The Story of Elf: Almost finished

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Now when soldiers die, does that count as tragedy or not? Take the soldiers in their clean white underwear, sitting in their bunkers at Peal Harbor? If God has taken them into his nursing bosom -- if their death was a thin screen of asphyxia that dissolved like powder never to return -- was this not a good thing? Were they then lucky? Does it feel lucky to think of them?

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God knows, we don't. "You take away their breath and they return to their dust" (Psalm 104). Going on: "They you send forth your spirit and they are born again." New creatures equivalent to the old, on the tired planet earth. Or are they born again for real, not someone like them but themselves for real?

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Of course she was not a martyr, and when he reached to tear her clothes and stare at her bruised front, she flinched and she jerked. Her body protected her. And there the hoodlum stood with his shoulder hanging loose from himself. Like a slab of meat in a slaughterhouse! I didn't do that, Elf said. I didn't, I couldn't have done that.

So the demons stood in the darkness like giant hunks of melting wax, giving off the horrible smell of meat. And it was their very definition that smelled so bad that seemed so utterly incompatible with redemption of any kind. "You take away their breath and they return to their dust." As if wanting to be there. As if renewal were a universe away.

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