a stranger asked if i was jesus
by S.A. Kennedy
The day was a vacuum again. I ventured the three-block walk down the hill to the thrift shop because I figured something might happen there. Even with the layer of clouds stretched across the grey sky, the natural light penetrated my eyes with force. I hadn’t been conditioning them properly – too much time inside failing to read the open books in my hands, eating nothing aside from macaroni with frozen peas. Too much time staring at the ceiling while trying to forget that my now ex-girlfriend had dumped me for her new friend that looked so much like me that she’d once suggested I borrow his photo-ID bus pass.
Inside the thrift shop, I searched the store’s dusty shelves for items that would catch my eye and for people whose eyes I could catch. I was more open to making eye contact than I would have ever been before, but that seemed to mean little. Two seniors stood together at the till. Neither said much when I paid for a book, a seventy-five-cent, abridged portion of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. I began walking back toward my home (to the room I rented in a house on a hill which lay in a hole far from the city’s pulse) telling myself the book purchase had made the trip some sort of success.
I neared four girls standing on the bike path, staring up into a tall tree. They looked about thirteen – the age of the students I would be teaching if I were using the diploma I recently earned. But employment in a school, a career, felt impossibly far away.
The kids called out to me, asking if I could get the purse that hung from a branch at the top of the tree. Aside from my height, it’s hard to guess how I came off to them. I was a twenty-six-year-old who likely looked malnourished and thoroughly sleep-deprived, though maybe neither were revealed on my face as I suspected.
The purse had apparently been hanging for some time that afternoon, the result of a comedic impulse by the most talkative one of the group, an uninhibited redhead with bright green eyeshadow, a plaid skirt, and long white socks covered with skulls.
Thick offshoots growing from the base of the tree housed prickly bushes and created an impenetrable mess. I was happy to try to help anyway. I threw sticks at the purse, tried to use a long, broken branch to shake the tree, and even pleaded the purse down. I was closer than they had been, so they encouraged me to continue. For motivation during a lull in the efforts, the purse owner offered me a twenty-dollar reward for success. The quieter of the four used her phone to call the one in the tree, the ring from above getting a laugh out of us all. Being a teenage girl appeared luxurious.
Twenty minutes later (where else did I have to go?) I managed to jar the purse loose by striking a lower branch into its branch with the right amount of pop. The purse plummeted down and crashed onto the paved path to gleeful cries of disbelief. They cheered as though I saved the townspeople by defeating a spiteful giant.
I wasn’t a thirteen-year-old so I didn’t feel I should stay. I turned to move on while extending a reserved goodbye and half-wave that wouldn’t show I was a little disappointed it was all over. I was no longer a human needed by other humans, but I had been, and that meant an extraordinary something during that time.
The purse owner called out “wait” and rushed toward me. She came to a jumping stop one pace away and then her hand stuck out a folded twenty-dollar bill. When I had heard the reward offer, I’d taken it as nothing but hyperbole thrown out in a moment of enthusiasm. I cracked a smile while shaking my head; let the money be blown on overpriced makeup and cheap jewelry. When I turned away from them to continue toward home, the redhead called out, “Are you Jesus Christ?”
I admitted no and walked back to my nothing, smiling.
S.A. Kennedy has a master’s in literature, lives in the mountains of British Columbia, dreams, and fails. He enjoys typing far too late into the night and then showing up to his job sleep-deprived.