In Which the Rapture Misses Bushwick

It is on this random Friday my mother texts me—yes, texts me, though I did not know it was her at first because she is on her sixth Obama Phone this year—to ask me—yes, me—if the rapture is happening and I pause to look out my window because the question is so ridiculous and because I am in the middle of Bushwick where, had the rapture happened and I hadn’t known it, I still wouldn’t know, because what God-fearing person moves to Bushwick, which my mother must have known because she follows up on her first text with obviously you’re okay, but I saw it on the news, which then prompts me to tell my mother—prone to conspiracy—that the rapture is not, in fact, happening and you should really evaluate your sources and that if the rapture were happening, I’d be on the first bus to Glory, thank you very much, to which my mother—prone to skepticism—asks when the last time I prayed was, at which point I, knowing I had been stumped, ignore the question and instead opt to ask my mother about changing my name legally, at which she—prone to distraction—tells the long story of my birth, of who I did and didn’t belong to and who did or didn’t or wasn’t supposed to know, how I was so small I could fit in the palm of her palm, how the helicopter carried us to another hospital, how even still in my puny state she called me diesel—after her favorite Autobot, Optimus Prime—how yes, yes, of course the name is mine to change, my life is mine to live, yes, yes, while I am still unraptured and unclaimed by God, go, go, be what she never could have dreamed, alive past the hour of my birth and onward to oblivion.