*
A few days later or perhaps more.
I can take you where I think he is, Elf said. Dave is probably back in the barrio, recuperating.
After all, even our town, nice as it is, has its own sort of skid row.
Elf sat in the right hand seat while Elise drove, rather stiffly, through the part of town she'd never had much occasion to visit. Signs were sometimes in foreign languages, storefronts were largely broken and empty. The blight seemed kin to an organism, it had a biological outline. One was really afraid to touch this part of town. There were some churches on corners but not the kind she'd ever considered going inside. Former dry cleaners that now said Assembleo de Cristo in crooked lettering. But of course people live here, souls that is, so I should be drawn, not repelled. It was always possible that the human repulsion one felt was a kind of sin in disguise.
Up there is the anchoress's place, Elf said. The lady who made the hot meals and had the emergency beds. She would be, I pretty much think, a good person for you to talk to, Elise, but whoa, what has *happened* here?
Where are you pointing to anyway?
They drove by a beaten up old warehouse, maybe a warehouse, now tattooed with grafitti, otherwise exorcised and empty, and now there was a straggly charter school, barred from outside entry, with a Tongan guard in front. So where is her, you know, her hermitage? Elise asked.
All I see is a vacant lot.
Elf didn't answer. Her jaw hung open. There was nothing, no hermitage, no house, no garden, no toolshed, no mud, no whirlpool, no people, no anchoress, no anger. Nothing.
There might have been an aroma of Christian spirit hanging in the air. But no thing tangible.
*
"My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off." [Psalm 38:11, KJV]
the end
*
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