Michael Malone - Weebly

different men and women she had seen in Dingley Falls,
or whose pictures she had saved from magazines.
In her prayers tonight Judith didn't wish for her own
happiness; it was not something she expected to be
given or knew how to want, though she knew (the nuns
had told her so) that she had little justification for this
failure of feeling. After all, she had never lived in a time,
or at least not in a town, in which the streets were
strewn with scab-oozing bodies everywhere struck
down by plague. There were no rotting heads of those
who had displeased arbitrary rulers shoved onto
pointed sticks and stuck atop bridges. Never in the
night had she or anyone she loved been carted off into
slavery because of their color, or marched to the stake
because of their faith, or herded to death because of
their race. No child of hers had starved while she
watched, no lover had been buried in dirt. She had
known neither fire nor shipwreck nor earthquake. She
had no enemies and could think of no one really that she
herself even disliked, except perhaps the appliances
store merchant Limus Barnum, who stared at her
surreptitiously with such ugly, naked feelings. She