back to Issue 17
by Angela Townsend
Every time a child is born, God booby-traps the world with acorns. Over the next few or many years, they will become trees of life. God will work hard to get the child to climb them, and when that happens, the angels will high-ten each other. But most children start walking with their heads down around the same age they start reading books with no pictures at all.
God cannot come right out and call the trees of life “trees of life,” because that would scare the adults and make them lock their car doors. If God really wanted to freak the adults out, God would tell them that these trees of life are soulmates, and every child gets several, maybe even seventy times seven. That is not the kind of thing you can just tell people.
So God keeps planting acorns and recruiting finches the color of kumquats to issue broadcasts from the twigs. If you ever hear a blue jay blathering with a specific sense of urgency, you should probably stop folding the laundry and go outside to see what is going on. More than likely, one of your several soulmates is trying to come into your life, although they are probably as unaware of this as you are.
Soulmates are as silly as acorns, which if you think about it are ambitious green peanuts wearing berets. “Silly” comes from the same word as “happy” and “blessed,” but adults do not trust any of those words, because they are looking for cracks in the sidewalk to prove that everything is broken. God will not argue with them about that, although God crams dandelions between the cracks to remind adults that looking down does not relieve you of the obligation to make wishes. God does not come right out and say “prayers,” because that sounds too religious for dandelions, although nothing is actually too religious for dandelions.
God is the Word, but God lets children and adults play with language, because God is in favor of fun. If God were not in favor of fun, God would never have thought up people in the first place, but here we are, inventing words like “crunchwrap” and “Funfetti” because we are in the image of God. If people keep playing with language long enough, some poetry will get born, and the next thing you know even adults will find their soulmates. It will freak them out almost every time, which is the appropriate response.
Soulmates and trees of life are never where people expect to find them, because that would be boring. If all the trees of life were in the romance arboretum, there would be no apples left for the dear singletons of whom God is madly fond, and even the respectable romancers would only get one apple each, and that is hardly enough. So God goes a little wild assigning acorns, jamming them into the soil under the post office and the grocery store and the animal shelter and the trampoline park.
That is how we get trees of life in the desert, although they might look like scrub brush and tumbleweeds and dental hygienists and deacons who wear both a belt and suspenders. Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but most people have some soulmates whose names they never even know. If you have a conversation in the bakery or the aquarium or with a customer service representative and come away feeling like something got mended, you just spoke to one of your soulmates. You can’t see them, but there are leaves the color of a Golden Delicious in your hair, and there are angels happily playing hacky sack over the incident.
Most of your soulmates stick around long enough to call by name, and if you are lucky, you will assign each other nicknames that make the Holy Ghost guffaw. This is easier than adults assume. The newer people on the planet know they make God laugh until God is almost out of Breath when they kick their fat sausage legs in that ecstatic tarantella that every infant remembers without being taught. Statistically speaking, at least ten percent of soulmates show up before the dancer says a single word, although the math is malleable, and God is always adding more acorns.
We spend a lot of time researching caulks and pastes and deadbolts to secure our soulmates. If I were God, I would get a little exasperated and maybe even start rationing acorns. But God is most infatuated with the people who are most afraid, which is a nine-billion-way tie. God sends stray cats and mothers and therapists and rock musicians we will never exactly meet in person until we are tattooed with the inkling that we cannot run out of soulmates, not even if we hide in a turret, not even if our teeth fall out, not even if we raze our own forest.
God cannot come right out and tell us that no one will miss their ride, not even adults, because that would sound too good to be true. So God will keep planting acorns, and leaving silly soulmates right out in the open, because the angels are watching, and they are going to high-ten after all.
Angela Townsend writes for a cat sanctuary. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a winner of West Trade Review‘s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Five Points, and SmokeLong, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar.