SUCH A DEAL

by Don Kunz

            There once was a man who wanted to be a writer. Sometimes he would sit for as long as an hour at his desk with a spiral notebook and a number-two pencil and stare at the blank white page and dream of filling it with words. But no words came to him. Often he would doodle, making circles and squares that intersected in bewildering patterns. It was a maze which he couldn’t find any way out of. He filled whole pages in this way. On bad days he couldn’t even create a new doodle. He would trace and retrace an old one, making it heavier and heavier until the page was a mass of shadows. But he knew that a shadow was not a story. Then he would chew on his pencil until it was reduced to a pile of splinters, his teeth were black with graphite, and pink eraser crumbs clung to his lips. He looked as if he had been to a banquet for starving artists.

            In his youth he had been a devout Roman Catholic, but he had grown bored and left the church when he realized that the priest kept telling the same stories year after year. They were always about fishing with nets from small boats, working in vineyards, and rescuing sheep. He had looked for new stories first in bottles of sour-mash Bourbon which he had purchased with a fake ID, then in marijuana which he grew in his bathroom and dried in his kitchen. When he was high, he thought how easy it would be to become a writer, but when he came down, he could make nothing of the visions he had received.

One midnight in July he sat at his desk in the living room of his apartment and traced a doodle that he had made the previous week. Through his open window a faint, warm breeze blew the sound of a clock chime, and it reminded him of the bells that had announced Mass when he was a child. The breeze freshened, and a sudden gust slapped him across the face with the lace curtain. It made him recall the sleeve of a priest’s vestment and being embraced. He found himself wondering if prayer would help. “What the hell,” he said, “why not?”

            The next Sunday he was in the back pew of Sisters of the Cross and Passion Roman Catholic Church attending eleven o’clock Mass. As soon as he discovered that the priest’s stories were unchanged, he paid no attention to the service. While others knelt to pray, stood to sing, or sat to hear the lesson for the day—he remained on his knees. While the rest murmured prescribed responses to the litany which the priest recited, he made up his own prayer and flung it squarely at his maker. “Please, God,” he said, “I want to be a writer.”

And to his amazement God whispered into his ear. “I am thy shepherd, thou shalt….”

And the man interrupted with his own whisper into God’s ear. “I know, I know. I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve heard that one. Frankly, I’ve had it up to here with that sheep metaphor.”