99 Stories of God Read online

  On the displacement and destruction of the American Indian, George Catlin wrote in 1837:

  For the American citizens who live, everywhere proud of their growing wealth and their luxuries, over the bones of these poor fellows, there is a lingering terror for reflecting minds: Our mortal bodies must soon take their humble places with their red brethren, under the same glebe: to appear and stand at last, with guilt’s shivering conviction, amid the myriad ranks of accusing spirits, that are to rise in their own fields, at the final day of resurrection!

  She immediately vowed to no longer frequent public accommodations. She would purchase a mobile home and continue her travels unharried by the sentiments of others. Still, she had no idea who this person who would continue was now.

  Polyurethane

  83

  The notion of cyclical time was crucial to Native Americans. For them, sacred events recur again and again in a pattern that repeats the cycles of the celestial sphere.

  Time does not progress along a linear path but moves in a cyclical manner so as to provide an enclosure within which events occur.

  Past, present, and future all exist together because the cycles turn continually upon themselves.

  The progression of time along a developmental path was a concept foreign to Native Americans until the Europeans forced them into history.

  Crazy Injuns

  84

  We all have one foot in the grave, the poet insisted.

  Well, if that’s the case, the pretty girl drawled, I should get a pedicure every week instead of just a coupla weeks.

  They looked at her slim, tanned feet in their strappy sandals. It was summer. The grass was green as jade and freshly cut.

  Who had been the first to notice, they wondered later, that swelling on her instep? The swelling, tender to the touch, that, even she would later say, hadn’t been there yesterday.

  Winter

  85

  Jung tells a story of a woman who came to him with a secret. She was an elegantly dressed woman of refinement. She had been a doctor. Her husband had died relatively young, and her only child insisted upon being estranged from her. She was a passionate horsewoman and owned several horses of which she was extremely fond. But the horses had become nervous around her, and even her favorite reared and threw her. She then devoted herself to her dogs.

  She owned an unusually beautiful wolfhound to which she was greatly attached, wrote Jung. But the dog sickened, suffered paralysis, and died.

  She came to Jung to confess that she was a murderess. She had poisoned her best friend, whose husband she coveted, the very man she had made her own who later died. She no longer had a relationship with anything she loved. In seeking out Jung, she wanted to find someone who would accept her confession without judging her.

  Sometimes I have asked myself what might have become of her, wrote Jung. Perhaps she was driven ultimately to suicide.

  Though would that not have been the final thing denied her, after so much had been taken away, even her secret?

  Early Practice

  86

  The friendship of the two men was based on eczema. They had terrible eczema, and all they talked about was eczema. They tried everything—creams, shots, diets. The one thing they agreed not to give up, never to give up, was liquor. Liquor was their bond. They drank and talked, talked and drank.

  Finally one of them, in such torment and despair over his eczema, sailed his small boat out into the Gulf of Mexico and was never seen again, though the broken boat was eventually recovered.

  Going through the suicide’s effects, the surviving friend came across his diary, in which he confessed that he had given up all alcoholic beverages recently and found his skin condition gradually improving. His stratagems and lies concerning this, however, were taking their toll on him, he wrote, and he was feeling more depressed and without hope than ever.

  Infidelity

  87

  A famous war correspondent reached the age when she could no longer attend wars. She threw herself into the writing of fiction, at which she did not excel. She had married numerous times but had lately given up on men. She had never involved herself with women. She traveled, swam, and wrote her bold and unnecessary books. She remained fit, chic, and rather frightening to others well into her seventies.

  One Valentine’s Day, she decided the time had come to die. There was a single pill she had gotten hold of years before to be employed at the correct moment. She tidied up her apartment, bought vases of fresh flowers, and put on a stunning ivory-colored silk nightgown. Then she couldn’t find the pill.

  After that, you can imagine. Her remaining years were as a nightmare to her.

  Plot

  88

  An op-ed article in Wednesday’s New York Times about the Heimlich maneuver incorrectly described the technique.

  The person administering the maneuver pushes under the choking victim’s diaphragm, not above it.

  The article also misidentified the part of the body food travels through to the stomach. It is the esophagus, not the trachea.

  A Flawed Opinion

  89

  There are certain places where it does not matter if you hear the word yes or the word no in answer to your question, whether you turn left or right, you will reach your destination.

  Not many but some.

  Phew

  90

  Her unhappiness had a great deal of integrity to it. That is, it was pure. How could you fault it? Mom and Dad have Alzheimer’s. Her child, now fourteen, is autistic. If she could only teach him to pee without rolling his pants down to his ankles, she … it would be an accomplishment. There were no other accomplishments on the horizon.

  The father was long gone. He’d promised to take the boy fishing, deep-sea fishing for marlin. You couldn’t find the sailfish anymore.

  He doesn’t want to kill a marlin, she’d said, and that was pretty much the last conversation they’d had, though she remembered the father later saying something to the effect that you don’t kill fish, you catch them.

  So there were two black whirlwinds (three if you counted the mother and father with the same affliction separately) barreling toward her from opposite directions as her own poor days lurched to and fro.

  And all that people said to her, her friends and doctors, was:

  You are entitled to some help.

  Compline

  91

  The most astonishing suicide took place in this resort community. A young man descended into the basement of his family’s home, where the father maintained an elaborate hobby workshop with all manner of meticulously cared-for tools, and he severed his leg with a table saw. Before losing consciousness, he cut off a hand as well.

  He left no note, nor, as is the fashion these days, a video of himself.

  His classmates at school said that in the preceding week he had been quieter than usual and he hadn’t been as neat or as organized as he usually was, or on time. But no one knew him really. How many ways do we discover the inaccessibility of another’s mind.

  Mr. Sandman

  92

  I have never known an insane person, he said. But I have known people who later became dead.

  Distinction

  93

  The Lord was in a den with a pack of wolves.

  “You really are so intelligent,” the Lord said, “and have such glorious eyes. Why do you think you’re hounded so? It’s like they want to exterminate you, it’s awful.”

  “Well, sometimes it’s the calves and the cows,” the wolves said.

  “Oh those maddening cows,” the Lord said. “I have a suggestion. What if I caused you not to have a taste for them anymore?”

  “It wouldn’t matter. Then it would be the deer or the elk. Have you seen the bumper stickers on the hunters’ trucks—DID A WOLF GET YOUR ELK?”

  “I guess I missed that,” the Lord said.

  “Sentiment is very much against us down here,” the wolves said.

>   “I’m so awfully sorry,” the Lord said.

  “Thank you for inviting us to participate in your plan anyway,” the wolves said politely.

  The Lord did not want to appear addled, but what was the plan his sons were referring to exactly?

  Fathers and Sons

  94

  “… in other areas of the country, shopkeepers have threatened mass suicide to protest eighteen to twenty hours of power blackouts every day …”

  If You Feel You Must

  95

  The American philosopher William James posited that overbelief was essential to a lived life, and that only when we open ourselves to God’s influence are our deepest destinies fulfilled. God provided William with many things, including (according to his sister Alice) the ability to be “born fresh every morning.” He also gave him a brother, Henry, who He determined would be “younger and shallower and vainer.” William quite agreed with this assessment.

  Sibling

  96

  When a woman sits down to a meal alone, her beloved dead arrive to share it with her, but only at the last moment, the last possible moment, in her prayer that they will.

  Plenary

  97

  Several months before her death, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote in her notebook of someone who enters her room one day and says:

  “Poor creature, you who understand nothing, who know nothing. Come with me and I will teach you things you do not suspect.”

  He takes her to “a new and ugly church,” then to an empty garret. Days and nights pass. They talk and share wine and bread.

  “The bread really had the taste of bread. I have never found that taste again.” She is content but puzzles: “He had promised to teach me, but he did not teach me anything.”

  Then he drives her away. Her heart is broken and she wanders bereft. Still, she does not try to return. She understands that he had come for her by mistake, that her place was not in the garret.

  The text ends with the words “I know well that he does not love me. How could he love me? And yet deep down within me something, a particle of myself, cannot help thinking with fear and trembling that perhaps, in spite of all, he loves me.”

  Weil died at the age of thirty-four, after deliberately reducing her consumption of food for reasons that are still debated.

  Bread

  98

  The Lord heard that people in the Southwest were adopting tortoises. He went to the Desert Museum, in Tucson, Arizona, and was told He had to fill out an application.

  You have to provide an enclosure of one hundred square feet, a volunteer in charge of all the paperwork told Him. Can you do that, or have someone able assist you in doing that?

  Yes, the Lord said.

  You have to build a burrow.

  Indeed.

  Are you responsible? They need access to water.

  I try to be very responsible.

  That sometimes isn’t enough, she said tartly.

  May I have two? the Lord inquired.

  No. We don’t want them to breed. The reason they’re up for adoption is that there are too many of them now, they’re holding up building permits.

  The Lord didn’t like enclosures. He was surprised He knew how to create one. The volunteer inspected it and found it adequate.

  Some people put a little grass inside, she said. You can get a square of it at Home Depot.

  Home Depot! the Lord cried, horrified. I will scatter some seed and have it grow.

  She looked doubtful. They like mulberry leaves, we’ve found. Kale. No avocados. They’re not like chickens. You can’t toss anything and everything in there. Some people treat them like chickens.

  The Lord was given his tortoise at last, a glorious young tortoise. They said very little to one another on the way back, both rather worried about this adoption business.

  A New Arrangement

  99

  The Lord was in a little town in Maine, inland Maine, at the humble home of a psychic. There were dishes in the sink and unwashed clothes in the hamper. The calendar on the wall was not of that year. There were lots of small stones in little woven baskets, and dog hair, though no dog seemed to be present. The usual.

  Outside it was raw and windy. The trees were broken and shorn of leaves. The ground, too, was broken and stiff. There was a faint fusty odor everywhere, and cold. All was cold. Still, some solitary bird was flinging out its frail song.

  The psychic tried to see the Lord, but nothing was coming through. She thought: This can’t be that unusual.

  The silence was not uncomfortable, but it was getting late.

  Finally she said: You always wanted to be a poet.

  This sometimes worked with her more difficult clients. Or not difficult as much as … reclusive. Brought them out a bit.

  Nothing. Still nothing. She couldn’t see Him. She needed to find the anchor chain.

  Then she thought: Maybe she didn’t have to see Him. Maybe she was putting the cart before the horse in this case. Maybe she should just go directly to the question most everyone had and visualize from there.

  What’s going to happen after I’m dead?

  The Darkling Thrush

  About the Author

  Joy Williams is the author of such classics of American fiction as Taking Care, Escapes, and Breaking and Entering. Harold Brodkey called her “the most gifted writer of her generation.” 99 Stories of God, a Byliner Original, marks the publication of her first book of fiction in nearly a decade. She has also written several widely anthologized essays on ecological matters. Williams lives in Arizona, Wyoming, and Florida.

  Read more of Joy Williams’s best stories at Byliner.com

  Photograph by Rollie McKenna

  About Byliner

  Byliner works directly with the world’s best writers to deliver great stories to readers. We publish original fiction and nonfiction by top authors, including bestsellers such as Amy Tan’s Rules for Virgins, Margaret Atwood’s Positron, Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit, Ann Patchett’s The Getaway Car, Nick Hornby’s Everyone’s Reading Bastard, Buzz Bissinger’s After Friday Night Lights, Chuck Palahniuk’s Phoenix, Alexandra Fuller’s Falling, Richard Russo’s Nate in Venice, and Sebastian Junger’s A World Made of Blood. These quick-read stories are written to be read in two hours or less, and can be purchased individually through major digital bookstores. The entire Byliner Originals library is available online to Byliner subscribers, who also get access to premium content from our by-invitation community of writers—including thousands of rarely seen and exclusive stories by bestselling authors.

  Enjoyed the story you just finished? Turn the page for our recommendations on which Byliner Original to read next. Or visit Byliner.com for the full list of Byliner titles.

  If you enjoyed 99 Stories of God, you’ll also enjoy …

  Read an excerpt at Byliner.com

  Genie

  By Richard Powers

  On a tour of the bubbling fumaroles of Yellowstone park, Anca, a rising-star biologist, sneaks off to steal samples of an ancient bacterium. Her off-and-on boyfriend, Warren the statistician, frowns on the behavior, until their analysis of the cells’ ancient DNA chains reveals a pattern too regular to be anything but deliberate. Is it the signature of the Creator himself? Or a message left billions of years ago by an alien life form? In Genie, master fiction writer Richard Powers goes sci-fi, to delightful and deranging effect.

  If you enjoyed 99 Stories of God, you’ll also enjoy …

  Read an excerpt at Byliner.com

  The Secret World of Saints

  Inside the Catholic Church and the Mysterious Process of Anointing the Holy Dead

  By Bill Donahue

  Stigmata. Self-mortification. Miracles. It takes a lot to become a saint in the eyes of the Catholic Church. The journey to canonization is long (sometimes, as in the case of Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk Indian who just got the nod from the Vatican, it can take centuries), lurid (decayed bod
y parts play a role), and, nowadays, surprisingly cutting-edge. (Miracles can be determined through MRIs.) This rollicking yet thorough investigation of the Church’s most mysterious tradition provides a fascinating inside look into how the holy earn their places in heaven and introduces us to America’s newest saint.

  If you enjoyed 99 Stories of God, you’ll also enjoy …

  Read an excerpt at Byliner.com