An Open Letter to Pastor Andrew

Re: the Super Nintendo Game Genie He Borrowed and Did Not Return to Me the Year We Graduated High School 

I’ve been trying to remind myself lately that we are all human: plumbers, street fighters, kidnapped princesses. I’m an asshole; you’re an asshole, my therapist used to say. (Please excuse her ungodly choice of words.) Some of us, after all, can make it past Super Mario World’s Vanilla Dome the old-fashioned way: through practice, perseverance, and well-timed X-B running jumps above the Buzzy Beetles and Koopas. Others of us need a little assistance. Jesus understood that, didn’t he? (See the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, Matthew 20:1-16. See Zacchaeus the Tax Collector, Luke 19:1-10.) Maybe now I am also trying to have a little more grace amid what feels unevenly distributed: opportunity, luck, or predestination. Still, I have this recurring fantasy—in which I storm into your sanctuary just as you’re approaching the pulpit, and all your well-dressed congregants swivel in their pews to make out the shape of me against the backdrop of the open doors. “What did you do with it?” I call out. “Did you break it? Lose it? Was there some story you told yourself that made you believe you were more deserving of a never-ending cheat code?” Maybe you wouldn’t recognize me now—the long hair I could never style cropped so much shorter, the baggy men’s jeans I once purchased from the thrift store now upgraded, purchased from a clearance rack. I like to think there’s a part of you that’s always wanted to come clean—to return the device or explain why you didn’t. Maybe it’s naïve of me to believe in your better impulses despite the evidence—to cling to them the way your mother once clung to her prayer book. Sometimes the things we believe don’t make much sense. Perhaps that’s what we have most in common: this thing we call faith.  

Sarah Carson is the author of several poetry collections, including How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan (2022), winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Slowdown, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, and Gulf Coast, among others. She is the inaugural poet laureate of the Kobayashi Society for the Appreciation of Hot Dogs. You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com.   

This essay is a Short Reads original.