'm re-listening to graceling, but will always take good fantasy book recommendations. the radio said god's body made a strange hum - the announcer said like. well. it sounds like the living room fan from my childhood.
fox news had to say it wasn't god, because god is a man, and men stand up to pee. they had on male experts who talked about how yes, of course, god might have fallen from heaven, and yes his halo has singed through the first layer of the earth's crust - but this is probably not god. maybe one of the angels. micheal? rapheal? god cannot be 5'3", god lifts the rich from perdition and allows them passage into the fine life above us. god's body would be brave and tough and rugged like a lumberjack on a papertowel roll. god's body couldn't be like this - whalefall. nobody knew what to do with the body.
i have a lot of reasons to hate god. i am not here to defend any part of the faith nor of god. unfortunately god was 5'3", and i am 5'2". and i guess some of us maybe felt the same way because i wasn't the only one getting out of the car. we all gathered around the crime scene tape and just stood there and looked at the body of god, who is a small man. god wasn't rotting correctly - his skin was flaking off like feathers overlapping. did i tell you? my girlfriend and i both saw the same god in our dreams, long before we met. we both described the experience as many hands.
all of us who were there bent down and picked up god from the rubble, which was blasphemy. we put him down in a clover patch. a bee rested on his cheek. what do you say at a funeral for god? he didn't look like jesus. people got mad then, because it wasn't funny anymore. they didn't want us to put god on the tombstone, and that made me laugh, and i suggested INRI. unfortunately i was raised super catholic, so that was only funny to like 3 people and of course the honeybee.
i think god would have liked swingsets and public transportation (when it works). i think he would have liked bodegas and good grilled cheese sandwiches. i think he would have lost his mind about dumplings. think of the humor behind getting god stilts or showing god mariokart. it is warm in baltimore so the ground is thawed. we talked about putting god under the ground and under many rocks, which is ironic because like - back in the cave you go. but it felt wrong to close him off from open air. god should sleep with his chest towards heaven, right?
god ruined my childhood and bored a splint through my eye and now i can never see this world without flinching. when i brought him in the clover i still laid him down with a care that almost felt parental. he was so small, is the thing. it was important to be gentle.
