Fiction, Harry McNabb
I asked my congregation, “WHAT DO WE NEED MORE OF IN THIS WORLD???”
And the congregation said back, “GENTLE STORIES!”
“YOU WANT GENTLE STORIES? YOU WANT STORIES? THAT ARE GENTLE?”
“That’s what I want.” said someone I didn’t know. “I need a gentle story in my life, please,” said another person that I didn’t know.
“IF YOU WANT A GENTLE STORY!” I said “IF YOU WANT A GENTLE STORY, I WILL GIVE YOU ONE TOMORROW!”
I paused.
“WHAT SHOULD THIS GENTLE STORY BE ABOUT?” I asked the congregation.
“How about a cute little chicken nugget,” said a lady with a big smile on her face.
“OKAY!” I said. “I WILL GET RIGHT ON THAT! TOMORROW, YOU WILL HEAR A GENTLE STORY ABOUT A CHICKEN NUGGET!”
So, I left the church that I preached at and waited for the bus, feeling dulled. Lately, the sermons had been taking it out of me. The lady who said she wanted me to write about a chicken nugget waited for the bus with me, but when we got on, we did not sit together. We were church friends. Not bus friends. I have few bus friends.
When I got off at my stop, my neighbor Raul was looking at what used to be a tree. I asked him what had happened to the tree.
He said that nothing had changed. It was never a tree. He said he was just there because that particular area had not changed for a while and he was wondering if it would maybe change soon. We stood there for a moment, waiting for it to change. Or change back. I was very sure that there had been a tree there.
I reached in my pocket and brought out some Pokemon cards and gave them to Raul. He said thank you and went away. And as soon as he went away the thing that wasn’t a tree turned back into a tree, the tree in my memory.
I went home to my apartment complex. As I walked there, little white spiders crawled onto my shoes. I smiled. They always waited for me the way I waited for the bus. They got off the bus of my shoes at the person I didn’t like who didn’t like me’s house. We used to be friends. Now he gave me dark looks and I gave him little white spiders.
I went into my apartment and turned on the lights. There were some skeletons in the apartment, looking at me but I waved at them and they turned into a couch, a refrigerator, and a TV.
I went to the bedroom and sat down at my desk where my laptop was. I booted up the laptop. Cheap thing. A Hewlett-Packard. I didn’t use it that much. Most of what I did as a clergyman was convene with God. The way God worked was that he always told me about all the cool stuff he wanted to do in this enthusiastic manner and my job was to match his enthusiasm. Sometimes God wanted to do bad things, but I still had to have enthusiasm for them, or he would never do things that benefited me and my congregation.
I had an hour before I convened with him, giving me very little time to write my gentle story. Gentle stories were a thing I had tried at services just on a lark, but people had really liked them. The first time I told them a gentle story, it was as though I had transformed into Grammy Winner Alicia Keyes. That was how much they loved me and my gentle stories. Some of them wanted to stroke my hair. I had to tell them that that couldn’t be a part of my storytelling time. They stopped. Eventually. They were good parishioners.
I opened Microsoft Word on my laptop. How would I come up with this gentle story before I convened with God, I thought.
I thought to myself, what was the gentlest thing I could think of and then it hit me. A mother helping a child blow their nose.
So I wrote a story about that. A story about a boy who is sick for the first time, feels a tickle in his nose, and pulls on his mom’s jacket. The mother understands the problem and provides the tissue. The solution.
I wrote it all down. And then I felt curiously empty. I felt like everything I was doing was the wrong thing. Like I had gone to the wrong class at school. But it was not just a class in a school.
I felt like maybe I couldn’t save the gentle story on my hard drive. I am a writer of gentle stories, I told myself. I am a writer of gentle stories. I am a writer of gentle stories. And the words felt false in my mouth.
Where did this come from? I thought. I read the story again. I read the first line about the boy who is sick for the first time. Pulling on his mother’s jacket. It hit me.
I didn’t have a mother anymore. I didn’t have anyone I could call on when I was sick. I mean, of course I blew my own nose now. But to have someone show you what a tissue is used for…it wasn’t necessary, but it would be nice. It would be so nice if someone helped me blow my nose. It would be nice if someone did not assume that I knew how and just did it for me.
Then I remembered: the gentle story was supposed to be about a chicken nugget. What was up with me? I must have been super-checked out during my sermon. I had also not been sure of the tree I passed every day’s presence. What was up with me?
I couldn’t bring in this nose-blowing story when the story was supposed to be about a chicken nugget.
So, with my meeting with God happening soon, I quickly wrote another gentle story about a little boy who puts out chicken nuggets for Santa Claus at Christmas. The boy gets up in the night and sees Santa Claus eat a chicken nugget. Santa Claus looks at him and says, “are you the little boy who left me these chicken nuggets?” and he says yes. And then Santa says, “here is a 3D printed model of Deep Space Nine from the Star Wars. I only give these to very special children.”
The next day the boy, playing with his Deep Space Nine model asks his dad what Star Wars is and his dad says that’s my favorite show and they watch Star Wars on Netflix. I didn’t think it was very good. But it had been requested, so I had to write something.
I hit save, printed it out, and readied myself for God’s visit.
God is not corporeal. God is a suggestion of a presence, and he talks to me with the suggestions of words.
I closed my eyes so that I could focus to understand the suggestions.
I would always know when God arrived because my neck ached less.
God, settled in my neck, said the suggestion of “Hello”. I said hello back.
He got right down to business. He suggested that love is as big as saturn’s rings. That we should all hold hands in a giant ring, that all of us affected each other.
(I wondered if this applied to people who weren’t bus friends).
He suggested a question to me that was, “Have you been loving?”
I told God that I was loving him by preaching his word. He said, “What about the spiders?”
I said I didn’t have control over what the spiders did.
God said, have you prayed on the spiders?
I said no.
God said love is as big as Saturn rings. That we should all hold hands in a giant ring. I waited a few moments, then I realized that God was waiting for me to talk and said, “I agree”. I was so checked out!
God asked about my gentle stories. He did not suggest words when he asked this, he just suggested the feeling I got when I read my gentle stories, which was a big, warm, reassuring feeling.
I said I was doing well with them, only I had forgotten I was supposed to write the chicken nugget story and wrote another story that I couldn’t read to my congregation.
God suggested the question, “Why not?”
I said I just always did what the congregation wanted as a way of being friendly.
God suggested that if I thought my first story was better, I should read that one.
I didn’t think so. Making the parishioners upset scared me. I imagined an event from the previous summer at a church potluck when someone had dropped a watermelon covered with Vaseline in the swimming pool. A frightening war had ensued, with these women and men angry at the watermelon and each other, whipped up in a watery frenzy, as they tried capture it for themselves. (After that, there was a no-watermelon rule at potlucks.)
Yeah, I didn’t want my parishioners to get mad at me.
I told God this, but God said my best work would be the best thing to do and that I should have faith. So I said I would. I, after all, had only done requested stories up until that point. I didn’t know how the congregation would react. It was worth a shot.
God and I talked for the next several hours. I didn’t have a lot to do except match enthusiasm. God simply told me little stories of kindnesses from all over planet earth and I would mirror his enthusiasm, by saying things like, “Indeed” and “Gee, that’s great”. The hardest part was listening for so long. But it was my job.
When God said goodbye, I made myself a microwave dinner. I was so exhausted from matching enthusiasm with God, that as soon as I had finished my meal and thrown away my trash, I waved at the couch, TV, and Refrigerator, turning them back into skeletons. They needed to be skeletons so they could create the dreams I would have when my head hit the pillow.
The next morning, I said hello to the skeletons, dressed, and headed out the door. I walked past the guy I didn’t like who didn’t like me’s house and the spiders clambered onto my shoes. On the way to the bus stop, I nodded at Raul who looked like he was going to look at the tree some more. I wondered why I never saw Raul at church. Maybe he wasn’t a believer.
I got off the bus and walked into church with two gentle stories tucked in my pockets. One about a woman blowing her child’s nose and another that I called The Chicken Nugget Christmas. It was a Sunday so the church service would be played on the radio.
I did my preaching well. (God had prepared me with an arsenal of parables.) I finished the sermon and then I said, “DO YOU FOLKS WANT TO HEAR A GENTLE STORY?” and they said, “YES YES YES!” I was a rock star.
I did as God said and read the one about the mother blowing her child’s nose. But by the time I got to the part where the child tugs on his mother’s arm with a snotty nose, there were mutterings and even a few boos in the back.
“Wasn’t the story supposed to be about a cute chicken nugget?” said a lady I didn’t know.
“Yeah, this is a chicken nugget-free story,” said a man I didn’t know, angrily.
“What is this about blowing noses? So gross. Not like delicious chicken nuggets!” said another woman I didn’t know.
I was losing them and I felt extra embarrassed because I was losing people on the radio too. I could see the sound guy looking at me like he thought I was a son of a bitch.
I quickly regrouped. I said, “That was just a joke story! Haha! I can tell you the real one now!”
So, I told them the gentle story about chicken nuggets and Star Wars. They loved that one. Everyone went bananas. They all said “Hallelujah!”
They liked it so much that they swarmed me and touched my hair and even though I had said three weeks ago that they would be banned from the congregation if they touched my hair again, I let them touch it. And, to tell you the truth, I kind of liked it. I had seen what it was like not to have their love and I was glad that I had it again, even though their fingers had germs on them. I made a point, this time, to learn these people’s names
I left the church and got on the bus. I made small talk with a man on the bus. I don’t know why. I kind of felt like making a bus friend. I got off and the little white spiders jumped on my shoes. I saw Raul watching a giant rabbit sway back and forth as if it was listening to R&B. The giant rabbit was where the tree should have been. I gave Raul Pokemon cards and he walked away, the giant rabbit turning into a tree again.
As I neared the guy I didn’t like who didn’t like me’s house, I expected the little white spiders to get off, but they didn’t. The guy was sitting on his front porch.
“Hey,” he said, waving at me.
I stood there looking at him. He spat out a sunflower shell and walked over to me. What did he want?
“Hey, man,” he said, “just wanted to tell you: I heard your story on the radio, the one about the mom blowing the kid’s nose. That was special, man.”
“Thank you,” I said, not sure of what to say to someone I didn’t like. I had always disliked him because he didn’t like me.
“I didn’t like the chicken nugget Star Wars hooey…but that nose-blowing story. I heard it on the radio and as soon as you reached the end, I didn’t hate you anymore.”
I didn’t say anything.
“If you want, sometime, you could come over and watch football with me,” he said, smiling.
“That sounds great,” I said. “That sounds just fine.”
I went home to my apartment, but this time the little white spiders came home with me.
Harry McNabb is a writer based in Dallas, TX. His latest book "Poetry Podcast Murder" was published by Alien Buddha Press. He loves tomatoes and black-capped chickadees.
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