Untitled 1

Daniel awoke on the couch, a stabbing feeling in his ribs not only from the mounded chips and salsa but also the realization that it was finally time to try finding God. He dragged the laptop back to the couch. While it fired up, he muted the 1-900 commercials, trying not to ogle the women.

When the battered laptop finally found life, Daniel pecked into Google “finding God.” What he found off the bat was a homepage covered in child-like blue font declaring:

Once I really realize God is there, and become convinced of it, my heart hungers to find God there. Once my appetite is whet, I desire to find God in a much different way than I look for my car keys.

Easily led askew, and constantly fighting off OCD, Daniel rifled through the utility closet to ensure his keys were where he had left them. Then he confirmed in the dictionary that the author, and certainly the editor, should have selected “whetted.” Daniel dialed a number he hadn’t in over 13 years. At the sound of his father’s “hello,” Daniel palmed the phone, glancing at the clock: 2:47 a.m.

“Dad,” he said, his voice soft and pitchy, “I’m alone now, that marriage is done. I’m a Jew all the way. Can you forgive me for marrying the blonde?”

His father cleared his throat, said, “Maggie is out of the picture? Papers have been signed?”

“Yes,” Daniel said, assuming all of the paperwork had in fact been completed. Perhaps there were one or two more documents to be notarized.

“My son,” his father said, his voice creaky, “I disown my disowning of you.”

They talked about Rachel, their dead wife and mother, respectively, and then, both sort of choked up, agreed to talk again about travel arrangements, about who would make the trip out to the other.

Daniel sat back on the couch, left the phone on his lap. He put on earthy music and read the homepage again, trying to feel his heart hungering for God. He thought back to high school, tearing the house apart before having to pick up his friends, how he ranted at his mother about the fucking missing keys and how he was going to kill himself if they weren’t found, how she always read the paper, telling him to look in that corner or that room, how she never got up.

Daniel turned off the music. He felt on the verge of something like that now, only in the opposite direction. He felt capable of falling asleep immediately, waking to find his bags packed and airport shuttle waiting in the driveway to go see his father. He wanted to take, like lashes, his father’s admonitions for all that Daniel had wrought. But first Daniel found himself digging into his porn collection, something that would need throwing out before the flight, it not tomorrow morning than certainly the next, once the hunger became too real, too whetted, when Daniel needed to feed.