Write, Son

            Before I'd been inducted into The Society For No Longer Sinners, I packed my bags for a road trip, just me and God, in my maroon Chevy Nova. I wanted to find my other self, the one that shines like a new sun, and I was thirsty and tired.

            We left at night, in August, on my birthday, and God was using the moon like a bobber on His fishing line. What is He trying to catch? It did seem a little odd to be fishing out of the window of a beat-up car, but He's God, and I was fed up with asking so many questions. The air conditioner had blown out in late July, so the breeze from the open window felt like a sleepy child stroking my skin.

             Bugs kept dying against the windshield and, from the air, I smelled a skunk, either run over or angry at having had her sleep disturbed. The bugs and the skunk—I remembered midnights in Wichita Falls, Dad delivering newspapers and buying my brother and me cherry pies or chocolate cakes and taking us skinny dipping in apartment complex pools. "Why did he do that?" I asked God, but silence.

            We passed an exit sign—"Happiness"—and I wanted to turn around, to stop and take a whiz and stretch or sleep, but I kept driving, headlights pushing into the dark. God tugged His line, shaking the moon a little, and now the breeze smelled like Christmas cookies. At Grandpa's in Flint, all the kids slept in the living room while the snow piled up outside like a thrown-off blanket. In the morning, the house was a buzz and we drank strawberry milk and waited out the sleep of one last parent. How did we get here?

            After a couple more hours, my bladder felt like a mango lodged over my groin, and I stopped by the side of the road to pee in some reeds. God stayed in the car, an arm leaning out of the window, His large hand holding the fishing line. I stared into the underbrush, imagining a snake waiting, and my brother and I in a huge sewer pipe beneath the highway in Savannah, wary of moccasins. We found one and ran, and God smiled as I zipped up.  "Are you ready?" God's question filled the car as I got back in. He was struggling with the line; He'd caught something.

              I squirmed in my seat; the moon went dark; He yanked hard. When I was thirteen, sitting beside a road full of semis, deciding which one to jump in front of, I gave God a twenty-seven page essay of tears on why I couldn't go on living, why life was shit, and why things had gotten so fucked up. God handed me a piece of unleavened bread, and I ate it, thinking of Alice, and I drove home, imagining the possibilities of being a sun.