Cathryn Hankla

1958 / United States / Virginia

God Attack

The girl floats down the country road-oh how the
glorious cows and pretty horses roam and graze. The girl
wanders past, daydreaming in the pastoral setting, the
icing on the cake she's eating every day. She's thinking
about the nature of god, but the message traveling
through the air converts, and, lo, dogs come instead, to
eat her. On the horizon they gather and growl and run
to set upon the girl and wrestle her to the ground
leaving blood, embedded gravel, nightmares, and later
scars. All thoughts of nature being God go by the way.
All nature gods turn ugly to her sight, and surely are
not God, not the one she had in mind when the dogs came
out of the blue, charging through goldenrod, which, if
she considers her allergies, should have been a sign.
She realizes with embarrassment that she wants to limit
God in this small way (and that others want to limit God
in other ways) and that to limit God at all is just the
opposite of what she had in mind when she was wandering
down the road, expanding. All in all she's glad that she
was only set upon by dogs. And thanks be to whatever.
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