Your sister is a Jesus person I can get behind: I can see his badass light in her hair and skin and children. I'm sure it spills from her darling vagina, too!

I keep trying to make stories that could do Jesus to a person—that would keep doing Jesus to you, over and over—but other whores' stories do it instead: soak us in their juicy, euphoric thrills, then abandon us on the roadside.

Fourteen hours later, a slab of beef-gorged Iowa muscle arrives and goes on and on about the farmhouse with the huge front porch and garden and bunker full of doomsday ammunition and eons of land where he and his wife will fuck endless babies into the universe.

He has invented and inhabited an image of perfection. It has green
grass and has never seen anything unlike itself.

If I were your sister during this story, I would be experiencing some kind of enormous awe for this person so different from myself, who sees joining forces with another human being to make a slew of new and redundant human beings as a supreme act of love. I would see him as someone brave, rather than just a stupid everyday person.

I read this story to my mother while she's frying chicken for my father's dinner.

"I read an interview with a writer who says he solves all his characters' problems like equations," she says. "He uses a compass to make plotlines that are perfect circles!"

"Mother," I say, "I would never employ a compass except as a weapon."

"Suit yourself, honey," she says, slapping blood out of the chicken with her spatula.

What she means is: an empty and childless and husbandless life of putting words on paper is what I get for attending a liberal atheist-run institution and reading too much about the decrepit state of low-income vaginas worldwide which are eating her hard-earned tax dollars and jeopardizing her vacation fund.

It is my mother's story now, and I'll admit, she's right.