Sunstroke continued

*

So Dave lay down his burden, lay it down, that heavy burden -- took the armor off. One nudge and it clattered down to the ground.

Duessa lay like a fossil embedded in the ground, pterodactyl boneship, unutterably pitiful, so wedged in that she could hardly move. She somehow managed to shift into supine mode. Dave, Dave.

Dave, my good man, dig me out of the ground so that I can die with a little dignity.

Reaching toward light she bent herself into one of those impossible yoga position that her daughter would toss off almost apologetically in class. With the mother it looked innate, natural. Dave shook his ugly bald head but the vision didn't clear.

If they'd just left me with my old sunstroke I could tell whether you were lying to me. I would not guess, I would know. But they shot me with these drugs that have restored my common sense and taken away my discernment. God's voice is but a whisper.

Dave, that's what they did to me too, Duessa said. That's why I was so bad, she said.

Our bad deeds are imposed on us by something we don't even know.

Dave knew she was lying, really, he knew, he absolutely knew. She was at just the point of depravity where one not only cannot play innocent but can't remember why another simpler being might want to. In a word she was lost. This he knew, this he caught even from her words; nevertheless, there he was already reaching forward to loosen the dirt around her. Of course she took him by the neck, of course she fastened her teeth on his lips. And era obvio, it was obvious, that she didn't even want to! She was like the dog who found himself lungeing before he'd even decided to do so. Her thrashing tore the man like a piece of paper. His lips bled as she pulled him bodily into cast off dirt and took away his ability to breathe, and now he wasn't even surprised. He'd known what she was going to do because this was just her -- the way of her -- what her definition entailed. And as he began sinking into rocks, swallowing them and assimilating himself to them, he heard a sort of discontinuous pop that released him from her power. Elf had crushed her mother's head in with a rock. She hadn't killed her but at least she had knocked her, like a croquet ball, into some other continuum.

So the devil sank into the earth, not to die -- not yet -- but to flutter and expand into some other part of the planet that was ready for her.

*