Michael Malone - Weebly

around it? Why couldn't she pick up the gun and kill
him, or her? She tried to remember what she had been
taught in those tales the nuns had told to pose perilous
dilemmas of faith. In them young girls were lashed,
burned, raped by atheist Orientals and Russians, and
she recalled that it had been all right to deface yourself,
ruining your beauty, to escape their lust, and it had been
all right to be killed for your faith. For your faith. But for
yourself? Or to kill? Or to kill yourself?
Sensation rushed back down to where the pain
was. She could not stay away. And it kept on, labor
until she whooped too for breath, her mouth gaping.
And his huge face filled her vision, purplish and frenzied.
Sweat drops and tears splashed onto her, then ran
down her face, mixing with her own. His head banged
into her shoulder, over and over, numbing at least that
small part of her. She felt that they had dropped out of
time, that this act would never end, but go on forever in
tortuous incompletion, like the acts in hell.
Now, now, she begged, now let me go mad; now
that it's happened, now that it's true. For everything that
waited behind the glass had laid itself bare and proved