The migraine

*

The paradox that struck this wretched creature was the fusion of the need to pray and the inability to pray.

The devil opened the door of her condo and was greeted by a migraine of stupendous width and depth and emptiness. It was not a creation of the bright sun. It was not the wheeling configuration of planets in her head. It was not something she had eaten. It was a thing wedged inside her, it was definitional, intrinsic, basic. It was *her*.

When she managed to open her eyes again, she saw the Zen warrior, a different person now, zooming past her on his bike. From the boom box slung behind him came the sound of praise songs. they said the name over and over.

She was nauseated and unable to vomit.

Make this a dream, please, she said. But who was she speaking to?

The door handle moved. The world was real. She was not dreaming -- at least not more than usual.

The plight was that she knew the name. She knew the one from whom she might have begged relief. But to beg she would have had to release this person she held, this person full of pain, this self. She would have had to cease to be herself.

Thus there was a redemption offered but it was offered to another person. And this other person she flatly refused to become. Or simply could not become.

*

She heard it like music through a closed door. Redemption through a closed door. The sound of a person taking heart and opening a door. The fact of it, the fact that the change was there and was on offer. All through that muffled door, the ear itself muffled. And she could not, would not, open the door.

*