“Look! The Moon has come out from behind some clouds. We’re saved!”
“That’s just old Xianity superstition,” replied wannabe lover Johnny Blank to this, hoping she wouldn’t go down that road again, the Jesus Saves one. He’s Muslim and he’s going to stay that way! And Cylinder is Jewish so that’s that. Found God a while back but a different one from mine, and a different one from Gloria’s. But we still seem to be getting along. For now, he thinks.
Gloria stares and stares. With hate. Just like long long ago when she first got this role. The Moon grew a mustache and beard, peered down at her in ultimate superiority and changed birds into bees, flowers into trees. Not God. Something better, she realized. A Dark Lord. She’d been thinking about it for years, but hadn’t said anything about her insights. A good Christian woman she was to others still. Until the Big Reveal. She’d been pondering it for months. She’ll act on it in days. Xianity, as my *friend* Johnny Blank puts it, doesn’t *have* any superstition like that. She made it up. But, being Muslim, he wouldn’t know the difference. Maybe a perfect match after all, a perfect foil. I set them up he knocks them down.
“Johnny,” she says seductively, moving her pointing finger over to his shoulder, making an “X” on it to mark him as a target. “Tell me about your family again, your overbearing father, your loving but absent mother.”
“She *died*. She wasn’t absent.”
“Oh right right.” She sat up with this, looked up to the still visible Moon for strength. “I… forgot.” The Moon went behind clouds and she suddenly became sad, spell over.
(to be continued)
Sunklands 