A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

perspective.
And once a month, to pay for all this trickery, I was visited
by a dream about hell, as if the innocent blue sky we love came
loose somehow and came crashing down on the world like a
dome, and it was my job to piece the trillions of crunched pieces
of it back together. It wasn't possible. But I had to do it. I picked
up the first piece and began weeping copiously.
And in my horror at the task that befell me I would stagger
into the bright light of the bathroom, sit on the lip of the tub, hide
my face in my hands, until my sister knelt beside me and asked
what was wrong.
"It's going to happen, Kathy," was all I could say. "It's all
going to happen."
She was my friend, the one person in the family who
understood my weird ways.
And sure enough, one day at age 15 she went to the dentist,
and she never came home. She went into a coma and died in
Amherst Hospital, on the second floor. And I remember my father
at the funeral, unable to sit beside my mother. He was gone, too,
although he had not yet left.
Everything good died then.
I came out of that experience strangely confident of my
competence. I never worried about the gaps in my makeup. At
seminary I was the happiest I would be for a long time. I loved
the mystery of the incorporate Christ. I loved the moon rising
over the seminary pond at 5:45 in the morning. I loved the sound
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