He was tired of hearing about it—
He decided just to
go do it.
And He did.
It was terrible.
It was awful.
He’d never been so cold.
He’d never been so tired.
He hated snow.
And it was like that
all the way to
the top.
Then at the top
He turned around
and His heart just broke.
Suddenly the whole world
was plain as day,
and still.
It was so still.
“Should’ve put everybody
on top of Mount Everest,”
God thought.
Nobody’d want to hit
the guy next to him
on top of Mount Everest.
“Next time,” thought God.
Next time.
GOD IS A GIRL
Though nobody wants
to talk about it.
Nobody wants to think
about it.
Not even God.
He knows He’s a guy, too.
He knows He’s lots of things.
He’s an eagle.
He’s a tree.
On less than wonderful days
He’s even a pig.
God’s a lot of things.
But He likes His guyness best.
People who know Him
know this,
so they always refer to Him as “He.”
Sometimes they call him “Bob.”
He isn’t sure why.
But God does guy stuff.
He wears guy cologne.
He listens to guy music.
He eats guy food.
God can’t help it.
He wants to be a guy.
Which is why,
whenever He gets the urge
to watch reruns of Sisters,
He’s embarrassed.
He lights a big cigar
and spits.
GOD HAS A COUSIN
Lucy, or Lucifer,
if you want to be formal.
Everybody called him
Lucy growing up,
which accounts a lot
for how he turned out.
God’s not as mad at him
as some people think.
You don’t become God
by holding grudges.
And besides,
Lucy taught Him
how to swing a bat,
though nobody wants
to hear about that.
Living in the same neighborhood,
hanging at the same places,
you get to feeling close,
you know?
Lucy’s one of the few people
left who remember
what it was like
In The Beginning.
Sure, God and he went
their separate ways,
but truth be known,
they’re always asking,
“How’s he doing?” and “How’s He doing?”
That’s the way it is
with family.
God’s still looking
for Lucy to move back.
GOD GOT A DESK JOB
Just to see what it
would be like.
Made his back hurt.
God’s always had a
bad back anyway—
the weight of the world
and all that.
He thought His job was tough,
’til He sat at a desk all day.
It was torture.
He could feel the Light
inside Him grow
dimmer and dimmer
and He thought that
if He had to pick
up that phone
one more time,
He’d just start the
whole Armageddon thing
people keep talking about.
(Not His idea, not His plan,
but in a pinch, He’s
sure He can come up
with something.)
The only thing that got
Him through to the
end of the day was
Snickers bars.
He ate thirty-seven.
Plus thinking about the Eagle Nebula
in the constellation Serpens.
That helped.
GOD FOUND SOME FUDGE
In the mail.
It was from an
archangel who’d been
and had it shipped
out from there.
The candy store thought
they’d sent it to
Grants Pass, Oregon.
Well, more goes on
in Grants Pass
than you might think.
Like God UPS.
But anyway—
He got the fudge
and He liked it.
So He thought He’d
make some of His own.
But everything God
does tends to turn out big.
Really big.
God’s fudge wouldn’t harden
so He kept stirring it
and stirring it,
and when He dropped it
in some water
to see if it formed
a ball,
it made
Neptune.
Or that’s what it’s called now.
God called it fudge.
GOD WROTE A FAN LETTER
To this country music
singer He liked.
God rarely writes fan letters,
so He figured the singer
would make a
big deal out of this.
He figured He’d get
an autographed photo
or something.
But she never wrote back.
Nothing.
So He wrote her again.
And He signed it
“God. Really.”
Nothing.
Finally He wrote
one last time.
He told her how much
He liked her singing
and how He had her
concert video, which
He played over and over,
and how, if she wanted,
He could answer her prayers.
Well—one at least.
And finally, finally
she wrote back.
And she said,
“Dear God, I pray
you will get a life.”
Well, thought God.
Just what did she mean by that?
GOD WENT TO INDIA
To see the elephants.
God adores elephants.
He thinks they are
the best thing
He ever made.
They do everything
He hoped for:
They love their children,
they don’t kill,
they mourn their dead.
This last thing is
especially important
to God.
Elephants visit the graves
of those they loved.
They spend hours there.
They fondle the dry bones.
They mourn.
God understands mourning
better than any other emotion,
better even than love.
Because He has lost
everything He has
ever made.
You make life,
you make death.
The things God makes
always turn into something else and
He does find this good.
But He can’t help missing all the originals.
GOD DIED
Sort of.
It’s a long story.
But if you have time…
Okay—
God has been God
&
nbsp; for so long
even He doesn’t have
a clue where He
came from.
For a while He
wasn’t even sure
He was God, until
everything He said
or thought or
wanted to happen
happened.
That was a big tip-off.
So He didn’t remember
where He came from
or why.
He just knew
what He could do.
Oh, He wanted to be
very careful with this.
This could be Good.
This could be the
biggest thing in the
universe.
He just had to be
a really tip-top God.
Somebody who made
no mistakes.
Who didn’t show up
late for work.
Who competed
only against Himself.
He could do this.
He was GOD.
So He thought about
everything
for a really really
really really really
long time.
Then He opened His mouth
and said,
“Let There Be Light.
” And it was so.
Good, said God.
And after that
no one could stop Him.
He said “Let There Be”
a billion trillion zillion
times and when He
was finished,
there were so many
new things, even He
didn’t know
what some of them were.
(Like grapefruit spoons.)
But it was all Good.
Really good, said God.
Then who knows what
went wrong, but
one morning God woke up
and His right-hand angel
at the time (Sheila)
said, “You know those
two brothers? One
just killed the other.”
God could not
believe this.
He could not
believe this.
(It should be mentioned
that this was
way before Lucy
relocated to more
southern regions.)
God, in fact,
did not even know
exactly what
“killed” meant,
until Sheila explained it
very carefully to Him.
Even then, He had
to see for Himself.
And there He saw
that boy—Abel
was his name—
covered with blood
and not a hint of
life in him.
Not a whiff.
God wanted to start
all over again,
make everything
all over again,
from scratch.
Make it so nothing
in this world
could be “killed.”
But Sheila said,
“You can’t start over.
You’d have to
kill everything
to start over.”
God hadn’t considered this.
God lived purely in the moment
so He wasn’t the greatest
long-range planner.
But He stopped and
thought about what
Sheila said, and
though there were
some things He could
probably kill
and feel pretty
okay about it
(He wasn’t all that attached to
the chicken pox virus,
for example),
there were other things
He could not ever
let go.
Sea turtles, for one.
Spiders, for another.
Too beautiful, too beautiful,
He said.
What to do?
God was like anybody else.
Everything was the
first time for Him, too.
He didn’t mean to make
what happened between
Abel and his brother
happen.
He thought they’d be
good buddies.
Like ducks.
Hadn’t they learned
anything from ducks?
Apparently not.
God was stricken.
He did not know
what to do.
If He left things as
they were, there was bound to be
more killing.
Could He bear this?
God’s blood was love.
His bones were love.
His eyes, his heart,
his kidneys were love.
He didn’t know
what He’d done wrong
that caused a thing—the other brother—
to be born
without love.
A thing
that came from Him.
He asked Sheila
what she thought
He should do,
now that killing
was a part of things.
And Sheila said, “Die.”
Just like that.
Sheila had always been
a very smart girl.
So the story goes
that God took on
the blood, the bones,
the eyes, the heart, the
kidneys of a man.
And He made real friends.
And He loved a real family.
And He prayed real prayers.
He didn’t go unnoticed.
Ever after, religions were made
that insisted that God
had been this guy or that guy
or the other.
But one thing happened
for sure.
God died.
No one knows precisely how.
But sure enough,
He did it.
Because it was the
only way He could
find out what it is
to love
a drink of water,
sleep,
a warm coat,
a mother,
a father,
morning,
evening,
a really good joke.
And pain.
God saw so much pain
and He was sorry for it.
He didn’t know it would
happen quite that way,
but He finally saw
how pain caused
one of two things:
A reverence for life.
Or killing.
Both grew from the same seed.
The one He had planted.
So God went back
to being God,
finally comfortable
with being called
All-Knowing
because now
He actually was.
And after that,
He made sure
He ate popcorn and
watched a movie
every Friday night.
Petted the cats.
Fed the birds.
And played the jukebox
at Kenny’s Tavern.
God needed
to remember
what a cool thing
it was to be a guy.
Or a girl.
An eagle.
A pig.
To be life.
God went to beauty school.
He went there to learn how
to give a good perm.
But what He was really there for
was the hands.
About the Author
CYNTHIA RYLANT was awarded a Newbery Medal for MISSING MAY and received a Newbery Honor f
or A FINE WHITE DUST. She is also the author of several popular series for the beginning reader, including the beloved Henry and Mudge books. Cynthia Rylant lives with her family in Oregon.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Other books by
CYNTHIA RYLANT
THE RELATIVES CAME
EVERY LIVING THING
A FINE WHITE DUST
MISSING MAY
THE ISLANDER
Credits
Cover art © 2003 by James Robinson
Cover design by Alison Donalty
Copyright
GOD WENT TO BEAUTY SCHOOL. Copyright © 2003 by Cynthia Rylant. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition March 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-188432-0
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