Inflatable God
German version here.
Once a year the kids could bring their own toys. It was a special day at the kindergarden, and it was looked forward to with the appropriate amount of awe and anticipation. What had the children brought this time?
Theodore had come with his pink crocodile, the one he had told Nele and Tom about so many times. None of them had ever been interested in his stories about his unusual plush toy, no matter how pink. The truth was, they had not believed him: a pink crocodile! A silly boast, no more, no less. He was to show it to them — they would eat their hats!
But now Nele and Tom were eating their hats. There it was, crocodile-shaped and as pink as Theodore’s head, bursting with pride. He carried his crocodile like a standard, and Tom and Nele were kicking themselves in their little nanny-fannies.
Next to them sat fat Gulliver on his favorite carpet, the one with the city printed on it, rapt in the mighty deeds of his yellow shovel excavator. The excavating bucket of his destruction machine was scraping imaginary skyscrapers from the sky and shovelling their concrete remains into the abyss of oblivion (the linoleum floor next to the carpet). Nobody ever played with Gulliver, but today he didn’t care. So many months of having to make due with the inadequate loader from the kindergarten stash finally washed away! The carpet’s World Trade Center collapsed with an inaudible roar.
And Jenny? Jenny had brought her inflatable god. His brightly shining, helium-flooded form listlessly hung beneath the ceiling. Now and again it bobbed up and down like a dancer when Jenny pulled the string.
Just as she had expected, Jenny’s god was at the center of attention. All the kids from the Raccoon group had aahd and oohed when he had majestically floated him into the Blue Room, his leash in the firm grip of her hand. The news of Jenny’s inflatable god spread like Australian wildfire. Even from the far lands of the Makaki and the Ozelot groups across the hall they came to marvel at the miracle. Nele and Tom were especially glad upon the god’s arrival, since it meant a lucky break from Theodore’s annoying reptile which he wouldn’t shut up about.
Jenny, meanwhile, bathed in the radiance of her god. Because of her the room was filled with his holiness. His glory was her fame. As his herald she occupied an elevated position in his kingdom. Through her efforts his blessing spread to all the realms of the kindergarten, even to the Mareike from the Ozelot group, who Jenny couldn’t stand because of her beautiful blond hair.
Suddenly, a girl’s voice next to Jenny squeaked. ‘Can I hold it?’ The voice belonged to Ceaulette, an especially tiny girl from the Makaki group. She held out her stubby hands demandingly.
Jenny hardly knew Ceaulette, but she knew that her father was a Frenchman, and Daddy said that Frenchmen might talk to you with their frontside, but look at you with their backside. Jenny didn’t quite know what that meant, but the way Daddy said it she concluded that Frenchmen were probably not nice people, and you didn’t have to be nice to people who weren’t nice people themselves.
‘No!’ she thus declared. There was an expression of priestly rigor on her face. ‘He said that only I was allowed to carry him.’
‘That’s a lie!’ Ceaulette said, tiny hands on her tiny hips. ‘He can’t even talk. He’s just an inflated toy.’ The girl’s voice was soaked with the kind of smugness which Jenny knew adults found cute, but only when it’s done by a four year old.
‘Of course he can!’ Jenny said. ‘He only talks to those he likes though. And he doesn’t like you. He just told me.’ At least that’s how Jenny felt. After all she was holding god in her hand, she was his prophet, and she didn’t like Ceaulette. Just because she didn’t have a good reason for that didn’t mean that it wasn’t god’s idea.
‘He did not!’ said Ceaulette. But her eyes, sparkling in the light of his frightful glory, betrayed her doubts. Jenny read it with the brutal precision of her age and put as much satisfaction into her voice as she could.
‘Yes he did!’
The girl in front of her startled, but she didn’t give up. There followed a protracted discussion, where the argument ‘No he didn’t!’ on one and the counter argument ‘Yes he did!’ on the other side were trading eloquent blows in an ever louder and shriller fashion.
Eventually Ceaulette had channelled all the strength of her little body into her facial muscles to keep back the tears, but alas, she was young, and the muscles of her face were not yet hardened by experience and the admonitions of adults. And so the tears won.
‘You’re a liar!’ she cried. ‘And you’re stupid!’ And she stormed off towards Ms. Falahi, to tell her just how insufferable Jenny and her inflatable God were. But Ms. Falahi’s attention was fully directed towards the fruits of the work of a cild called Chi Fu. Chi Fu, the carpenter’s son, had been allowed, after so many Nos, to bring his tool set with him, and he had immediately set out to create a passageway between the boy’s and the girl’s bathroom. Ceaulette’s remonstrations went unheard.
In the meantime, Jenny had been forced into yet another theological debate. The noble Malcolm had challenged the holiness of the Almighty to a duel with his Wolverine action figurine. Right now Jenny was using the most comprehensible words to try to explain to Malcolm why, first, a mutant was incapable of accomplishing anything against god’s omnipotence, why, second, that didn’t mean that god and Superman were the same, and why lastly god, wouldn’t let himself get involved in a duel either way, because he was a good god, and good gods didn’t hit people, not even if they were made of plastic.
‘So he’s a scared little sissy?’ Malcom said. Jenny snorted at the accusation. That boy was shorter than her!
‘He’s not scared! God can’t be scared at all. He’s stronger than every person in the world. He’s not even scared of spiders.’
‘But he’s scared of Wolverine.’
‘No.’
‘Then let them fight!’ Malcolm assumed a pose that Jenny supposed to imitate that of his figurine: Legs spread, left arm raised straight above his head, right arm perpendicular to the left, pointing forward. He let his left arm swoop down in a circular motion (Wolverine’s arms only had rotating shoulder joints, limiting his motor skills somewhat).
‘Didn’t I just explain to you that …’ Jenny started, but Wolverine had been overcome by his owners superior morale. With a battle cry from Malcolm’s mouth he lunged at the floating body of god in a straight line. Is has to be noted that god tried his bestto dodge his assailant, being pulled down reflexively by Jenny’s Hand, but his size — bigger than the universe after all — made it impossible for him to move out of the trajectory of the greatest of X-men.
And as the circumstances of fate will it now and again, misfortune descended, and Wolverine triumphed in the face of the impossible, stabbing the face of the Uncontainable. His pointy fists pierced the hull of the Almighty, spilling god’s innermost into the world, filling the place with his noble gases. And so, having been dispersed into the diaspora of common air, his essence drifted to the ends of the earth, dissolving in an ocean of lesser elements.
‘My God!’ Jenny cried out in horror.
The bulging shell rapidly lost its outline, collapsing onto itself like an unsuccessful sufflé. Deprived of its bouyancy, the foily mass of the one most high came down onto the children, who collectively panicked and rushed to escape the building.
Only Jenny stayed where she was, string in hand, glittery folds descending on her head. She loudly cursed the boy who had killed her god. She decried the sharpness of the weapons that had brought such quick death to her theology. She was still mourning the apostasy of mankind when her voice was finally muffled by the dead hull which, after its defeat against the greatest of X-Men, had now also lost the fight against gravity.
Thank you for reading!
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