Free Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam by Peter Goldsworthy

offered to that sacred faith? What crimes committed in its name? Me against my brother; my brother and I against our cousins; our cousins and us against the world excuses everything from fratricide through clan warfare to ethnic cleansing and genocide — but there may be more subtle, suburban weirdness to emerge from family worship. This story explores one such little nuclear detonation.
    Sunbeam
strikes me more and more as a special story; certainly in the sense that it is a story that no-one has written before. It has another claim on me: as a father in love with my children, I understood it instinctively, before I began to half-understand it at a rational level. It seemed, simply, true.
    The best stories are often deceptively simple; they speak to us, to our unconscious, in ways that can not be immediately grasped; but we feel the fit, even as we are horrified, or awed.
    Stories about the death of children are not new, of course — they are among the oldest, their common tune one of the most easily played for effect. Dickens killed more babies than a minor diphtheria epidemic, and even Oscar Wilde’s famous comment that anyone who could read the death of Little Nell without laughing ‘had a heart of stone’ is surely a defence against his own suppressed sentimentality. Wilde may or may not have convinced himself, but he has helped to convince us: a Dickensian rendering — a rending — of the death of a child is impossible in today’s fictional world. ‘The blood of the children flowed in the streets … like the blood of the children,’ Pablo Neruda wrote in a famous attack on the use of artistic effects, such as simile and metaphor, to describe the unspeakable. Tell it plainly, I assume he was saying. Tell it as it is — at least when speaking of real deaths, real events. But in the world of fiction?
    Fiction is a different way of seeing — even its most plain-talking stories operate at a more mythic, universal level. It aims to tell the truth, yes — but in essence, in symbol, in a deeper emotional language that illuminates the particulars.
    After Dickens and Wilde — and Hollywood — stories must pluck at our emotions more subtly.
    This story has an odd logic — but I hope it is a logic which still locks us in, subtly, and carries us, disbelief suspended, from comforting and loving suburban beginnings into a zone not so much twilight as midnight.
    Like crabs in slowly heated water, we find ourselves — I hope — being boiled alive, without noticing how we got there.
    Where are we?
    Among ancient instincts of sacrifice, and the dark comfort that the dying find in taking others with them, if given a chance, in their pyramids, on their funeral pyres, in their Berlin bunkers. In a world of repressed or sublimated spirituality. In a place where the logic of love has carried us further than it had any right to do. Perhaps.
    I’ve added a few pages to the 1993 version which first appeared in the collection
Little Deaths.
    What we write is usually too much or too little — or looks that way later. I usually err too much towards too little. I used to think the story was perfect, of course it wasn’t, and still isn’t, but it will probably continue to aspire to perfection when it has the chance.
    PETER GOLDSWORTHY 1999

POETRY

    Peter Goldsworthy has written a number of poems whose concerns overlap those of the novella
Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam.
A reading of these poems might enhance an understanding of the novella.
     
Songs on the Death of Children
    I
    Dry eyed after so many deaths
    how many could still bring tears?
    family and friends
    I count on a handful of fingers
    and all the children in the world.
    With children
    the first million is hardest.
    II
    I walk through their sleeping ward.
    Among heads inflated with dreams,
    faces loosened on pillows.
    Among small milky breaths, smaller than words.
    My child
    and the children of others.
    Shared animal young,
    possum eyed and thimble nosed—
    shapes that