Why God Loves Us

Why God Loves Us



Jimmy was a strange boy. He lived in a strange house on the highest hill of the Old Town, right next to the ancient and crumbling Wellington Cemetery. His family was quite strange, too. They never attended either of the town’s two churches or any social gatherings, and that alone was a topic for the tongues of the buzzing gossips that populate small towns like Riverton. The boy's mother hadn't been seen in public for quite some time but no one seemed to care enough to really notice.

Jimmy attended a small school of wood and red brick, a haphazardly maintained building with a leaky roof and peeling paint and bleary windows that always seemed gray with grime. It stood within an easy walk of his home. From his seat by the window, he could see the ill-tended cemetery. On Jimmy’s last day in school, he brought his assignment to class, an essay by which his English teacher, Mrs. Bell, hoped to inspire creativity in the young minds in her charge. The class was held in a small dreary room with regimented rows of narrow desks uncomfortable as church pews. Jimmy slid into his wooden seat and watched the fat boy across the aisle struggle to squeeze his flabby bulk into the narrow space of his desk chair. Jimmy felt no sympathy for this boy named Tyler, who, like many classmates, disliked Jimmy and often showed it by taunts or malicious pranks. He did, however, manage a surreptitious glance and a nervous smile at Amy in the seat adjacent to the fat boy. She was wearing a pink bow in her light brown hair and looked very pretty. But as usual, she pretended not to notice Jimmy and he quickly moved his gaze away, his face reddening, his eyes now averted and his attention ostensibly turned to the paper clutched in his hands. Jimmy tried to forget that once he had overheard Amy telling her friend Jen how she disliked Jimmy’s strange smile and hated it when he smiled at her.

Attendance was taken and, within minutes, Mrs. Bell began to address the day’s assignment. She was a small, plump woman, animated with the only burning passion left her; a genuine love of teaching. She tried very hard to explain why an assignment such as this morning’s exercise, a five hundred word essay, could be very important to the students. She spoke of the need for feeding the imagination while young and keeping a spark of creativity and wonder alive and well-nourished through one’s entire life; and she had barely finished when Jimmy’s arm shot up and began to wave with an almost comical desperation the teacher couldn’t help but smile at. Clearly such enthusiasm showed she had been correct to stimulate the minds of these children with an exercise that relied on their own powers of imagination. The subject of the essay had been simple; to describe a favorite and beloved pet. For the child who had none, an imaginary pet would do just as well. Whatever sparked thoughtful creativity, Mrs. Bell felt, must surely be a good thing.

“Mrs. Bell, Mrs. Bell… May I please read my homework now?” asked Jimmy.

“You certainly can, Jimmy,” said Mrs. Bell. :”Everyone is going to read their essay today.”

“”No,” said Jimmy, “That’s not what I mean, Mrs. Bell.” And he smiled a very strange smile. “Mrs. Bell, I mean can I read it now?”

Mrs. Bell hesitated slightly. She was an orderly woman who lived an orderly life in an orderly world and she preferred her students to read their homework in orderly fashion. She would call their names in proper order and they would smile nicely and stand, presenting their work. Jimmy, you must wait your turn…the words were almost on her lips but something caused a hesitation. Was it Jimmy’s smile that disturbed her? He was usually such a nice, quiet little fellow—she couldn’t understand why the other students picked on him so—but she remembered the fuss and commotion he had caused in Mrs. Pruitt’s class last fall when something had apparently provoked him and he had thrown a tantrum. She had been out sick that week but Abigail Higgs, her best friend and fellow teacher, assured her it was extremely unpleasant. Of course she knew Abby had a tendency to exaggerate things, and even the most trivial of molehills could become a mountain when she was in one of her moods.

But above all else, Mrs. Bell was a cautious woman. Why risk unpleasantness if you could avoid even the possibility of it? If Jimmy did have some minor emotional issues, she wasn’t going to stir the pot. It was far too beautiful a day for unnecessary grief. The sunlight slanted through the windows and rays fell on Jimmy’s upturned face, so alive with expectation and even excitement. The boy looked positively angelic.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Bell, “Of course you can, Jimmy. Why, you can read it right now.” Mrs. Bell had never seen Jimmy so animated before over anything let alone a homework assignment. She was also aware of her rising curiosity about what type of pet, real or imaginary, the boy had written about. Perhaps it was wishful thinking on her part but might not the other children begin to relate to Jimmy in a way free of teases and taunts if they could just relate to a normal and shared experience like the love of a small animal companion?

And Jimmy stood so erect Mrs. Bell couldn’t help but smile. His customary slouch was gone, and excitement danced on his very tongue as he began to read.

“Why God Loves Us All...by Jimmy Sirka,” read the boy proudly. But then, after a long pause, a sudden spasm of nervousness seemed to grip the boy. His nasal tone became increasingly high and unpleasant and even Mrs. Bell's optimism began to falter.

"My Papa told me once that I have a very special thing what he calls a link and it's with God and he can't understand it but says it's a really wonderful thing to have like maybe even a gift..."


It took only a sentence or two before Mrs. Bell realized with dismay that Jimmy had misunderstood the assignment. What the boy was reading was an attempt to describe his personal relationship with God; and while Mrs. Bell was a Christian woman who would have welcomed an essay of this sort under different circumstances, she could already hear the other children trying (but not too hard) to muffle their laughter. But despite her concerns she let the boy read on and turned a stern face to the rest of the class. Jimmy was oblivious of all this and the other children stopped their sniggering when Mrs. Bell’s gaze fell upon them. The poor boy misunderstood, she thought, why make him an object for the cruel ridicule of the other children? She decided she would just praise his reading skill, move on to the next child—this time in alphabetical order!—and no harm would be done. That was the wisest and kindest solution.

But she wasn’t prepared for the final line in Jimmy’s essay and it left her speechless.

“…and God loves us if we’re white or we’re black or rich or poor or big and strong or little and weak and God loves us all because we’re so tasty to him…”

The classroom erupted in the howling laughter of the children.

Oh dear, thought poor Mrs. Bell. Oh Dear.


****
Despite Mrs. Bells best attempts to end the laughs and jeers as fast as she could, several classmates followed Jimmy after the dismissal bell and taunted him mercilessly. They laughed and danced about him, pulled at his clothing, hooted unceasingly as he walked through the playground, mocking and taunting until he was forced to break into a run to get away from them. Fat Tyler and Bobby Martin threw small stones that struck him on his shoulder and even Amy laughed. All Jimmy wanted was to get home, far away from these children that seemed to hate him so.


Exhausted and with tears staining his cheeks he ran to his home, the rundown house his father had once promised to make like new but never did. He had dropped all his school books while running but didn't really care. Sasha, his plump tux cat, ran to greet him, purring and rubbing against his legs though he failed to respond with his customary pets. His only thought was that his father shouldn't see him like this, a boy his age crying like a girl.

But, as usual, his father wasn't there to see him. He was in the basement, probably drunk again, and making clattering and crashing sounds while chanting unintelligible words like a crazy man shrieking gibberish. At least he had avoided the humiliation of having to explain his disheveled state to Papa who had been constantly drunk and angry since mother had--




Jimmy missed his mother. He had loved her very much even if she had 'spells'--his father called them that-- where she could be very cruel to him. He wished God hadn’t taken her but he understood why. She had taken one of her 'spells' the day God came for her and she had ordered the terrified boy to undress because he had been a very, very bad boy, he had forgotten to feed his damned pets and the stupid animals were a dammed nuisance when they started crying for their food and what would the neighbors think of the caterwauling, such stupid pets with stupid names and this stupid little boy who now simply must get into the bathtub and take his punishment. Jimmy knew what would come next. Beneath his clothes his scrawny body bore the marks of countless scars. She would turn on the scalding hot water and try to hold Jimmy in the tub for as long as she could. Jimmy was screaming in the worst pain of his life, crying for help from his Papa, from anyone...and God had heard.

No Jimmy didn’t hate God for taking away his Mother; he understood it had been done to protect him. But he missed her.

Ignoring the sounds of his father in the basement, Jimmy looked upward and whispered, “God...are you there God?”

But the only sound was the wind whistling through the upstairs broken window his father hadn’t fixed yet and the soft creaking of floorboards from the attic.


****
"Jimmy, you're late for class, ' said Mrs. Bell, as gently as she could. She had seen the boys running after Jimmy the previous day and it had appalled her. She meant to do something about the situation...it just couldn't go on like that.

Some of the boys, Tyler chief among them, were already making snorting sounds just loud enough for Jimmy to hear.

Jimmy ignored them. He smiled at his teacher. It was a strange smile and Mrs. Bell was taken aback. She did not like that smile one bit.


“Oh, Mrs. Bell,” said Jimmy, "I went upstairs so quietly, so quietly that my papa wouldn’t hear me and I was very careful and I took out the old rusty key and unlocked that big old wood door--I remembered the words Papa taught me and I erased the marks on the floorboards he had made after God took Mother-- and I whispered, “God? God? You want to follow me to school today, yesterday I wrote about you in class...” and I think he liked that because he made that deep funny sound way back in his throat and quietly, so very quietly he followed me to school and I waited in the trees at the end of the playground and God and me watched the sun rise all red and pretty and God was so very happy to be out and free…”

"Oh, Jimmy..." began Mrs. Bell.

"God is like that animal you taught us about, Mrs. Bell. He can't be seen unless he wants you to see him. What was that animal, Mrs. Bell?"

"A lizard, Jimmy" said his teacher. "A chameleon. But please, Jimmy--"

Jimmy ignored her and turned to his classmates. And at the very moment he did--

Something Impossible squeezed through the small door behind Jimmy, It’s massive bulk slithered, stretching bone and flesh to manage the narrow opening. It was vaguely bear like but larger then the largest Kodiak that ever lived. It crouched and Its misshapen skull pushed against the low ceiling. It waited silently behind the boy, contemplating its new environment and the promise it held. The eyes were insectoid, clustered above a tentacle-lipped maw more suitable to an alpha predator of the deep. The shaggy reddish fur almost hid the nexus of snake like tentacles that writhed lazily along the beast’s underbelly.

"You shouldn’t have laughed at me,” said Jimmy. “You shouldn’t have hit me with stones. I hate you, all of you...yes I do...even if God loves you.”

Mrs. Bell was the first to mercifully faint.