Heretics book 3 - The Apocryphile Press

298 :: JOHN R. MABRY
thumb and putting it in her mouth. She took a scrap of a
magazine and held it to the wound until it stuck, and picked
up the magazine and the scissors again.
This time she found a picture of a radiant African-
American woman in a dark blue jogging suit. She clipped her
out, and snatching up a glue stick, pasted the woman into
the beard of the huge, patchwork icon of Jesus. She considered
its placement, admiring the effect.
Why am I doing this? A little voice nagged at her.
“Because I’m sooo fucking bored,” she said out loud, and
flipping a page, found a photo of a kangaroo. She wondered
about the theological implications of adding animals to the
icon, and decided to ask Susan about it later. In the meantime,
she kept turning pages. A little girl, astride a tricycle...perfect.
She reminded Kat of the little girl Dylan was
going to baptize tomorrow. She clipped the photo out, tricycle
and all.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that baptism thing. It
seemed unfair to make the little girl a part of a religion without
her really knowing what she was being inducted into.
Not just unfair, it seemed wrong. But one thing she had
learned since she had been, well, captive here was that she
wasn’t always in possession of all the puzzle pieces. She
decided to make a list of things to discuss with Susan. She
pulled out a pen and wrote, “baptism” and “animal Jesus,”
hoping she could figure out what the heck that referred to
later.
She glued the little girl just above Jesus’ upper lip, forming
part of his mustache, roughly along the line of the coffee
stain.
I know why I’m doing this, she thought, I’m doing it to
burn time, because I don’t want to think about Mikael. How
long had it been since he’d eaten? What had he endured in
Dane’s dungeon? How did he get those scars on his back?