Child Prays For Painless Death Of Kid With Cool Toy
By: Daniel Williams
Tags: Christianity, Humor, Gifts, Comedy, Childhood

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

I’m addicted to toys.

This addiction caused me to steal from my son. It has made me sniff old figurines and weep (nostalgia smells like plastic and rubber articulating limbs). And my addiction has encouraged me to wish evil on other children.

I remember Christmas at my great grandmother’s. What did she get me? Winterwear. Mittens, socks, hats. Not a toy in sight.

How dare you.

Oh, it took you months to knit and stitch my presents by hand? Maybe that’d be awesome in your day when they burned children for heat, and mittens meant, “We find you too valuable to burn now that you’ve somehow survived the birth asphyxia, rickets, milk sickness, and lung fever, and all the leeches. Go make textiles.” But those jolly times have passed.

Thanks a lot, “great” grandma.

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I remember my friend Bradley and his wonderful toys. One in particular. It was a tank that fired a gigantic eyeball.

One day, when I went over to Bradley’s to nurture my friendship with him so I could keep seeing his tank, his room had changed. Where were the toys?

“Where are the toys?” I said.

Then he told me. He had asked his mother to donate them to charity, of all places. His reason? “I’m getting too old for kid stuff.”

When I die, I believe God will rumble up to the pearly gates in an eyeball tank and holler, “Need a lift?” As we tear up the golden streets with our metal treads, heading for my mansion (Sauron’s tower), I will ask God a rhetorical question:

DAN: Is Bradley in hell?

GOD: Of course.

DAN: It’s because he gave away marvelous gifts to strangers when he could have given them to best friends, right?

GOD: Exactly! Wanna shoot the eyeball gun?

DAN: I love you.

And I remember my cousin and his little broken leg incident, which caused so much generosity. Arguably too much.

My cousin, we’ll call him Junior, was a wildman, handsome to a fault, and he was lucky.

God had given him the hair I wanted. His hair resembled curly fries (the greatest kind) and grew up and up into a beautiful dome, making his head enormous. The vast shadow of his head on the ground declared him the clear leader of everything we did.

God had given him the nose I wanted. Junior’s nose was like a mini ski-jump. Down it went, straight as an arrow, and then it sloped up at the end, forming an adorable little knob, worshipped by women. My nose? Yes, it was desired by many women, but it was and remains a knob-less nose, a ski-jump tragically unfinished. The Sexy Winter Olympics will never be held in this country.

And God had made him wild. He rode his bike off cliffs. He flung himself from the highest bridges into the shallowest waters. And when winter fell, Junior would slide on his sled so fast, he could never hope to stop. He slid out onto thin-ice ponds. He crashed into friends and the crowds of women who pursued him. And one winter, he smashed himself into a tree, savagely breaking his leg.

I was there. I remember his screams. Though I grew up envying him, I felt bad about his compound fracture. But when it came time to visit him in the hospital, I felt bad for a different reason.

I didn’t want to go. It wasn’t because I feared hospitals or because I didn’t want to see his nose, which the tree could have solved. It was because of the sympathy gift my mother had picked up for him: a pack of “Micro Machines,” my favorite toy in all the world.

Do you remember these miniature toy cars, trucks, motorcycles, and airplanes? In Home Alone, Kevin McCallister uses Micro Machines in his attempted murder of two homeless men: Marvin Merchants and Harry Lime. McCallister plants the little cars on a hardwood floor, causing Merchants and Lime to slip and fall violently on their backs.

I had adored Micros before McCallister’s ruthless assault. After it, I worshiped them.

The TV commercials for these toys featured “The Micro Machine Man,” none other than the talented John Moschitta, the “Motormouth,” and “The Fast Talking Guy.” According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Moschitta was the “World’s Fastest Talker.”

How fast?

586 words per minute.

The Micro Machine Man buried many many thousands of words in the minds of susceptible children, words wadded so tightly together it would take them longer to dissolve than the cannonballs of swallowed gum in our bellies. In fact, his slow-release messaging is speaking still, thirty years later, making me a prisoner of eBay.

But I wasn’t deprived of Micros. I had hundreds. It’s just that I didn’t have the ones my mother bought for Junior: the coveted “Fire & Rescue” set.

I watched her wrap it at the dining room table. It felt wrong, like a mother throwing away her milk to a stranger when her ravenous baby is standing right there, burning with his desire for some rare Fire & Rescue milk.

As we drove to the hospital, I didn’t talk. What was there to say?

I am in pain.

You do realize you’re killing me.

Are you capable of love?

She wouldn’t have understood. The fact that she was giving this gift to Junior made it clear that the boy beside her meant nothing. Who was he compared to Junior? This substandard son of hers was just a boy who had loved his mother by not allowing a tree to destroy his leg. But if he had known how her love worked, he would have let the tree have both his legs. The arms too. Everything but his heart, beating lovingly for his cold mother.

We got there, greeted family, then I was charged with handing over the present. To my credit, I forgot about my misery for a moment when I saw what the doctors had done to Junior.

He was in a bed. His leg was out…and up. Naked and suspended. A big, chrome pin stabbed through his leg at the knee. I don’t know if I’m remembering this right, but it looked like the only thing holding his leg in the air was that monstrous nine-inch pin. It was the most horrible thing I had ever seen, so I looked at it with all my might, ignoring the need to blink, crying because of this need.

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My mother nudged me.

“Is there something you’d like to give to Junior?”

Wow, mom. Making it sound like I have a choice.

Sadist.

I gave. I handed over the gift. I placed the magnificent gift in his hands even though the balloon-infested table beside his bed was overflowing with gifts. My mother was casting her milk to a baby who had already gorged himself. Another baby (her own), a malnourished babe, emaciated (though at least he didn’t need a pin to hold him together), received not a drop.

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Junior was grateful.

“Thanks,” he said, before even knowing what he had. Then he unwrapped it and shouted, “Wow! Thanks!”

“It’s the Fire and Rescue set,” I said, though mostly to my mother.

On the ride home, while classic rock played on the radio, I couldn’t stop thinking about that horrible, dangerous-looking pin. Deadly even.

“Is he going to be all right?” I said.

“Of course,” mom said. “He’s going to be fine. It’ll be a while before he’s all better, but he’ll be back to normal in no time. Don’t worry.”

“Good,” I said. “But could something bad happened though?”

“Bad? Like what?”

“I don’t know. Do people ever…die from things like that?”

“No. I don’t think so. No, of course not.”

“That’s good.”

“You don’t need to worry about it at all.”

The radio played “Tears in Heaven.”

“But if he did die…”

“Stop,” my mother said. She knew the sound of evil. “If he died, those precious Micro Machines would go in the garbage, got it? They would not become yours.”

“But I gave them to him!”

“Enough. You need to spend the rest of the ride home asking forgiveness for what you’ve been thinking. Pray. Now.”

Therefore, I prayed.

Dear God, do careless people ever die from pins in their legs? I hope not. But if the pin was really big and they did die…would the hospital throw their gifts away, the balloons and all the other stuff, even though it’s hardly used and would never be used to its full potential, or would they mail it all back to the good people who gave it to them? That would be fair and just, right? Are you a just God?

“Are you praying?” my mother said.

“Yes.”

“Pray out loud. I want to hear it.”

I prayed aloud, but first, I wrapped up my silent prayer:

Dear God, we’ll finish this later.