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The 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time by Jennifer Tall
Thursday, August 30, 2018
Rated "PG" by the Author.
A homeless woman and her adopted kitten get much needed help from a pair of mysterious voices on a dark, wintery night.
The 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
She found the poor shivering whitey brown kitten huddled behind a short telephone box. Cold and exhausted, frightened and crying, he wouldn’t have survived the night. She pulled her buggy up closer to get a look at him, and the buggy blocked the wind off his little body as she did. He wasn’t more than six weeks old, sitting in a small box, looking up at her with gray blue eyes.
This day, one of the worst winter storms in years was predicted to come on in the night. And as night fell, a brutal wind blasted through the streets. All day Friday and all day Saturday, the homeless woman had spent hours longer than she usually did picking up bottles and cans and stray food out of dumpsters, because she knew she’d have to stay holed up next to a basement boiler for the two days this storm lived its wintry life. She had about three dollars, enough for some King Cobra malt liquor and a few loosies. But then she heard the kitten crying.
She looked down at the unloved kitten behind the pole, wondering if she could possibly take care of anyone besides herself. I can’t make a decision, she thought. It will come down on me or it won’t. It will stay away from me or it won’t. She looked down into the folded over black plastic bag in the buggy. She held onto the few dollars she had clutched inside her pocket. She looked into the night wind. She looked at the bodega two doors down she had been heading for to buy the one thing she thought she needed on a deep winter night like this. But lastly, she looked at the whimpering little soul who needed somebody itself now.
She picked the freezing little kitten up and tucked him under her coat. The box someone had left him there in immediately blew away. He snuggled deep next to her and she knew if she kept him he would survive. She started to push her buggy against the wind, to get somewhere else before the darkness did. The bodega was the first place for them to go.
Most of the other bottlers in the neighborhood had been off the streets for hours already. The church steps and the sidewalks were empty of the homeless. They had disappeared into boiler rooms, shelters, underneath the rock ledge at the park, into the seventh floor alcoves of sixth floor buildings, anywhere they could. Woodie had six guys sleeping ten across in his welfare apartment. Four dollars a guy.
The old fellow who wore the beret and followed his own hallucinations down the street was gone. And the guy who had a sign that said “Will Eat for Work” probably had gotten himself arrested again because he was such a pest. The police even put handcuffs on his saxophone, or so was the joke at the soup kitchen. The home-ful were still out and about, getting off the evening buses.
But the homeless were every last one missing. The bottlers, the dives, the streetwalkers, and the boiler sleepers had all disappeared. There was too big a storm coming on.
She had been headed to the basement boiler room, where she often slept, in an apartment building at a corner of 180th Street, near the George Washington Bridge and the Hudson River. She knew the superintendent would keep the door padlocked and pretend she wasn’t there.
But it would still be a frigid 48 hours, hiding behind the boiler, awake all night listening for footsteps. Pipes clanking and doors opening and closing on the hard concrete floor, deep in the night with malt liquor and the half of a Quarter Pounder she had dug out of someone’s trash.
Aeroneurosis is nervous exhaustion from prolonged piloting of an aircraft, but in this case it was from pushing a nearly aerodynamic shopping cart loaded up with empty pop bottles in high wind for close to 12 hours. The bottle machines would be closed for the next two days. With the black winter weather, they’d all be drinking their Coronas and smoking their Newports clean out of a pack indoors.
So she’d spent hours trudging up and down the streets ahead of the coming nor’easter. Now with the kitten, she didn’t know if she could go to sleep next to the boiler, not tonight, so deathly cold was it, with the wind blasting through her ripped clothing.
She pushed hard against the nearly airborne buggy and opened the door to the bodega on the corner. The warmth in the store stung her eyes. A guy behind the counter was talking on a cell phone. He was lighting up another guy’s loosie with a 50 cent cigarette lighter tied with a string to the counter. She let her face warm before she looked at the shelf next to the coffee machine, vanilla bean was the flavor of the day.
She had to decide between malt liquor and cat food. She picked up some cat food. She asked for two menthol loosies and some matches and counted her money. The clerk gave her the matches and slipped her an extra loosie. He knew what was going on outside. The kitten had stayed quietly under her coat up the street, but now the lights and the voices frightened him. The clerk looked at her curiously when he put the cat food into a bag. The church had the Saturday night dinner open. She let the kitten’s little face push up from under her coat.
The clerk handed her the cat food and gave her the dollar back. He looked past her eyes, which meant for her to say nothing else, just leave with what she had right away so no one would see her. Now she had to go back outside and after outside, she didn’t know where she was going to go.
She was near the Bering Sea, the 11th time zone west of GMT Bering Time, or maybe by the Hudson River, not far distant from the North Pole of Manhattan. The midnight blue sea, with the garnet star in Orion was beautiful, but it was Arctic cold outside, watching the red and white rotating beacon on the George Washington Bridge.
In that midnight blue sea above the bridge, all those stars that can’t be seen from the city had fallen to the ground, never to be seen again. She thought she was about to dim out the way those city stars had done years and years ago with the brightening of city lights.
But suddenly there was a clear, strong, crystalline voice whispering in the wind, into her ear. The voice was clear and insistent and said, “The alley where the fire escape is, you can go inside there.”
She knew no one was around her, but she turned and looked anyway. She was completely alone on the sidewalk. The church door into the meeting hall was bolted shut. The M4 had already left the bus stop. The nearest lone figure was crossing the street towards the station. This time it was her own mind repeating the words, but the voice itself had been strong, insistent, reassuring, knowing, “you can go inside there.”
There was an apartment in the same building she was headed for, deep in the alley on the second floor that was vacant, and she knew that because she’d climbed up the grounded fire escape once and looked in the window. It was a gutted, stripped, unrenovated studio apartment and it had been that way for years.
The apartment window off the fire escape that went down to the ground was broken the size of a fist. If they could just get up those stairs and inside that window without being seen, they could stay there until the winter storm had passed. That must be what the deep, compelling voice was talking about.
Deep on a frigid night, the wind blasts, it tornadoes in the alleys. Winter weather makes its own winter weather in a city. She pushed the buggy into the alley and hiding it under the fire escape stairway; she hoisted her knapsack onto her shoulder and pulled up the bag with her dismal groceries and the cat food from the bodega.
Neighboring lights were dark and curtained. She had to get up the stairs to the second floor, if only those rusty stairs would hold her and the sack and the baby cat. She held onto herself by the railing and everything else she had in the world with the other arm.
Meanwhile, the infinite white angels had begun swirling to the ground between gusts. A foot of snow was expected. People going by on the sidewalk were bent over against the wind. She had waited for the bus to empty out, because when it did, and there were more people going by, she was less likely to be seen, so busy would they be hunched over and watching out for each other. A person going by alone might have turned his or her head toward the alley. On the other hand, with the wind howling the way it was…
A street guy had shown her once how to open a window from the outside. The ice torn wind of this white squall nor’easter was in full force now. The snow was horizontal and the flakes moon-sized. She prayed no one would hear glass shattering on a night like this. She had to wait for a gust of wind to strike.
But she didn’t have to break the window because the window was open. She got it to slide upward easily with one hand, almost as though someone else was helping to open it from the other side.
She could feel the warm, dry air ahead of her, in the staleness and the dust of an empty and unloved home. Just one last moment to pull her darkened figure over the window ledge and then not to be seen again, praying she wouldn’t trip and drop everything back down the stairs. But it seemed as though a hand took hold of her elbow and she nearly glided in over the ledge, onto the floor inside.
A shadowy yellow light from the alley flooded into the sawdust floored apartment onto the homeless woman and the homeless cat. She closed the window behind them and crept away from it. The kitten had begun to mew.
She set the bag down on the floor against a wall where they wouldn’t be seen and opened her coat for the kitten to breathe. No lights were flashing behind them. She waited to hear footsteps in the hall. But there was only the sound of the wind blasting against the fire escape railing. A red light from a passing bus swung its way around the room, but still there stayed the silence. She watched the pattern of traffic lights on the cracked paint walls.
There were tarps and paint cans and paint rollers on the floor, a few rough old blankets, wood shards and plywood, slabs of sheetrock there on the shaved, worn wood floors. There were about 30 takeout menus shoved under the door. Wind pelted the cracked window. Deep dusty silence. And the deepest sense of God and well-being, breathing in the dusty air, the calm, unmoving dusty air, came over her.
She stuck a plastic bag into the gash in the window. She quietly walked in ice caked shoes away from the front door. She moved to a corner that looked to be the farthest away from the front door, next to the radiator. The wood floor next to the radiator was warm. She set the bag down next to it. She tried to set the kitten on the floor for a moment, but he didn’t want to go, so she walked holding him as quietly as possible around the room, just to breath in the dead warmth.
Con Edison had turned off the electricity in here ten years before, because there was a notice on the glass of the meter. Empty all this time, well, she thought, chances are it won’t be renovated within the next day or two. But the water still ran in the plaster encrusted sink. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling of the cracked plaster bathroom. The bathtub was filled with planking and splintered wood. The tile had been stripped from the floor.
And if there had been ghosts in the living room, walking on the floor of this 100 year old room, they would be walking two inches off the ground, because the wood had been stripped all the way down to the brick foundation.
She hung her coat on the radiator. She set the kitten down on the scraped floor. The room was dark and warm and silent and dry. The kitten was staring up at her with his stomach. The neighboring windows were dark. Water dripped in the faucet. There was no draft from the window. They were under a roof and behind a wall, away from the wind for right now. And then she heard the radiator itself begin to clank and hiss. Life came back on in the dark.
Outside, the clouds and the snow had begun to fall. Eventide cirrus clouds had given way to huge cumulus moving in from the west. She could see the handle of her buggy shaking violently in the blasting wind. She opened the can of cat food and fixed the tiny animal his meal.
She had gotten a charity bag from the Catholic church that had a pull tab can of pork and beans, some Dinty Moore stew, and it also had, she thought she remembered, some Parmalat milk in it. She had picked up half a Chinese takeout meal. She had found a pack of Oreos. She had gotten an extra covered dinner plate from Mt. Holyrood.
She had a paper cup filled with cigarette butts, most of them long ones. (People didn’t stand outside very long in the cold and smoke outside the hospital. They put out their cigarettes after a drag or two.) And there was one half of a Quarter Pounder and some french fries. She had thought to hide behind the boiler with all of that and a six pack of malt liquor and a few menthol loosies, and have all that dark to herself. But then she found the little cat.
She curled up in the corner of a pile of old horse blankets. The kitten ate his food and he drank some of the Parmalat she had poured out for him in a rinsed out tin. The water flowed and it had been a few days since she’d been able to so she held her hands under the warm running water for a long time. The kitten was a little scrawny but his eyes were brighter now. The deep January wind outside was blowing in another night world.
However had she ended up on the streets? Well, shall we say, long ago a xyloplane had carried her off, picture IDs fluttering out of pocket to the ground and away in the wind, SSN given to a newborn, dollar bills and loose change dispersed to open hands to catch them, phone number disappeared from the book, birthday is now someone else’s, as if you’ve never been there at all, fly without a name anymore into the night sky. Even after that darkness descended, she could still see too much. It was better on the streets, it was better.
For a day or two, there had been a cardboard box out on the corner of 180th and Broadway with 40 and two cigarettes, God Bless You scrawled in magic marker on the wall behind. A boy had been killed and this was the boy’s memorial.
There had been about 100 seven day candles lit down there: St. Mary…St. Joseph…St. Iglesia…St. Michael…she picked up a St. Michael when they had started to break down the boy’s memorial after two days the way they always did on the street and people had begun to take candles away for themselves.
Sometime in the night the alley light had gone off. She thought she left the candle down in the bottom of the buggy, but somehow it had made it into one of the bags she had carried in. She lit the St. Michael candle. The kitten was now sleeping on his back on one of the old blankets, with his paws stretched out to the quads.
Hanging her head up against the window, looking at the noctilucent clouds, there was a DC-3 cargo plane flying against an icy sky; white kerosene in the compass, the card swinging, black winter seas out to a thousand fathoms. A DC-3 flying above at 8,000 feet against the icy sky. Were they looking at the milky white moon, she wondered.
The kitten reminded her of the little alley cat the bottlers had been taking care of at Charlie’s bottle establishment, over between the grocery store and the old Taco Bell. Charlie’s was the biggest bottling place in the neighborhood. It was a large enough of a going concern that the guys could sleep overnight under the planks that served as tables to set bottles out in 24 case cardboard boxes.
Cee Cee had found a scratching post toy out on the street somewhere for the baby cat. Someone brought the kitten a chicken dinner or a can of tuna fish every day. Jorge got him some milk from somewhere. He stayed at night under a parked truck or in the tin shed that stored bags and bags of picked up cans and beer bottles.
Then the street people lost the kitten because he just disappeared one day. His little toy scratching post sat miserably alone a day or two until someone took it away. Jorge and Woodie asked around the neighborhood, looking for him. Cee Cee couldn’t speak about the lost kitten at all. Charlie only muttered a bit and looked away from the cat’s little cubbyhole. It was going to make her cry to think about it, so she stopped thinking about it.
This apartment’s living room had its window facing the bridge and the bridge’s red and white rotating beacon. One of the street guys had a kind of nervous something about what he kept seeing hanging over the George Washington Bridge at night, every night, he said.
Woodie kept insisting that the planet Venus was actually a Chinese satellite platform, hovering over New York, watching the city’s every move. Further down on Haven Avenue, looking out at the river, Woodie would wave his arms because he thought he saw a star war, a slow meteor shower, planets and their moons coming down from the sky, moving stars across the water. An astromachy, a star fight. She had never gotten him to understand they were aircraft coming down the glide slope into Newark. But that was just Woodie. When Woodie saw bright red Mars in perigee in the eastern sky, he went into hiding.
She wondered how it would be if she went up to the roof of this building and just jumped. Since she was inside the building, it would be easy now to get up to the roof. She wiped her face off with a grimy handkerchief; she opened the half bottle of Diet Pepsi, it was time for that bag of Cheez Doodles, it was time for just anything.
If she were out on the streets right now, battling the wind, she wouldn’t have time to think. If she were back behind the boiler with a six pack of malt liquor, the way she had planned, she wouldn’t have done much thinking either. But now…with only the silence of the room and the silence of a sleeping kitten…
She thought about the four dollars she still had in her coat pocket and wondered if she could make it down to the bodega for some malt liquor and get back in here again. She looked out the window, almost ready to put her shoes back on.
Outside, two feet of snow had already piled up and she could barely make out the handle of her buggy. The wind was deep and the night was strong. She put her face in her hands, wondering why the thought of drinking even came to mind. If not for that, she wouldn’t be where she was finding herself at the moment.
This must come to an end, she thought; otherwise, I will never live and I will never die.
She tripped over things around the studio apartment for a little while, tapping cigarette ashes here and there, making sure she hadn’t dropped a smoldering end onto the wrecked wooden floor. The street outside was winter quiet. A blue clouded sky with no way to tell at all now what time it was or how long, if any, she had already been there. There was one lone Sprite can she’d missed putting through the machine for a nickel. She and the kitten were going to stay alive, one nickel at a time.
It was back behind some paint splattered tarps that she found the old radio. Sliding off the back panel, the batteries inside it were rusty bottomed, like most else in here. But this was something she found almost, as Charlie would say, “high-larious,” because only a day before she’d found some working double A batteries in the trash and had kept them.
She knew they were working batteries because in reaching for a plastic bottle down in a can, she’d heard a metallic voice go off. It was a plastic talking alien toy with a waving arm holding a ray gun or whatever. That was a good laugh at three A.M., after she figured out it was a human alien toy. Anyway, she had kept those batteries, but not the toy. She decided instead to find out if the radio worked.
FM didn’t come in at all. She’d been hoping for some music, but it was AM only: weather, traffic, news, sports, weather, traffic, news, sports, weather…she flipped down the dial, about to go back to the big talk station, when there was an electronic pop at the lowest end of the dial as she passed through it.
A deep, raspy, but somehow familiar voice broke through the static and white noise. It sounded like someone she knew. A preacher man, but which one? It wasn’t Reverend Ike. His auditorium was right in the neighborhood and anyway, you could hear him in New Jersey. Whoever, he was, Merlie thought, he wasn’t from this town.
“This is KSR, talk radio that listens to you. And I am the Reverend Franklin L. Hewitt, on the KSR Saturday Night Radio Marathon, staying on the air until the world is saved.”
AM-DX was transmitting a voice from somewhere far away. Deep in the night, during nighttime fadeout when the ionosphere settles down, AM transmission increases and far distant stations can be heard. At 50,000 watts, CKLW comes in once the listener lines the loop up with Windsor.
During twilight fadeout, ionospheric AM stations such as WGY 810 in Schenectady have rotating metallic noises; WHAC in Louisville faintly talks in and out. Over on the other side of the dial, WPXA at 1630 calls the ocean weather from Long Island Sound. Now here was KSR from deep in a corner of Missouri.
“Now, you’ve got your St. John’s Wort, you got your High John the Conqueror Root, you got your John the Revelator. You want to get that thing out of your soul? I know what you’re thinking now, that you can’t, but oh ye caller of the stars, I’ll bet if you try this for a while, you just might get that old black nebula to budge, just a little.”
“First, let me announce the KSR Town Picnic, Dance and Broadcast Marathon, it’s coming up in June. Mark that on your calendar.”
Oh, I will, I will, Merlie thought. She hoped his signal would stay strong enough to hear as long as the dark lasted. She also hoped he would get back to the sermon.
“Now, back to our discussion for this Saturday night.” He took a deep, ecclesiastical breath. “Blue ruin, chained lightning, heavy wet, the Devil’s sodie pop, however you want to call it. But listen, congregants, let’s be frank here, those 40s of Olde English 800 are only a symptom of the real problem. And don’t let your family tell you otherwise. So what are you going to do about it?”
I don’t know, she thought, tell me something I can do about it. She waited. “But we have to pause for a commercial break,” he said, “I have to make a few radio announcements. First, the KSR Radio Job Bulletin Board: We sure could use a fluffer in the men’s shirt department at the Kresge’s.”
Oh, no, she thought, here he goes again. Her laughter woke the kitten up. She thought maybe she was hearing some archived radio show from the 1940s. There was a commercial about Aunt Minnie’s Honeypies. This was a country preacher out there in the Midwestern part of the galaxy.
“Did they ever tell you in AA what to do with the other 23 and ½ hours of the day?” No, they didn’t, she thought. What do I do with those hours? “If you’re used to being half seas over, squiffy, as they say, what are you going to do with yourself the rest of the time?”
But then there was an announcement that on the Sunday afternoon cooking show, they would be preparing selections from the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook: cheesecake tassies, eggs goldenrod, sourdough flapjacks and The Little Bible Teacher’s Cole Slaw. And then there was a Good N Plenty commercial from the 1960s. Merlie lit up one of the menthol loosies and sat on the windowsill next to the radiator listening to Reverend Frankie. Maybe you just had to let the man take his time when he talked.
“And let’s see, I have to announce here that we got us a 1952 Airstream trailer for rent out at the West Bobcat Trailer Park. Nice kitchen, running water facilities. Utilities all hooked up and included. Five dollar deposit and first month’s rent, which is ten dollars a month.
There was a pause as papers shuffled against the microphone. He cleared his throat. He may only have 5,000 watts, but it didn’t matter. He was putting every single watt he had to good use. “And terrestrial time, it’s two hours ante meridian. Don’t want to confuse the affiliates, so we just say the time that way. Now back to the Job Board: We need a chandelier and mirror straightener at the hardware store.”
“How are you going to do it? How are you going to go and get back everything you once gave up? And by the way, we sure could use some help at this radio station. KSR sure could use a sky announcer. We don’t need a traffic reporter because we don’t have any traffic. I can’t think of the last time I had to sit behind a car at a stoplight.”
The aerosonorousness of his voice soothed her deeply. The dusty room, in the dark, with only the St. Michael candle lit and the streetlight flooding in, the deliquescence of his voice as it faded out during yet another advertisement. “West Bobcat is a wonderful place to live,” he said somewhere along the way. “Birds fly in from other forests to live here. And don’t worry too much; you can probably get to Missouri without any eye-dee.”
Outside, the moon was in the waning gibbous phase. The corner of 180th Street and Fort Washington had the best astronomical view in the neighborhood. It was there at a time in early summer when Venus and Luna were only a degree apart as they descended the western night skies together, that direction over the bridge.
She had her own constellation of stars; asterisms, really, of the only stars that could be seen over the Hudson River, but these weren’t the constellations any of our ancestors drew. Seen in the direction of earthshine, our sun is a dim yellow star in an alien constellation.
“You will announce the neap tides, when the sun and moon are in quadrature. Solar perturbations of the lunar orbit, the position of the polar jet stream. Star caller, we take the universe very seriously here in Southwestern Missouri. We have an astrolabe, a medieval instrument used to determine sun and other celestial bodies. We monitor type 3 solar radio bursts. We monitor the Cygnus A radio galaxy; the slow change in the Schumann Resonance of 8 Hz. And you will monitor…”
Here the Reverend Franklin L. Hewitt lowered his voice about two octaves…”that nebula emitting a B flat 57 octaves below Middle C.” He chuckled a good bit at himself for that one. “The quadriterrestrial telescopes can see and hear much further than the triterrestrial ones.”
“But, on the other hand,” said the good reverend…here it comes, she thought. She was getting to know him very quickly. “If you don’t know anything about astronomy, you can just read off the index cards and try to sound like you know what you’re talking about.”
And then it was almost as though he had forgotten what he was talking about. Next came: “Singles Dance: This coming Friday at the Swing Ballroom. Free admission. Calling out of town because we got plenty of singles, but we need some more singles for the singles we got. And I’ve got another job opening announcement: pumping sunshine at the solar wind plant.”
Back to the sermon.
“Now, why doesn’t God Almighty just come and zap you if you asked Him to? Because, oh, ye citizens of this dark inhabited world, your free will is constricted enough already. Free will…free will is inviolate. Interfering with human free will by the angels is not allowed.
“You know somebody who can’t quite think straight? Got himself zonked in the head or just born that way? Can’t quite keep the train on the tracks? His mind keeps going northeast when it should be going north? We have very little free will in the first place.
“This is the tragedy of the human existence. That is why God will allow you the free will that you do have and take no more away from you. His angels will take no more of it from you. You may have lost enough of it already. But He and His angels do make suggestions. You can accept them or not, as you will.
“Now, let me make a humble suggestion to you for a vacation this year: let me announce our Ozark Bus Lines Summer Special, 108 dollars to West Bobcat, pets allowed on board the bus. You’ll find us where four roads meet, at a quadrivium, or in this case, two back roads, U.S. Highway 71 and one unlit airway.”
She sat up straight and, wiping her face with her cloth torn sleeve, thought to herself, with the kind of focus she experienced only the second time that day, if that month, or any time recently, the first being when she had decided to save the kitten. “What is 108 dollars divided by a nickel?”
Out of her knapsack, she pulled a plastic solar powered calculator she had picked up in the trash somewhere. She used it to add up her bottles to make sure Hector or Charlie weren’t messing up their math. You punched in the numbers and then you kind of had to let the calculator think about it. But after trying three times, she was satisfied that one hundred and eight dollars divided by a nickel was 2,160.
Two thousand, one hundred and sixty bottles and/or cans, give or take. It was 80 cents for a case of Corona or Heineken bottles; 70 cents if it was a mixed case of anything else. King Cobra cans were two for a nickel.
She’d have to figure a dollar or two for a soda and a sandwich on the way down, this was not including all the kitty cat food between now and then. Still, it could be done. She had to add in the five dollars, or whatever it was, to rent the Airstream trailer at the mobile home park. But these were incidentals.
She watched the kitten paw into her now warmed and dry coat and make himself a little nook to sleep in. She decided to bring Reverend Frankie with them to sleep. She set the radio by where her own sleeping head would be. Lying down, it was a triantennial system that seemed to work: the radio next to her head next to the kitten. The kitten was warm and sleepy. The nighttime fadeout, ionospheric radio talked on.
“Star Caller, you will announce the position of the Einstein Cross, the Northern Dawn, circumpolar star trails, and even the thunder of the Vatican. The exact movements of civil, nautical and astronomical twilight.” The hissing sound of the prewar radiator was going straight into her ear as she slept. The kitten stretched and threw out a paw. Deeply satisfied with next to nothing, they both fell asleep in their tiny kingdom.
Arcing over it all, superastral luminosity, crystalline chords, Merlie was in a reverie of music love as she descended back into the third dimension. Then on landing, there was a vibrating, pulsing rasp in her ear. Rhythmically, it pounded on, like the waves of the ocean, deep and masculine, going further out to sea to sleep, then back and forth, crashing against your shore. Back and forth…back and forth…
She woke up and realized it was the radio. The radio was snoring in her ear. The preacher man had gone to sleep right by his microphone. They really do need some help at that radio station, she thought.
But then Reverend Frankie stopped snoring, woke up, and finished the sentence he must have started before he conked out, as though nothing had happened. “And at 2 A.M., we’ll be bringing you the Starlight Music Hour,” he said, then he realized it was way past 2 A.M. already. He dropped on some Ella Fitzgerald and promptly went back to sleep.
She did not want to think right now about the day after tomorrow with nowhere to go. Merlie went to smoke another cigarette. She flicked the lighter that she’d left sitting next to the makeshift pillow. She checked to see where the little furry thing was, his tiny paws dug into the grimy old blanket.
Just as she was about to draw a puff of smoke, a flame lit up brightly, arcing all into a corner of the room, and then intensely golden in the corner of the room, as though a fire had started in a split second. But it wasn’t a fire. There was a figure standing in the corner of the studio apartment, staring at her with a glowing, kind face. The figure was standing so that the calculator which was sitting on the floor was still showing the figures she had punched in, dividing $108 by a nickel. The still lit Archangel Michael candle flickered nearby.
“Oh, my God,” Merlie said, staring at the illuminated figure standing in the corner, “you really exist.”
“Go there,” the brightened figure in the corner, speaking with the same voice she had heard before out in the cold, “you’re needed. Go there.” And then he made himself into air and the bright golden dawn light faded from the corner.
A mesmerizing story. So mentally productive of Merlie's (and the author's) mind. Finding the kitten had made a profound change in what she would do. I'm not sure about the ending though. I would've almost preferred, that she died. Perhaps she did and I didn't get it.
One of the best stories I've read in a long time with just enough glimmer of hope to make me think Merlie can do it because of the kitten she happened to come by. Cuz everyone, in some small measure or large is needed.
Suspenseful and close to home, Rain of Deception 2 will leave you in Tears. Much like Part 1, this will shocking sequel will keep you on the edge of your fingertips.
Rovella is a beautiful woman with a cold heart whom blames herself for an unfortunate old family secret that is literally ruining her life. This secret impedes a gorgeous woman from having happiness in her childhood, and throughout her life. Dark sec
The 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
