What Once Was & Will Never Happen Again – Kai Edward Warmoth

July 11, 2019

We had heard about God coming down amongst man on Tuesday, while waiting on the bacon grease to solidify enough that it could be scraped out of the pan. I had said repeatedly that the next coffee can I’d buy would be a metal one so we could use it to store the grease for her mother’s green bean recipe. I had instead forgotten and bought the coffee in the plastic container. She wasn’t upset with me though. “Next time.” Her patience with me was the first sign that maybe a tethering ladder still connected us to the Idyllic.

A crowd in Lima had reacted to the news of God’s visit with wide-eyed frenzy/panic and whatever their version of the National Guard is had to come out and man barricades. Three people died but who knows if it was from the crowd or the soldiers or they were scheduled to die anyways. New York didn’t really have much of a response to the news because there was an innate knowledge that God wouldn’t visit Gomorrah on his few free days this eon. Miami Beach offered to give him a grand tour and we all wondered if there was any self-awareness left or if that is what sinks into the ocean first when water rises. Hollywood too. Podcast hosts mocked the idea of God wanting to parade down an avenue of shit and grime to stargaze at pedophile constellations. Shanghai didn’t even flinch, all quiet from Beijing’s national media.

Palestinians chucked rocks at an IDF patrol and they replied with whatever the organic, environmentally safer version of napalm is; a fourteen year old named Isa’s stomach pops open from the scathing jelly on his navel and the doctor who gets their first vomits on the wound from the smell of half-digested dolma and milk. The Wailing Wall has a gift shop and the wi-fi doesn’t work this week. 

Alan Richardson would like to meet the Lord and ask about his mother who died of cancer in ’93 but his is one of the Chevrolet factories that hasn’t relocated yet and Tuesday is a work day but maybe this weekend He’d be in Tulsa and Alan could drive the family into the city to meet him.

They were saying God walked through a crowd in Tacoma, shaking hands with the saved and it was as if He didn’t even see the damned, walked right past them and onto another handshake. Local reporter Teresa McClellan asked him where his Son was, whether Jesus was even real and God smiled and shook the hand of the teenage boy next to her. The cameras they had caught him in full HD glory but the lenses were deteriorating rapidly from that point onwards. Television new anchors commented on the brightness of a Divine Being on such an overcast day and, Tim, it looks like we’re gonna be seeing the sun halfway through our ten day forecast. Let’s take a look at the live doppler radar.

When God was in Moscow He shook hands with Vladimir Vasiliev, 23, who had stabbed a pharmacy worker to death four days prior and remained on the run. 

The New York Times gave a special feature to their youngest half-Indian editorialist who penned an op-ed about the disappointing maleness of God as He calmly strode down Romeo Plank, outside of Detroit. She dutifully collected the statistics on the racial backgrounds of who He did and did not clasp hands with but the results weren’t what would make an article viral so she put her MFA to proper use and still managed to get the right ratio. Faceless people with anime avatars repeatedly asked her to confirm whether she did or did not get a handshake, or even put her hand forward. She had not, nor was she even close enough to do so.

Fatima Shari’ati brought bread to her grandmother in hospice and they sat in the heat of Tehran, talking about everything besides God’s world tour. Her fast-weakening hands shook as she touched her face and laughed about how she never had seen a tall man lead a revolution, just fight for them. Someone died in the adjoining room and a nurse prayed quietly over the corpse.

We watched this on the news and then a commercial told us about dish soap that was safe to use on your animals. She told me that her dog, after a bath, would immediately search the yard for a dead rodent or remnants of deer piss to roll in, to bring back the scents of life and the sense of belonging. No animal in their right mind wants to smell like an air-conditioned boardroom in the nice part of town.

God was naked in his walks and HuffPo wonders if this is toxic chauvinism. What about survivors of rape and their need to not be reminded that penises exist? New episode of NCIS advertised in between the paragraphs because the ad blocker has to be turned off. “Why is God a male?” discussed passionately while someone packs a bowl and do we really know if that is how They identify? The pastor for the local police department told me she considered gender a cage of the human that the Divine must pass through when she bummed a cigarette off of me outside the funeral home because another cop shot himself in the head when he was drunk and his wife was at the Jason Aldean concert. His son found his body in the bathtub. Now I know Glock makes a .357 and its hollowpoints leave a mess in their wake.

European news streams didn’t censor naked God as he tromped down a gravel road in the better part of Melbourne’s countryside. His flaccid penis wasn’t shockingly, or even much, larger than mine and I was confident that teenage porn use hadn’t completely ruined my body image and it’s interaction with reality. God was even seen chuckling and His Divine Light shimmered with a flash of coral hue when a man in the crowd told an innocuous joke about public indecency. 

A suicide bombing disintegrated the support structure of a hospital being constructed in South Sudan, turning a late night security guard’s body into a Rorschach test on the concrete wall ten feet behind him. Investigators were two hours late to arrive and left after getting their fingerprints on everything, stuffing a shred of skin and cloth into a bag and forgetting their coffee cups at the scene. MSNBC asked for a comment from God as He surveyed the grey waters off of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and He turned His head towards an equally grey old woman who had brought her grandson’s favorite stuffed animal (an otter) and said he had been run over by a self-driving truck just a week prior. God brushed His fingertips down her cheek and a teardrop formed a new constellation somewhere, but not here and not visible in the West for another five hundred years.

It happened to be that God was fond of chipmunks and a family of them dashed at His feet for a moment before scampering off into the wood, somewhere in southern Wyoming, when He was casually hiking the trails around a diminutive mountain’s base. 

I asked whether or not she thought He’d come this way; maybe take a promenade down our road and see the garden she had been painstakingly building on since the first warmth of March. He’d see my mulching and notice the spot I had cleared for the Pan statue I was waiting to arrive in the mail. 7 to 10 days delivery time. They had said one of His first stops was the ruins around Athens so maybe He appreciated the pictures taken of Him from all the angles throughout time. Maybe Pastor MacDonald had been wrong about the jealousy of He who slaughtered the Ammonites. 

She said her garden was nothing but earthly delights compared to the gardens in Paradise and she’d be embarrassed if He saw it with its weeds and crooked line. I reminded her that Paradise might be beautiful but not enough so that one never wanted to leave. What other reason was there for Him to be running His fingertips along a chipped perimeter fence around a grazing field in the Netherlands? 

“Maybe all of those cell towers and satellites and smog were blocking His view and He decided to come remind himself?” I thought about all of the books I’ve read and then read again a few years later. And then we turned off the television and both of us got ready for work.