Simon Peter
by Mike Phillips
“But we are the ones who have suffered through the Mother’s transgression.”
—The Letter of Peter to Philip (Nag Hammadi Codex VIII,2: 139)
He kept trying to skip stones on the river’s surface, but each time he was answered with a distinctly unsatisfying 
plop. I told him to knock it off, and he shuffled over to the picnic table, swung one leg over the bench, and immediately started scratching at the peeling paint.
“I just don’t get it,” he mumbled. He looked at me, then away, across the water. “Why are all women crazy?”
I told him that everyone’s crazy, by which I meant that he was crazy.
“Nah, bitches, man.” Now he was digging flecks of dried paint out from under his fingernails. I noticed they needed a trim. “I mean, they’re so irrational. It’s hormonal or something.”
He was always going on about purity, simplicity. That was what had started the argument. He told her she was wearing too much makeup, and that he liked her better without it. He just couldn’t understand why she would get so upset.
“She should be flattered, right? Doesn’t that prove that I love her, no matter what she looks like?” By now he was putting his fingers into his hair, taking them out, putting them back in.
I turned to contemplate a tugboat dragging a barge piled high with garbage, insatiable seagulls diving over and over into the heap. The small, stubborn tug, moving forward despite the apparent impossibility of its ugly load: I wanted to explain it to him, but I knew he wouldn’t understand.
