Heretics book 3 - The Apocryphile Press

THE KINGDOM :: 299
Did he really have three nipples? She smiled as that question
occurred to her. She’d looked it up and it was a sign of witchcraft—most
appropriate for the order’s Wicca expert, but
also—as with the Pawnee if Dylan were right—a sign of nurturing
and sensitivity. She wasn’t sure that it indicated any
such thing in real life—how many murderers were there with
three nipples, she wondered; there must be thousands—but
she liked to think it was true in Mikael’s case.
She flipped through a couple more pages and found a
photo of a young punkish couple in Belfast. It reminded her
of herself and Mikael, and she went to work on it, pasting it
on Jesus’ chin.
Okay, the truth is I’m doing this because I feel guilty for
damaging the icon. She sighed, depressed at the thought, but
it rested more easily in her breast than the others. That was
the whole truth of it, and it was okay.
What was also true was that the icon fascinated her. Not
only because of how oddly it was constructed, but by what
it suggested, what it meant. She loved the icon, although she
would be hard-pressed to articulate exactly why. It touched
her in some deep and ineffable place—it spoke to her.
She threw the magazine onto the discard pile and took up
another, this one a Woman’s Day, that she couldn’t imagine
anyone at the Friary actually reading. Nevertheless, she
picked up the magazine-of-spurious-origin and began to leaf
through it.
Several pages in, her breath caught in her throat and she
sat up as if slapped. On the left hand page was an ad for
California avocados, and facing it on the right a golden
retriever hawking flea medicine.
She stared at them for a long time without knowing why—
if kangaroos were suspect sources for Jesus’ facial features,
surely dogs and oily fruit were, too.
But she cut the pictures out just the same. Just to have