Daddy

"What you got to understand..." Al was lying on his back with his head touching mine so that, to someone looking down from the clear blue sky above - a giant or a bird or God - we must have looked like the hands of a clock. Al, tall and lanky, would be the minute hand. Me, still short even though my 8th birthday was only two months away, the hour hand. "What you simply have to understand, is that, to God, you are just like that bug." I felt his head move as he nodded up at a crane-fly, hanging lazily in the air. "Or there might be aliens bigger 'n us than we are 'n that bug". He reached up and cupped his hands around the insect, imprisoning it in the cage of his fingers.

" 'n God, or the alien, might just decide to squish you like this bug." He closed his hands slightly, shrinking the cage around the captive crane-fly. I pictured the bug seeing the walls closing in on him, hopelessly trying to push through to freedom...

"But God wouldn't do that! I been good! I am good!" But I wasn't sure that I was good enough - not for God. There were some things...

"God don't care about that at all! God likes squishin' people!" But Al opened his hands and the crane-fly, after a short period in which I imagined him coming to terms with his miraculously regained freedom, drifted upwards and away until I lost sight of him against the cloudless but somehow less perfect sky.