99 Stories of God

25. Veracity

Churches have pews, and when the congregation falters they have too many pews. They end up in the kindergartens and the music rooms and the covered walkways. They seem to multiply. Fine old oak uncomfortable pews.

Then they start showing up in bars and finished basements and in mudrooms where people take off their boots and shoes.

There was a little girl once in a birthday bounce house that wasn’t tied down properly. A freak gust of wind picked it up and sailed it three backyards over, where it killed a beagle eating his supper.

Nothing happened to the little girl. She was a funny kid anyway. She never showed emotion about anything. But people felt terrible about the dog.

The young couple whose dog it had been had a pew in their kitchen, but they got rid of it. They replaced it with a bar made from the rear of a ’64 Airstream Globetrotter. It became apparent pretty early on that it wasn’t an actual rear of a Globetrotter but a copy. The neighbors who had felt so sorry for them began thinking they were frivolous and, even more, couldn’t be trusted.