Cases of Miracle Abuse in Liberty Center, Ohio
By Joe Celizic

Oh, we are a terrible people.

It started when the Maumee River split, the water walling up like a roofless tunnel.  We just gawked at the height of it, like something out of a Roland Emmerich movie, or at least from New York.  We tested its fragile edges, toed the newly dried ground, sipped our hands in the calm, self-sufficient, airborne liquid.  It wouldn’t budge, and so for those few hours we just baked in the June heat and enjoyed its cool mist.

But it wasn’t long before the guns were brought in.  Just a few locals with turkey-season shotties and hand-me-down rifles, those men with enough organization and ambition to decide to guard either entrance.  Jimmy Corrigan watched his father—a man he’d only known for the latter half of his twelve years—stand like a statue next to the misting liquid walls, clamping his twelve-gauge the same way Jimmy imagined he did back in ninety-two, right before the black and whites had surrounded the Huntington Bank, told him to come out and put his face on the concrete.

The thugs dug signs into the dirt in front of the Maumee’s dry fissure, wrote “Twenty dollar entry fee” in red sharpie.  Some tried to protest but, of course, that’s what the guns were for.

*

We found others.

Bushes ignited, seemingly at random, without blacking the leaves or branches.  The flames didn’t seem to give off any heat.  They wouldn’t burn old newspapers, wouldn’t roast the marshmallows we held over their dancing light.  But we soon discovered that we could clap them on and off.  We used them to scare our friends, dogs and children.

The Circle K’s bathroom sink began running a deep plum Merlot.  They quickly bottled it up, packed it next to the Miller Lite for $7.99.  It smelled like lead and grapes, but it was the novelty of the thing.

A few of us suddenly understood all different languages.  Portuguese and Russian, sure.  But also Asturian.  Kanuri.  Catalan.  Kids swore at their unaware parents in Tswana, cackled to themselves as they ran back upstairs.

Others still were able to resurrect their dead grandmothers.  They shoveled them up from their cherry caskets and walked them into town, crutching their shoulders. The wait for Bonnie’s Beauty Shop lined out to the street and Jimmy Corrigan’s Grandma Betty was one of the many once-upon-a-time corpses wanting to get a “touch up.”  She was wearing the same lime floral dress in which he’d seen her buried, and her performance modesty chimed just as it did when she lived down the street.

“You deserve it,” he reassured her.  “How often does something like this happen?”

*

Soon after, a rumor spread that some ungratified, frustrated teens blinded Jimmy Corrigan, held down his arms and legs and splashed hydrochloric acid in his eyes.  He claimed they made him stumble through uneven fields and ditches before they brushed healing fingers over his eyelids to restore his sight.  Of course, no one could prove it, his word against theirs.  His eyes were just as wide and blue and open as they’d ever been, no trace of any physical damage.  But somehow we all knew it was true.  Anyone who looked at Jimmy Corrigan could feel how damaged he was.

*

But the real problem came after people did their research.

Everyone murdered, and everyone was murdered.  Over misunderstandings and false rumors.  Over incorrect change and dirty looks.  They were choked or stabbed or run over, and after the attacker exhaled his rancor, they were brought back to life to have their trespasses explained to them.  But no one learned or changed because no one had to.  People stopped working or offering courtesies, too busy with the new powers they now had over the world that once seemed both difficult and dull.

Many were sure this was the end.

*

Jimmy’s father and those men at the Maumee traded in their guns for trumpets, marched around Henry County Bank blasting incoherent squawks until the walls crumbled and powdered.  They bagged the safe’s money and took off in a plate-less white Explorer.  We never saw them again, not even Jimmy’s father, who seemed to have forgotten he’d ever had a son.

Many of us wondered if they took any miracles with them, if this were happening anywhere else but here.  We secretly hoped it wasn’t, for their sake.  It wasn’t until then that someone suggested we were cursed, that miracles were only blessings in the right place at the right time.

*

Then came the fish and bread.

They popped up in freezers and drawers, then on shelves and in old cardboard boxes.  We found salmon in our pillowcases, pumpernickel mixed in sheet wrinkles.  Perch crammed in the toes of our shoes.  Rank bluegill and soggy sourdough in our washing machines.  Marble rye under couch cushions.  Burnt ashen walleye in our microwaves and ovens.  We tried to throw them away, but found piles of slain flathead catfish in our trashcans, French rolls in our dumpsters.

Jimmy Corrigan spied a few older men and their resurrected friends as they tried to fry the halibut over burning bushes, before remembering the bushes didn’t cook.  “It was worth a shot,” they said, pans in hand.

The bread seemed no good, but some decided to package the fish, selling the cleaner pieces to shops in Toledo, Findlay and Bowling Green.  But they all came back, mushy rotten with angry notes saying they’d grown maggots after the first day.  The foul corpses heaped in our yards and fields, our roads.

So we gathered our trucks, vans and SUVs; those of us who were finally ready to labor again, if only for our own decency.  We loaded up each loaf and fish, cleaned every mess we’d made.  We didn’t care if it ruined our upholstery, if the smell stained our hands for months after.  Like a man helping to carry another man, we hauled them to the split Maumee.  We slid those silvery bodies and dried buns down to the water, splashed them in, watched as the fish sank and bread floated onward.  And we watched Jimmy Corrigan toss in our scraps from the riverbank, all the little pieces we had missed.

We hoped the river would know what to do with them.