Instagram Jesus, by Leonora Desar

We wanted to begin. We wanted to be reborn and die and do all these things at once. We didn’t know what any of it meant. Only that it would happen once a year, at Stephen John’s place. This is where he had his lawn scene. Every year, Jesus would be reborn. He’d grant a miracle, one minute he was a neon figure from Target and the next he was singing Hallelujah!
    We listened to the stars. We made up stories, about Stephen John, why his mother gave him two first names. And we laughed, but nervously. It was just a way to pass the time, until Jesus’ head. And then it came, bright and purple as a tulip. It looked at us, from Mary’s legs.
    We waited. We learned not to expect big things—trains that came on time and husbands who came back to life and a womb that would regenerate, hallelujah. We stood there and took pics with Jesus, and posted them to Instagram. Someone clicked like and for a minute we lit up like tinsel. Then we went back home.

Leonora Desar's writing can be found or is forthcoming in Passages North, Harpur Palate, SmokeLong Quarterly, Devil's Lake, the Bath Flash Fiction Award anthology, where she was shortlisted, and elsewhere. She also received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and was a finalist for Black Warrior Review’s flash prose contest and SmokeLong Quarterly’s Kathy Fish fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn and holds an MS from the Columbia Journalism School.