Wednesday, April 1, 2015

The Best Day of the Year to Rob a Church (Fiction)


            “A bottle of your best wine!” Carl slapped a hundred dollar bill down on the bar.
            “You don’t drink wine,” said Jimbo as he eyed the large bill with suspicion.
            “Then a bottle of your best whiskey!”
            “A hundred dollars isn’t going to cover that.”
            “How about five hundred?” Carl tossed four more bills on the bar. “Keep the change.”
            “What is this?” Jimbo asked. “April Fools or something?”
            “No, that was a few days ago. It’s Easter.”
            “Is it?”
            “First Sunday in April. Easter always falls on the first Sunday in April.”
            “I don’t think that’s right.”
            “Don’t you want to know where I got the money?”
            “That’s the question I’ve been asking myself—Do I?
            “I robbed a church!” Carl couldn’t help but smile.
            “You robbed a church. On Easter?”
            “The best day of the year to rob a church.”
            “How do you figure?”
            “Well, first of all, people who don’t regularly go to church still go to church on Easter.”
            “What about Christmas?”
            “Yes, the same holds true for Christmas, but by Christmas Eve people are broke from buying presents and what not. By the time Easter rolls around, people are feeling awfully generous. Spring is in the air. Tax returns are rolling in. That’s when they tip the most.”
            “I’m not sure that’s what they call it.”
            “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Check this out.” Carl pulled a bunny mask out of his back pocket and dropped it on the bar in front of Jimbo.
            “You robbed a church dressed as a rabbit?”
            “The Easter Bunny! Get it? Thought it would be a nice touch.”
            “Aren’t you worried about the repercussions?”
            “That’s what’s so genius about the entire thing—the church won’t even call the cops. It’s against their whole philosophy. They’re all into forgiveness and all that shit. The preacher went on and on about it during his sermon.”
            “Wait a second. You actually sat through the sermon?”
            “It would have been disrespectful if I didn’t. After all, it is Easter.”
            “So, let’s say for some reason they don’t call the police, which I find very unlikely, what about other repercussions, you know, from a higher power?”
            “You mean Jesus?”
            “Or God, or however you want to look at it. Don’t you think robbing a church might bring some bad karma?”
            “Bad karma? Have you looked at my life lately? I hate to break it to you buddy, but things haven’t been going so well on this side of the bar. That’s another reason this thing is so great—I’m testing God!”
            “Testing God?”
            “Yes. Testing God! I want to see if he actually exists. I figured that nothing is much worse than robbing a church, so if God is real, then he’ll punish me, won’t he?”
            “But if God was real, he might actually be disgusted by the idea of church in the first place. After all, doesn’t the first commandment say that you shall not have any other gods? It seems to me that most churches these days are more interested in the church itself than they are in the God in which they’re supposed to be worshipping. In some respect, the church has become their God.”
            “Well, in that case, by robbing the church, I’m actually doing God a favor!”
            Jimbo paused to think for a moment. “How much did you get anyway?”
            “Twenty-grand.”
            “Twenty-grand?”
            “It was a mega-church.”
            Jimbo grabbed the five hundred dollars and slipped it in his front pocket. “One bottle of our finest whiskey, coming up!”



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