*
The knight dreamed that his heavenly master had pulled him out of a burning building. The Lord's garments were brighter than neon bulbs and made the eyes pulse with a migraine. Pain the blessed messenger, our healer, and builder. "Do you think that the one who made your ear doesn't hear you?" Earaches more than flutters of the air.
In his dream Duessa, looking her true age, about 90 years old, was railing at Christians for giving in to their delusions. Don't they know, she cried, that anyone who touched the hem of his garment would have been electrocuted?
Terrible dreams came that were like giant moths covering the ceiling. And when they flew away the ceiling itself was gone, nothing but sky.
Stop it, you're screaming, Elf said, the little creature, not male, seemingly not quite female, who followed him around. When Dave woke up he found himself in the anchoress's back yard. All his bruises lay on him like mere decals applied to his surface and waiting to be shucked off. You slept for ages, the anchoress said, and this little one tended you all the time.
He had sores below his calves from where the thugs had hung him like meat from a hook. But wasn't that all a bad dream, a hallucination?
Elf followed the convict around, playing with gusto her lowly role of faithful servant or quasi slave. Such was the role of the -- what was she? a budding angel? a human whose gender was somehow dead-ended? Who are you, what are you?
I have no idea, I have no status, she said, not even among the Christians who like to pretend status doesn't matter.
The ones who talk the poverty talk but walk the supply side walk.
But now the anchoress has taken me in. Nobody dares confront her, whatever she does is just done. So at this point I would say that I am safe.
*
The anchoress was moralizing aloud in the garden while the rest of the soup kitchen, volunteers and clients together, cleaned up the tables. She sounded to Dave like Elise wound up into a second intensity. We no longer understand involuntary sin, she was saying.
People see *sin* as something they have chosen. Of course what you choose you ocan maybe later unchoose. But I would turn our eyes to the sin that has chosen *you* and wedged itself deeper than your own will. That's another story.
Picture the person born into a slave-holding societ. She did not choose for there to be slaves. She did not will slavery. But if she is not a slave, she is still implicated in slavery and, since she benefits, she participates in the sin. It is also her sin, it is also hers. She has chosen not to respond to the existence of this sin, its existence in her *own* life.
It cuts like the bitter October wind, it enters the body but it doesn't leave.
Sometimes, such is the mystery, you pay for sins that another person not yourself committed. They have committed the sin on you and as if engendered you with it. Not fair! Involuntary! But the simple fact that your role was to receive it instead of committing it, that does not cause the sin to cease to exist. And if it exists, it must be handled.
*
You must respond. You must deal with it. Because evading your need to do so only wedges you deeper!
*
After the dishes were clean, Elf and the convict walked into the tiny windy backyard to rest and meditate. This yard had the faerie-realm quality of never definitely ending. You saw the back of the charter school playground in the distance but you never got there. The path went on and on. It was like the world's most complicated labyrinth -- yet the eye's image of it was as bald and straight as a high school track. So the dizziness that twisted the lanes was something that the human brought within himself as he walked.
I have been working on my soul for months and months, Dave said. And yet it never seems to get any better.
*
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