For April 5th, 2004
Reverend Betty
Reverend Betty hung out by the cloister, wondering if the Jesuits would be hurling this afternoon. A rare performance was worth the wait, and she was used to waiting -- like a patient spider -- for the fruit of her machinations to mature. She knocked back the rest of her Tab & Chivas, throwing the empty pint glass over her shoulder for good luck (along with a whispered prayer to some forgotten saint or other). She smiled to herself and kept an eye out for her swain's return. The war was over, and it was nice to have a picnic every once in a while (though the occasional, accidental discovery of a landmine would keep things interesting for quite some time to come).
Bumblebees swarmed around the sweet-smelling shards of glass as if to beg for a taste of what their composite vessel once contained, but all had been spent on a prayer and a buzz no such hivelings could appreciate. Golden shadows hovered and danced through sharp prisms under the sleepy sun of springtime, and Betty yawned. She considered perusing her well-worn first edition of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, but she knew it all by heart (battlefield though it might be), anyway.
A blink became a nap, and she dreamed of Nemo's Nautilus, cruising twenty-thousand leagues under a cold and ancient sea. The hull brushed against brittle, Napoleonic shipwrecks and the spires of R'leyh, and still the gloomy captain's pipe organ played on from the unseen salon beyond. Who was Nemo this time, she wondered. James Mason or Gary Oldman? It was her dream, though she didn't know it yet, and it was her who truly commanded this Nautilus and Nemo, alike. Crispin Glover? She couldn't remember that ever happening, before. So she woke up, shivering.
The sun had retreated behind a long, wispy pair of clouds that reminded her of David Carradine's eyebrows. Beethoven's Ode To Joy could be heard faintly in the distance of her imagination, perhaps left over from her ten minute trip to the Dreamlands. Someone had cleared away the remains of the broken pint glass and kindly left her to her slumber, though drunken bees still staggered from scotchy dewdrops found scattered on the turf. Could she really hear their tiny hiccups? She shook her head and laughed like Zelda Fitzgerald on a gin bender. What a lovely day!
And to think
that it wasn't even Easter,
yet!
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