Would You Believe?
A Revelation Fan-Fiction
What would it take for you to believe in a miracle? Would writing in the clouds make you believe? Or have you been fooled one too many times by bad faith evangelists? Do you need a subtle miracle, like a note passed under the table? Or, happily taking the note, would you dismiss it because of its subtlety? I have been asking myself these questions for the past two years.
When that bus sighed to a stop ahead of me, Jesus stepped out. Do not ask me how I knew, but he is the kind of man that does not have to introduce himself. His face was not handsome and he was wearing blue jeans.
When I got close enough my legs started to buckle and my insides went to water, but some outside force walked me to him. I had a flash of those feet like bronze and hair aflame, but then he hugged me and took me on the bus. His hands felt like space heaters on my back, and they burned up the tightness that had been there for ten years. He waved away my attempt at thanks and herded me on.
The bus smelled like ancient wood and the prophet Jeremiah, and suddenly it was not a bus at all, because buses do not fly. We shot up over the earth until it winked into a blue dot in the sun and then the sun was a dot and we were over the Milky Way and Andromeda and time stretching across eternity.
When I was in college I scribbled together a list of questions that I would ask God when I got to heaven. I thought about them a long time and thought the answers would give me a pretty good idea of the meaning of human life and what it means to be great. But those questions seemed like silly, dirty things in the light of Jesus's eyes burning with the fire of every star in super nova. I wondered how I was not dead.
“It's not heaven,” he said.
“Oh,” I mouthed.
“It's just one of my favorite spots.”
Jesus looked at the universe like he was supremely content with his reflection. I gazed in the same direction and we sat there for seconds and millennia. The universe was beautiful and it was good, and the stars burned into my mind. There was no mortal fog to cloud my sight, and I saw smaller than quantum and larger than galactic at the same time, but there was no time. It was a beautiful pattern of force, disembodied from time like an out of place memory. In spite of it all I wanted to know why.
Jesus chuckled the way I used to laugh at my baby when she ran around the house naked. “That is a silly question,” he said, and pointed at the Milky Way and then we were there, over the earth. We were on the dark side, but there were no city lights. The sun was red and a dragon-snake was wrapped around the earth, jaw breaking open, trying to swallow it like an egg.
If I could explain the look on Jesus's face I would, but whatever it was it flattened me with sorrow and wrath. His appearance was like lightning and his clothes were white as snow.
Then I saw shapes moving over the surface of the earth like little beetles, and the snake lifted its head and saw Jesus. I thought it might try to flee, but its tongue flicked in and out and the beetles gathered to it. The light around Jesus also burned brighter as the host joined him and their white, clear light illuminated the dull red solar system and flashed the snake. His body was covered in eyes and congealed masses of growing heads and body parts that, were I not next to Jesus, could have swallowed my soul.
The two hosts faced each other, then charged. The beetles lurched through space ahead of the unfurling snake and the angels met them. I could only tell the beetles by what they obscured, like gnats in front of a lamp as the angel-swords flashed against the swarming and Jesus and the snake flying to the fray and the Morning Star blazing, flinging the snake's burning husk into the sun. Then Jesus smiled at me and the earth and sent me back.
Now as I stare at these words on the paper I know that no one will believe me. To you, I am smaller than one of these motes glowing in the ray that is sparkling my glass on the table. But if you had experienced this miracle as I have, and it had the solid quality of an undeniable memory that cannot be dismissed as dream (my back and neck still have no pain) – would you believe?
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