King of the Worlds by M. Thomas Gammarino

Author:M. Thomas Gammarino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chin Music Press Inc.
Published: 2016-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

Dylan didn’t especially like this being told what “we” wanted.

With nothing to look at but the sofa, Junior began to squirm and fuss. Dylan took him, held him aloft and tapped his head on the ceiling. In three seconds flat, he was laughing. All babies are bipolar.

“We could meet some people though,” Dylan said. “There must be plenty of nice people there.” He lowered the baby again and kissed his scabby belly button.

“There are nice people everywhere,” Erin said.

Dylan surfaced. “Hawaii strikes me as being kind of special though. Like I imagine people there must be extra nice.”

Erin screwed up her face. “What’s gotten into you? I don’t ever remember you mentioning Hawaii before. Now suddenly you want to live there?”

“I’m just thinking aloud.”

“‘Fantasizing’ is more like it.”

“That may be,” he said. “That may very well be.”

• • •

In the absence of Wendy’s body, Dylan spent the week attempting to get intimate with her mind by reading up on Mormonism whenever he got a spare moment between classes. It was harder than he’d expected. For instance, he failed to suspend enough disbelief to accept that their central prophet and founder, Joseph Smith, an avowed treasure-seeker and scryer, had, at the behest of the angel Moroni, dug up gold plates in Western New York circa the 1820s and translated them with the help of stone-lensed spectacles. The story was weird enough that Dylan almost wanted to believe it, but at the very least he’d have to inspect the plates, and conveniently enough Smith claimed to have promptly returned them to the angel upon translating them. Neither did Dylan much respect Mormons’ unbelievably racist founding myth. But the crazy, beautiful stuff—Kolob, spirit babies, the multiverse33 and all the psychedelic rest of it—this stuff he could get behind, at least in the spirit of poetry. And however different Mormonism was from Catholicism, it felt good to revisit the rhetoric of people who believed, truly believed, in ultimate Meaning and Goodness and Love. It made him feel, for as long as he let it, like a kid again, swinging his legs in a pew, absorbing all those magical words spoken by the adults who knew everything there was to know and then some. It wasn’t hard, in retrospect, to see why Jesus liked kids the best: Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

33_____________

“We can come to no other conclusion, but that worlds, and systems of worlds, and universes of worlds existed in the boundless heights and depths of immensity…” –Orson Pratt, original member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, in a pamphlet entitled “Great First Cause,” 1851.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.