-Piece of god-

I saw the shape of a crucifix in my pepperoni pizza

and although I was hungry, I didn’t want to pull a slice from the body of work

until I examined the vision more closely.

So I looked closely. The cross was perfectly formed and the sauce of the pie

began to look like rivers of blood and the cheese took on the properties 

of the sinew of muscle. The disks of oily pepperoni were cardinal sins

planted on a doomed soul. My pizza. My cardinal sins. Mea culpa.

I called Priest of the Parish who was recently released for educating his altar boys 

in new directions of adult expression and he drove right over to see the miracle.

He said it was interesting and called Pope who told him it was a good sighting.

"You see", Pope said, "God wouldn’t waste his time putting this image on a pizza

if it wasn’t worthy of serious consideration."

Priest blessed the pizza pie with a quick wave of his acrid, yellow fingertips 

and told me that we’d better pray or else. We bowed our heads above the circle

of the pizza pie and prayed like Kissinger and Nixon in the Oval Office

when a strange buzzing began to hover over us like another holy thing.
Maybe angels were coming over for a taste. Then a thick-bodied housefly landed

on a saucy piece of pepperoni, threw-up, then sucked it up through that ridiculous

tube in its abdomen we’ve all heard about. Seeing this, Priest asked me if I knew of any neighborhood boys in the twelve year old range who might want a slice of a blessed

pizza and I said: "No. No, I don’t"! Certainly not after the thick-bodied housefly incident.

And a story with this sort of detail has got to be true!