Gopnik Press

Little Joe sat on his shelf and smoldered with thought. He had always wanted to believe in the
religion he could not believe in, he told himself, but could not because it was man-made by
men to comfort man about the hole where religion should go. Made sense constructed to
comfort man discomfitted by the absence of sense. So little Joe rejected the comfort because it
was false, though it was designed to cover a hole that was real. The hole was the lack of true
religion, while man-made religion was a manhole cover for the godhole. Take a chicken,
thought little Joe, and whether or not it crosses the road, and ask yourself what covers the
chicken hole. That is right, it is chicken-made religion. That chicken is led by false prophets,
content because the godhole is covered by its chicken-hole cover. Yet in rejecting false religion
little Joe believed he had stolen from himself the only protection available against the godhole.
The hole is where the universe sucks the trash from the closets where you have it stuffed and
scatters it like feathers from a mattress all around your man-made apartment in your man-
made world, if you do not have a man-made stopper. All over this big fat town, little Joe knew,
they have stoppered the holes and their man-made trash sits and stinks inside their man-made
closets, while outside past the stoppers that squeak and whine like corks working free of their
holes roars the universe. It is the maw of the leviathan, it is the hole where Christ sent the pig
cartwheeling into space.

The door to the bedroom opened and a little baby hand reached up and groped the shelf for
little Joe, and little Joe stoppered up his thoughts. He knew for about forty-five minutes now
he’d be distracted by play, and if he could have smiled he would have.