Pick a Color

A black man moved into a white neighborhood. He had a black house with a black porch where he used to sit every morning and drink his black coffee. Till one black night, his white neighbors came into his house and beat the crap out of him. He lay there curled up like an umbrella handle in a pool of black blood and they kept on beating him. Till one of them started yelling that they should stop because if he died on them they might end up in prison.

The black man didn't die on them. An ambulance came and took him far, far away to an enchanted hospital on the top of an inactive volcano. The hospital was white. Its gates were white, the walls of its rooms were white, and so was the bedding. The black man began to recover. Recover and fall in love. Fall in love with a white nurse in a white uniform who took care of him with great devotion and kindness. She loved him too. And like him, that love of theirs grew stronger with every passing day, grew stronger and learned to get out of bed and crawl. Like a small child. Like a baby. Like a black man who had been badly beaten.

They got married in a yellow church. A yellow priest married them. His yellow parents had come to that country on a yellow ship. They had been beaten up by their white neighbors too. But he didn't get into all that with the black man. He barely knew the black man, and anyway, it didn't seem to be the absolute best time to talk about that, what with the ceremony and everything. He planned to say that God loved them and wished them all the best. The yellow man didn't know that for sure. He'd tried lots of times to convince himself that he did. That he knew that God loved everyone and wished us all only the best. But that day, when he married that battered black man, not even thirty and already covered with scars and sitting in a wheelchair, it was harder for him to believe. "God loves you both," he finally said anyway. "God loves you and wishes you all the best," he said and was ashamed.

The black man and the white woman lived together happily. Till one day, when the woman came home from the grocery store, a brown man with a brown knife who was waiting for her in the stairwell told her to give him everything she had. When the black man came home, he found her dead. He didn't understand why the brown man had stabbed her, because he could have just taken her money and run. The funeral service took place in the yellow priest's yellow church, and when the black man saw the yellow priest, he grabbed him by his yellow robe and said, "But you told us. You told us that God loves us. If he loves us, why did he do such a terrible thing to us?" The yellow priest had a ready-made answer. An answer they'd taught him in priest school. Something about God working in mysterious ways and that now that the woman was dead, she was surely closer to Him. But instead of using that answer, the priest began cursing. He cursed God viciously. Insulting and hurtful curses the likes of which had never been heard in the world before. Curses so insulting and hurtful that even God was offended.

God entered the yellow church through the ramp for the disabled. He was in a wheelchair too; he too had once lost a woman. He was silvery. Not the cheap, glittery silver of a banker's BMW, but a muted, matte silver. Once, as He was gliding among the silvery stars with his silvery beloved, a gang of golden gods attacked them. Once when they were kids, God had beaten up one of them, a short, skinny golden god, and now that god had grown up...