Your Holiness, I Beg You

The hole was gently smuggled in across the Bulgarian border. There was no directive. The hole moved silently about the landscape like iron on curtain. Your mother was there and she told us all about it when she got back to Dayton, Ohio, where the cat jumped a few times. It had been twenty years since she left for Europe. The year she left a hot-air-balloon took off and had a tragic crash only several hours later, when the man, young Thompson who I went to college with, shot himself in the head. The day had been bright blue, some puffy white clouds jumping out of the background like forested explosions. When Thompson pulled the trigger, he immediately flipped out of the basket, like in rag doll physics.

The bullet had been aimed upwards and shot upwards. Thompson had been looking down at the gun's barrel. It was his father's gun. I had seen the balloon floating along in the sky thirty minutes before the bullet tore through the balloon's fabric material and caused the previously-rising sky device, having lost weight when Thompson flipped, precisely 190 pounds of good, standard weight, to be exact, to fall slowly. The balloon tore with all its weight. I was studying for the SATs and didn't notice its fiery descent into the baseball field in the center of town. There was a large bang and there were some children remembering moments earlier when they had been screaming and running and looking for a place to hide. When I heard from Coach Jordan, my physics teacher, about all the clandestine chaos and resulting whimpers, I remembered being in the woods with my stepfather some years ago, maybe two, and felling trees left and right. There was definitely a fear of being squashed. I could be a LEGO man too.

As mother flew across the Atlantic Ocean headed for god knows what, because I was only 15 at the time and didn't give a shit about Europe or balloons or sissy music either, she had some fears of her own. Like a shortage of Perrier on board the flight; like obnoxious older women hitting on her; or worse, older anybodies farting next to her in the type of flatulence you associate with death and the most uncanny of resurrections.

But think of the odds: I am a god now, a living and breathing one, and I tell this story because it humors me. To think about what all the mortals like, in their pasty lifestyle of prowls and ill-humor. I can't imagine what they would do if the cows came home. What would you do if the milk boy delivered peat moss? A beer a night keeps the moss deliverer away. Get your best lagers out, is my free advice.

When she lands and when we're done playing the last card game of the night, where I'm stuck on the sidelines, having lost over and over, and have my imagination turning as I watch the mobiles hanging from the ceiling and the wine stench rotting holes in my mouth, I think about the hole. The hole marches back across to Bulgaria and is legally represented by an assortment of other holes. After the trial it gets penetrated by a stampede of beast feet. Where is the herdsmen? Where is the woman with the golden pipes? Where is father, his axe swinging, blowing the masses into pulp and plunder?

My mother takes a picture like a tourist. If I had found out she had done that I would have hated her for several years; I am currently hating her for several right now because she didn't tell me, and I found out about it, because I'm a god now, and when it comes to fourth through sixth dimensions in Bulgaria, I'm there. Hi mom.