The Little Jesus Story

The Little Jesus Story

By Katurian Katurian

Once upon a time in a land not so very far away there lived a little girl, and, although this little girl’s gentle parents hadn't brought her up very religiously at all, she was quite quite determined that she was the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Which was somewhat strange for any six-year old. She’d wear a little beard and would go around in sandals, blessing stuff. She could be forever found walking amongst the poor and the homeless, consoling the drunks and the drug addicts, and generally consorting with the type of person her mummy and daddy didn't deem suitable for a six-year-old to be consorting with. Each time they would drag her home from some unsavoury sort she would stamp and scream and throw her dollies about, and when her parents would counter that “Jesus never stamped and screamed and threw his dollies about” She’d reply, “That was the old Jesus! Get it?”

Well, one day, the little girl slipped away yet again, and for two horrifying days her parents could find neither hide nor hair of her, until they received a distraught call from a priest they didn't know, saying, “You’d better come down to the church. Your daughter’s here giving us a lot of shit. It was cute at first but now it’s really getting irritating.”

Well, her parents didn't care about all that, they were just relieved that she was alive and well, and they sped downtown to pick her up, but in their haste they careened into an oncoming meat truck, were beheaded and died. The little girl was informed of the news; she cried one single tear, and not a single tear more, as she thought Jesus would've done if he’d lost his parents in a vehicular beheading; and she was shipped off by the state to live in a forest with some abusive foster-parent who hadn't informed the state that they were abusive in the form; who hated religion, who hated Jesus, who hated anybody, in fact, who didn't hate anybody, and who, as would follow, hated the little girl.

She bore their hate with a happy heart and forgave them, but this didn't seem to work. When she insisted on attending church of a Sunday, they took her sandals away, forcing her to walk there barefoot and alone, over craggy roads of broken glass, yet when she got there she’d kneel for hours, praying for her Father in Heaven to forgive them, only to get told off for bleeding all over the church. She’d receive a beating for arriving late home, though no time had been set for her arrival; she’d receive a beating for sharing her food with the poor children at school, she’d receive a beating for cheering up the ugly kids, she’d receive a beating for wandering about looking for lepers. Her life was a constant torture, yet she bore it with a smile and it all only made her stronger, till this one day when she met a blind man begging by the roadside.

She mixed a little of her spittle in the dust and rubbed it over his eyes. He reported her to the police for rubbing dust and spittle in his eyes, and when her foster-parents got her back from the police station they said to her “So you want to be like Jesus, do you?” And she said, “Finally you fucking get it!” And they stared at her a little while. And then it started.

Her foster-mother embedded in her daughter’s head a crown of thorns made of barbed wire, because she was too lazy to make a proper crown of thorns, while her foster-father whipped her with a cat o’ nine tails, and after an hour or two of that, they asked her, when she regained consciousness.

“Do you still want to be like Jesus?”

And, through her tears, she said, “Yes, I do.”

So they made her carry a heavy wooden cross around the sitting room a hundred times until her legs buckled and her shins broke and she could do nothing but stare at her little legs going the wrong way, and they said to her

“Do you still want to be like Jesus?”

And she almost got sick for a second, but she swallowed it so she wouldn't look weak and she looked them in the eye and she said. “Yes, I do.”

And then they nailed her hands to cross and bent her legs back around the right way and nailed her feet to the cross and they stood the cross up against the back wall and left her there while they watched television, and when all the good programmes were over they turned it off and they sharpened a spear and they said to her “Do you still want to be like Jesus?”

And the little girl swallowed her tears and she took a deep breath and she said, “No. I don’t want to be like Jesus. I fucking am Jesus!” And her parents stuck the spear in her side and they left her there to die, and they went to bed. And in the morning they were quite surprised that she wasn't dead so they took her down off the cross and they buried her alive in a little coffin with just enough air to live for three days and the last voices she heard were her foster-parents above, calling out “Well if you’re Jesus, you’ll rise again in three 

days, won’t you?”

And the little girl thought about it for a while, then she smiled to herself and she whispered, “Exactly. Exactly.” And she waited. And she waited. And she waited.

Three days later a man out walking the woods stumbled over a small, freshly dug grave, but, as the man was quite blind, he carried on by, sadly not hearing a horrible scratching of bone upon wood a little way behind him, that ever so slowly faded away and was lost for ever in the black, black gloom of the empty, empty, empty forest.