Shortly after I learned about God, I turned him into Cheerios
and blasted him to death with piss. I must have been four or five. There was a box of Cheerios in the bathroom, and my parents had trained me to toss a handful of Cheerios into the toilet and practice my aim by blasting the little rings of toasted whole grain oats until they became so soaked with urine and toilet water that the rings shed their layers and dissolved into starchy, thin streams in the toilet bowl. This, too, then, was the fate I bestowed upon God that day.
It was grandma who first told me. She caught me alone in the kitchen, scraping chicken nugget crumbs and ranch puddles off my ceramic plate and into the trash. Have your parents told you yet? she asked. I ran the plate under hot water in the sink and thought how my parents had told me a lotof things, so surely they must have, whatever it may be. But she started before I could answer.
She told me how a long time ago there was nothing but then He created the heaven and the Earth, and the Earth was then populated and humans did evil things and we were punished for those evil things and forced to start over, and He had a son who was holy, so holy he personally took the brunt of all our sins (a mysterious new word to me, but I could still tell it was bad) and died with them, but he came back shortly after he died, and grandma continued and said how great He is and how grateful I should be for Him and the whole time I didn’t know Who she was referring to—whether it was dad or grandpa or some other guy. Then she said how God was responsible for everything—for the oceans, for the sky, for mountains, for sunrises and sunsets, for the daylilies outside in the flowerbeds; but also for lightning storms and tornadoes, for spiders and snakes, for all the sicknesses in the world—and that made Godcomprehensibly incomprehensible. It made Godthe foundation, the abyss, an unexplainable light of shining darkness inside every person.
She hunched down and looked me in my eyes—I had never seen her so serious before—and she told me, if I know what’s best for me, I must live my life in Hisvision. I did not say anything in return. I only nodded and told her I had to use the bathroom.
A couple aberrant Cheerios stuck to the sweat on my palm, and so with my other hand I brushed them into the toilet with the rest. I watched the cereal targets drift aimlessly in the water. I could never get myself to pee unless I pictured the Cheerios as something or someone I wanted to attack. It was usually villains I’d seen on Scooby-Doo or Courage the Cowardly Dog, but that day nothing came to mind. Finally, a weak stream of urine released onto a gathering of Cheerios, and I noticed under my breath I had started saying, God God God God God God, calling every Cheerio I’d hit by the same name as the mysterious man in the story grandma had just told. The Cheerios dissolved and blended with the water when I flushed. When I came out of the bathroom, grandma asked me if I had gotten everything in the toilet. I told her I had, but I didn’t tell her how.
Years later, she brought me to her church for the first time and even introduced me to the pastor who would deliver the sermon. But that day, when the pastor spoke, I did not listen. Instead, I spent the service flipping through the Bible I found in the pew rack in front of me, trying to find the same stories grandma had told, and begging God to forgive me for killing and flushing him so many times years ago.