My son wants to know what happened before the universe &

Katherine Shehadeh

today we learned the universe was created by fire—an explosion tinier than a tiny pin prick, and the universe, it’s expanding all the time, stretching this way, pulling that, until a moment when it isn’t and it gets smaller & tighter, until it turns back into a tiny little thing, tinier

than a pin prick. All the universe crunching & pressing like the trash compactor we never managed to get fixed in the nineties, except it’s actually working because god fixes everything, and then again & again and it’s all swirling around you all the time, like when you have kids

and the dryer is always on its spin cycle & you’re running the dishwasher twice a week instead of once, & you have to buy new spoons because one set of spoons isn’t enough for your family anymore, but one day you don’t, it’s not, and suddenly there’s so many spoons & the dishwasher

smells like hot trash because no one has run it for the whole week and you should be happy, right there, in the place where you are at every right now, but now I have to answer my son’s question, which he wants to ask god, who he isn’t sure exists, unlike Santa, whose fire red suit can be

seen, which is to say he must be real, unlike his friend’s mom who just got too sick, who he says no longer is, but there are no easy answers for the dawn of existence & so we must turn to YouTube to learn “how to pray salah” & to “explain the big bang” because no one can see a thing so