There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

by Casey Gerald

You arrive, by force, as a baby and become a little boy or girl and without much thought, because children don’t think about these things, you do something that leads somebody—your mother, your teacher, the lady who runs the candy house—to say That kid is special. You pick up, along the way, some honest basic virtues: you get a little angry when something seems unfair; you get a little sad when a dog dies or a friend falls off his bike; you get a little excited when somebody gives you a new task, a new challenge, and you work very hard to do it well, to please them and to see what you can do. If you, like me, are indoctrinated into a religion, you take the religion at its word, enough to adopt some of its mandates as the mandates of your life: feed the hungry, visit the sick, clothe the naked, help somebody. This goes on. Perhaps some tragedy befalls you and you wind up wandering around, meeting lots of strangers. You come to depend on their kindness. You come to like them more than many people you already know. At some point, a stranger shows up from another world and finds you, minding your business being special and all, and they say Why don’t you come with me? And you will go, for the same reasons I have mentioned re: journeys, and you will also go because your people want you to go—for you and for them. So you go. You go off to the new world and realize pretty soon—or you feel and don’t realize until many years later—that you are in limbo: you can never fully be a par...