Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist

from the center of the field and it made an arc and dropped behind the goal posts. “You should have seen it from the field,” Daniel said. “It was like an angel was holding it. I wish he was with us now. It’s not right he’s not here for this.”
    â€œI told him I was going to ask you all,” Grady said. “Before too long I’ll get him for longer and more often. I’ve got a lawyer working on it. We’re going to make it real expensive for his mother to be so mean. She stands in her driveway looking at her watch when I take him back on Sundays. I can’t be a minute late. But if she wants to change my days she just does it and sends me word.”
    â€œYou’ll get him more,” Daniel said. “I bet you will. He had a good time with us last weekend. He told me about the stuff she does to keep him from seeing you. He’s not going to put up with that forever.”
    â€œWhat are you all talking about?” Carly asked. She had come back into the kitchen wearing a blue wool bathrobe and with her hair combed and her makeup fixed. “What’s going on?”
    â€œWe’re talking about Jesse,” Daniel said. “You want a milkshake, Momma? I can make you one.”
    â€œI want to see my engagement ring again,” she said to Grady. “You put it back in your pocket. Give it here.”
    Grady took the box out of his pocket and stood up and handed it to her. “You don’t have to keep it if you don’t like it,” he said. “Mr. Mozer said you can trade it for anything you wanted.”
    Carly took the ring out of the box and put it on her finger and sat down at the table and looked at her son. “I do want a chocolate milkshake,” she said. “And I want you to make it for me.”
    IN NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, a beautiful little ten-year-old girl got up from her prayers and climbed into her bed in the trailer she and her mother and her grandmother were using for a house. She had been praying the same prayers she had prayed each night for a month. She thanked God for all his blessings, for the new trailer and for cleaning up Lusher School and getting it started again. She prayed for her mother to get in a better mood and she prayed for her best friend, Sallie, and she said a special prayer for the woman with curly hair who had come down from the helicopter in the little chair and pulled her up into the seat beside her and strapped her in and told her not to be afraid. “Get her something nice that she really wants,” Celia asked God. “Get her a new car or a new boyfriend or some pretty clothes or anything she needs. She’s from Arkansas, but you know which one she is. She’s the one who pulled Mother and Grandmother and me off the roof in the flood. I don’t think you made the flood. I think you didn’t know the canal barriers were going to break. Anyway, good night now, God. Amen.”

High Water
    S o Dean Reyes and I had been in the French Quarter for five days and we weren’t ready to leave. We work for a living and this was our vacation. Well, it was also a paramedics convention and our expenses were being paid by the hospital and the rest was tax deductible; still it was a vacation. We’re paramedics in Los Angeles, a city so beset by AIDS and Hepatitis C and gunfire and every problem you can think of from an emergency worker’s point of view that our hospital demands its workers take vacations. Anxiety becomes your middle name when you do the work we do.
    What can I say to justify the decisions we made from the twenty-fifth of August 2005 until we got home on the sixteenth of September? We’re only human. As Douglas Adams wrote, “In other words, carbon-based, bipedal life forms descended from apes.” Only apes would have run from a storm, not decided to ride it out in the oldest apartment building in the United States.
    Dean and I live together, but we are