Small Father Pieces

            The glossy cover of the religion textbook slides through his hands.  It is the first day of summer.  He will never use this textbook again.

            Forcing the covers together behind the spine, like manacled wrists, he gathers the too smooth pages of the book in one fist, the covers in the other.  A soft watercolor print of a benevolent Jesus smiles at him from the first page.  He curses at it and tries to tear the pages from the spine.  The book, barely used, is infuriatingly durable.  It makes him feel weak.

            Peering down the narrow, vertical hollow formed by the bent spine reveals off-white plastic mesh and unseemly glops of industrial-strength glue that could be mistaken for mucus on sight.  Years of use could break the seal, but impatient muscle cannot.  This angers him.  He has neither the time nor the desire to use this book for years.  It requires immediate destruction.

            He attends a Catholic school, but he is not Catholic, in any real sense.  He was baptized as an infant, but he had no choice in the matter.  He attends a church, but only as a mandatory satisfaction of his parents’ expectations.  He used to believe in things, but recently he has determined that very little is believable.  What now is certain?  He knows the space that he occupies.  He knows the book that he holds.  And he knows his dull, burning anger.  He would rather not assume too much more than that.

            Our Father, who art in heaven, they pray.  What Father? he asks.  The theoretical male creator of all humankind?  Why in heaven?  Why not in the ground?  Why not fossilized or preserved in a bog or decomposed into impossibly small Father pieces?  Is there heaven? he wonders.  Will I see it?  Or will I endure eternity in its antithesis?  Does it have an antithesis?  Does it matter?

            In his school, they present religion as fact.  Heaven is up, and that is where you hope to live forever, after you have had enough of earth.  Hell is down, and that is where you go when you have rejected God’s endless, all-forgiving love.  The saints and angels have ethereal halos and fluffy white wings and sit around all day singing hymns of praise to the Alpha and Omega.  They say that this is eternal happiness.  He cannot think of anything more boring.

            Of course whenever you ask any challenging question, anything possibly capable of stumping the experts, they invent a perfect answer.  Heaven has many rooms, for example.  Therefore, people of all religions will be admitted, they say, but they will all be segregated into separate living quarters.  You will not be allowed to spend eternity with your Hindu friend or your Protestant aunt or your Jewish grandmother, and certainly not your atheist cousin.  The atheist room is undoubtedly as far away from the Catholic room as the creator of all things could make it, which is to say, very.

            His hands have become tight and sweaty on the textbook.  The frayed maroon ribbon of a bookmark catches his eye, and he decides that it looks easy to destroy.  He winds it around his index finger and yanks.  It releases its tenacious hold in the gummy glue of the spine, but not before turning the pad of his finger deep red with pooled blood.

            Now it has inflicted corporal punishment on him.  Now this book has picked a personal fight.  His muscles tense with new anger.  He fixes his hands firmly to the covers and the stack of gleaming paper.  The modest beauty of the pages, reflecting the cold blue light from his lamp, grates on him.  He throws his strength into his grip.  He pulls.

            The spine breaks.  The cover shoots in one direction, the pages in another, flying briefly across the room like a mortally injured bird.  The pieces of the text land, defeated, on his floor.  He has conquered religion.

            The dismembered textbook accuses him from its fallen place, its glue and mesh and innards exposed.  You challenge the institution? it asks.  You refuse enlightenment?  It interrogates him scornfully.  Fine.  Enjoy the atheist room.

            Fine, he retorts defiantly.  Maybe I will.

            He storms out of the room.  He pauses a moment, then returns to the scene of the crime.  He gathers the textbook remnants from the ground.  He carries them across the room in both hands and deposits them, almost apologetically, in the trash can.