When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.– Oscar Wilde.
Life is a series of random events, strung together by sentience. People are conjunctions.
So, Sally shouldn’t have been surprised when she opened the door to her flower shop and found a 1955 Chevrolet impaled through the rear brick wall. She shouldn’t have been surprised by the large man standing on her Easter lilies, staring through the newly created hole in the ceiling of the flower shop, shaking his fist and swearing (apparently). And, she shouldn’t have been surprised by the occasional helium balloon shooting up through the roof and into the sky.
She shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was.
“Why, God, oh why me?” she demanded. “I’ve got a wedding on Saturday, and my best candelabra was flattened. And how am I going to replace the flowers? Those Easter lilies were for St. Joseph the Protector!”
She turned her attention to the man. “Look, Sheik of Araby, you’ve ruined my morning and my weekend. You better have a good explanation…” The Sheik did not appreciate her tone, although he couldn’t understand a word she said, and let loose a flood of profanities (apparently) in her direction.
Sally cried again, “God, why me?”, and then launched into her own diatribe directed at the Sheik.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed one helium balloon, a black one with “Over the Hill and Loving It” on the front and a buzzard, a cactus and a longhorn skull on the back. It floated toward her, then came to a stop directly in front of her.
And then The Buzzard spoke.
“Ok, here is why…”
Sally didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. She was stunned, her jaw slack.
The Buzzard was now animated, flying around the balloon, its beak (apparently) producing words. The Sheik didn’t seem to notice.
Sally, surprised for the second time in one day, could say only, “What?”
The Buzzard rubbed the underside of his beak with a wing and pulled out a smartphone. He scrolled through the messages.
“Look, you are Sally Heperdean, right?”
Sally nodded.
“And you did ask ‘God, why me?’ didn’t you?”
“Uh, yes,” Sally mumbled.
“Ok, well…I’m here to answer your prayer.”
Sally stared, stupefied.
“Are you God?” she asked.
The Buzzard looked skyward as it swooped to maneuver through the arms of the cactus.
“Of course not. He’s busy working on the Big Crunch. And let me tell you, it’s gonna make the Big Bang look like a firecracker. But, yeah, I’m God’s messenger.”
“A cartoon crow on a balloon is a messenger from God?”
“A cartoon BUZZARD. Yes, and I am a messenger from God. Look, God tried a burning bush before, and what did it get him? He still had to remake the tablets the next day. We tried writing stuff down, but look at what happened to the Bible. Something got lost in the translation.”
“From Hebrew to Greek to English?” Sally questioned.
“No, from the infinite to the finite,” replied The Buzzard. “Back in the day, we would just appear as normal people…maybe the hair burning or three heads… you know the drill. Sometimes not. Now everyone has a video camera and if we do that stuff we end up on the Gram. Cartoon characters work. Hulk t-shirts are a hoot, even though that is yesterday’s news. I was hoping Black Adam would catch on, you know…The Rock…but the public is fickle. Anyway, here is the answer to your prayer.”
“God answers prayers?”
The Buzzard was doing figure eights around the bright yellow sun and the longhorn skull.
“Of course. I mean, not all of them. Just a select few, and we limit the content. Like, e.g., one person prays for the destruction of all the Israelis and the other for the destruction of all the Arabs. If we answered everyone’s prayers, we got camels running the oil fields. For a while, we answered a few people’s prayers all the time, but the next thing you knew, they would think they were god–not good. Then we went to this rotation method, kinda like PowerBall without the money. We answer about two and have million prayers per day, less on Sundays. So, everyone in the world has a prayer answered about once every 8 or 9 years. Your last answered prayer was New Years Eve, 2014.
“What?”
The Buzzard was getting less interested by the minute. The novelty of being Disneyesque was wearing thin.
“You remember Billy Jerolds?”
She put a finger to her lips. “The name’s familiar, but I can’t place him,” she said.
“You were humping him on New Year’s Eve, 2013? Worst lay of your life and you said, ‘Please, dear God, please get this over with and make this guy…’”
“Yeah…that’s OK,” she interrupted as she lowered her face into her hand. “I remember.”
The Sheik, oblivious to the entire conversation with The Buzzard, was carefully inspecting his car.
“Look, Sally,” The Buzzard said, “I’d love to gab more, but, I gotta go. So, here is the answer: The Sheik here is in love with 1955 Chevrolet, and he should be, they don’t make cars like that anymore. I prefer the ’57 to the ’55, but both are classics.
“Anyway, his radiator is busted. He’s going to need two new radiator hoses. The new hoses come from a plant in Romania. If the plant sells just two more hoses, then the guys on the assembly line get a bonus. One of ‘em will buy rabbit ears for his television set. That way, his teenage daughter can watch soccer in a couple of months. That’s it. Bye!”
The Buzzard’s movement slowed to a crawl and then stopped.
“Hey,” Sally shouted, “All of this just so a teenager in Romania can watch soccer? Why?”
The bird had now flown to its rightful position in the sky above the cactus and skull. The balloon floated upward through the hole in the roof and then into the clouds. The Buzzard looked at her and winked.
“Do you think you were the only person in the world getting a prayer answered today?”