Emily Bliss Pickless lived with her mother, whose most recent boyfriend was a man named John Crimmins. They had met at a gun range, where Emily’s mother met most of her boyfriends, although she made herself a rule of never double-dipping them. Emily’s mother thought this John Crimmins was “darkly intelligent.” Emily did not share this opinion, but she didn’t mind him. When he wasn’t around, she didn’t miss him either.
The first thing he told Emily in confidence was that he might be the Son of God. “It’s a hypothesis I’m checking out,” he said. “I got the same initials, don’t I?” He grinned at her. He thought Emily was as dumb as is.
“I could never be the Son of God,” Emily said, not caring much.
“No, you couldn’t,” John Crimmins agreed.
He had many things he didn’t like, whole lists of them, and urged Emily to be equally discriminatory in her life, though he warned her against adopting his particulars. Emily didn’t like him enough to adopt his particulars. J.C. didn’t like mayonnaise, dogs, or beer in cans.
“Why don’t you like dogs?” Emily had asked.
“Do you know anything about the Son of God?”
“Not much,” Emily admitted.
“He was nailed to a cross of wood and left to die hanging in the air.”
“Well, I know that,” Emily said. “Everyone knows that.” To most people, it was the most compelling part of the story. She also had heard that he had come back, been resurrected, which she found extremely revolting, repugnant, and impossible.
“What else do you know?” J.C. demanded. He was sitting hunched over the breakfast table watching some cereal turn the milk blue. Her mother was still asleep.
In the first few weeks of their acquaintance, Emily had pretended that she didn’t know how to read. She’d ask him what signs said, billboards, magazine covers, newspaper headlines, and the like, and he’d always render them incorrectly. He’d change only one word sometimes but often entirely alter the meaning. They’d amused themselves each in their own way in this manner, for some time. Emily didn’t think he’d ever caught on.
“Nothing else,” Emily said. “I forget.” You had to act dumb around adults, otherwise there was no point in being around them at all.
“When the Son of God died, there wasn’t any of him left to bury. Even his bones disappeared. Every last scrap of him vanished. Do you know the whys and wherefores of that?”
Emily shook her head ever so slowly back and forth. Her mother lacked all discrimination when it came to men.
“The dogs took everything. The dogs that were always hanging around crucifixions. The crucified hung there as food for dogs, grim pickings for dogs. The reason the Son of God disappeared from the tomb was that he was never in the tomb, he was in the bellies of dogs. And to this day, you know, a dog will eat you. If you’re in a room with a starving dog and you’re powerless for some reason or another, he’ll eat you.”
“Not if he likes you, he won’t,” Emily offered.
“Likes you,” J.C. snorted. “Even if he loves you, he will.”
Emily’s mother walked into the kitchen. She looked at Emily as if she didn’t know how she had gotten there for an instant, but then she looked pleased. Though her mother loved her dearly, this was a way she often looked at her after the separation of some hours, particularly night’s hours. Emily didn’t mind it much, feeling like a little flower that had just come up to everyone’s surprise.
“Another thing that I don’t like,” J.C. went on, “is other people’s soaps.”
“You haven’t been using my duck and chick soap, have you?” Emily had her own tinctured soap, which she didn’t like using as their distinctive shapes would be blurred if she did. Because of this reluctance, Emily’s person was always somewhat soiled. “Mom, don’t let him use my soap.”
“J.C. wouldn’t touch your soap, honey,” her mother said, and yawned.
J.C. and Emily watched her yawn hugely. Emily was worried that one day her jaw would lock open like a sprung door, and there they’d be: her mother wouldn’t be able to work, and Emily pictured them wandering around in rags, begging, a little veil over her mother’s mouth to keep people from pitching coins in and keep the bugs out.
“I hate watching you wake up,” J.C. said. “Woke up you’re a fine, delightful, good-looking woman, but your waking up is a process I don’t believe any man should be subjected to.”
Holding her hands in front of her mouth and still yawning, her mother retreated back into the bedroom.
“She should take medicine or something for that,” J.C. said.
“So is that the only reason you don’t like dogs?”
“Isn’t that enough of a reason? I’m telling you something historically accurate. Dogs have been getting away with too much for too long.”
“Have you ever bitten anyone?” Emily asked. “I wish I could bite someone whenever I felt like it.”
“You look like a biter,” J.C. said. “You feel like biting me?”
But Emily demurred.
“Come on, come on.” The arm J.C. extended had black hairs growing on it up to the elbow, where they abruptly stopped. “Not everyone would allow you this opportunity.”
Emily continued to demur, suspecting that if she did sink her teeth into his arm, he’d swat her across the room and right into the boneyard. She had things to do in this life, although she was unsure as to what they were.