99 Stories of God Read Online Free Page A

children in Indian war bonnets brandishing plastic rifles.”
    “This was in 1947,” he added.

Tragedy Has Obligations
     

35
     
    An artist who had just won an award and was enjoying a nice midlife bump in her career was rumored to have died. The rumor did not, as they say, spread like wildfire, for she was not well known.
    This minor incident affected her deeply and negatively, however. Her work suffered. She became obsessed with how her so-called friends reacted to this rumor of death. Did they cry? No one it seems had cried. But that was because, these so-called friends assured her, they did not believe she had died. There hadn’t been time to cry because the rumor was disproven so quickly. They’d been shocked, of course. Did they set right to summarizing her life and work with superlatives? Again, the answers provided were less than comforting. What did they really think of her anyway? If they couldn’t even tell her what they thought when they’d heard she died?
    A so-called friend quoted from the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, this from a small red book he had recently discovered among what remained of his father’s things.
    Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and the rememberer and the remembered: and all this in a nook of this part of the world .
    The little red book had been a gift from this fellow’s mother to his father, both dead many years now, with no hope of coming back, and here she was, the artist, who had come back as it were and why wasn’t she more grateful about it or at least see the humor in it but she did not.

Just a Rumor
     

36
     
    Penny had never liked the house and spent as much time as she could away from it. It fit her husband perfectly, however. He loved the open rooms, the little plunge beneath the palm trees, the shelves he had built for his many books, the long table where he and his friends played anagrams and poker. When he died, she accepted a position at a university a considerable distance away and rented out the house.
    The new tenants adored it. They paid the rent promptly, planted flowers, and befriended the neighbors far more than Penny ever had. In front of the house they parked their three glorious vehicles—a Harley-Davidson, a Porsche, and a white Toyota Tundra.
    They wanted to buy but offered a meager price. Penny’s price was fair, everyone said so, but the tenants mentioned the roof, the chipped clawfoot tub, the ailing mahogany tree that would have to be taken down, the foundation. There was frequent mention of the foundation. As well they spoke of the risk they would be taking—the possibility of hurricanes and dengue fever, the continuing poor economy. But they adored the house. This was where they wanted to be.
    Penny found them irritating in any number of ways—they were ostentatious, full of self-regard, and cheap. They also did not read. But she knew herself well enough to know that they irritated her because they had found happiness in a simple place where she had not.
    A few weeks before their lease was up, they offered to meet her price, but she refused them.
    After canceling the insurance, she returned to the vacated house. The rooms were immaculate. Even the glass in the windows sparkled. She went from room to room with a clump of sweet and smoldering sage. She tried to think in the language of blessing. Then, with the assistance of a few gallons of accelerant, she set all that had been the structure on fire.

Dearest
     

37
     
    Even though our suspicions are usually aroused by those people who profess too much interest in saving the environment, people who harvest the water and the sun and so forth and maintain steaming mulch piles and kitchen gardens, we do on occasion visit the Lancasters, because oddly enough they give very pleasant cocktail parties. They had made quite a lush oasis around their home and were proud of the variety of wildlife that was attracted to it. They were also of the belief that birds wanted their