Keens, prayers, and the unsparing eternal, vagrant and raucous, overwhelmed the street on Tuesday, frightening the children.
Taking stock, they hesitantly rejoiced. Neither tumult nor eternity had come for them.
Before The Tumult:
The children drone our father and pledge allegiance then are seated.
“God,” Sister intones from a deeply black habit, “is everywhere. He lurks inside us. Filling nook, cranny, pore, and marrow. Terrible and ineluctable.”
The children squirm.
“Sloth and debauchery are twins.”
Blinking stares.
“Thought, word, and deed steep in impiety. Every jot and tittle are accounted. Transgressors feign contrition. Hell takes the impenitent!”
The children writhe, sinisterly confused.
Sister’s premious catechism concludes in further bewilderment:
“The devil takes the slack.”
In the sunny disquiet of recess, a rainbow horde of severed plastic heads, piked whimsically on Pez dispensers, chatters in anxious prepubescent hands. Transgressed children look heavenward, thinking about their thoughts, words, and deeds, and who among them might be taken.
Claire’s severed whimsy is frantic.
Immediately After The Tumult:
The street quiesces.
Priests—steadfast; nuns—subsumed; and laity—cowed fill time and space with signings of the cross as they bob un-whimsical heads and cluck like chickens their solemn, tedious conclusion:
“It was God’s plan.”
“Bewildering as it is,” whispers a rare scoffing skeptic (a former child). He hurries through the clacking beaks, head down.
(Amidst the tumult, a bustlingly fervent nun gathered the children on the sidewalk—Claire eternally crumpled, feet away—to offer a personal prayer of thanks for God’s plan. The rainbow horde silently fretted, thinking about God’s personal plans.)
Before God’s Plan For Claire Is Realized:
Sally’s drunkard mother wets herself, wakes, sniggers, slurs it is part of God’s plan, then resumes passing out on the couch.
Sally fulminates in her mother’s mercurial thoughts, words, and deeds.
The door slams, Sally’s father runs away.
God’s plan, scoffs the former child, has many chapters.
Claire and Sally cling together, best friends and better outcasts.
Claire’s plastic head squirms, writhes, and chatters on and on about her thoughts, words, and deeds.
“Claire,” Sally assures, daily, “your thoughts are empyreal.”
“Claire,” Sally soothes, hourly, “your words are dulcet.”
“Claire,” Sally truths, constantly, “your deeds are stultifying.”
(Sally, so besieged for words, has taken desperately to a thesaurus.)
Claire’s plastic head is impervious to Sally’s impressive vocabulary and chatters on.
And on.
“Claire,” Sally screams synoptically to Claire’s ultimate point, “you’re not going to hell!”
(a presagement):
Then Claire and her plastic head are put to rest, hit by a car.
God’s Plan For Claire Is Realized:
The school bell rings a cacophonous release.
“See you tomorrow!” Sally cacophons Claire.
A predatory 1951 DeSoto, chrome grilled, fully equipped with two smiling brothers, flashes pristinely in the sun one second, spattered in blood the next.
White-bloused Claire caroms off the just cracked windshield, flying silently… so far up… she seems to reach the scattered clouds. Her arms reach out to an indifferent Heaven. A black patent leather shoe turns end over end, disjoined of a white-socked foot. A second remains attached. Long red hair billows as if suspended in water. White, never-to-be-exposed! panties exposed between parted never-to-be-parted! knees under a wafting navy skirt (poor embarrassed Claire!). Of course, silly, distracted Claire leaves her bookbag behind, snatched up in chromium shark’s teeth.
The rainbow horde is deafening as Claire is taken, rent immediately eternal.
Immediately Before God’s Plan For Claire Is Realized:
Sally and Claire, safe behind a wall of parked cars. Claire’s relict mother waits, alone, across the street.
Sally smiles.
Claire’s mother smiles.
The approaching brothers smile.
Claire, thinking about her thoughts, words, and deeds, is too distracted to.
Glistening silver teeth flash, portending the collision as the gleaming car speeds for Claire with beer-fueled exuberance, leaving in its accelerating wake a bar sign twinkling incandescent stars. The brothers’ heads turn, laughing in malignant joy.
God’s Plan For Claire Is Realized:
The fated three come together in the only place Saint Wenceslaus Catholic School and Phil’s Starlight Tavern (FIRST CHANCE 7 A.M.) collude, between the parked-car walls at the excruciating instant between life and violent death, sending Claire heavenward, and the dumbfounded driver south to pace twenty years behind the walls of Joliet Prison, thinking inanely, if only I’d had one more beer!
As Claire flies out of sight above the two rotten apples no mother’s eye could hold, in that eternity of moments as they pass beneath her, they oh fuck! hope and pray they’d hit a dog, a bird, or something thrown by a child like themselves, anything please God! but a ten-year-old girl.
Immediately Before And After God’s Plan For Claire Is Realized:
Claire, thinking about her thoughts, words, and deeds, steps into the doubly distracted path.
Claire’s mother screams her name, Sally screams her name, Claire looks at Sally who sees the last thought in Claire’s silly head Oh my God, I told you so, I AM going to hell! rebuking Sally’s just made, frustrated assurance promise guarantee for the thousandth time YOU’RE NOT!
And the last silly thought in Sally’s head to Claire is Come back! Come back! Come back!
Sally’s world stops.
The World Resumes Turning:
Phil’s Starlight Tavern opens at 7 a.m. the day after. And on, and on, according with another chapter of God’s plan.
Claire is buried two days after.
The door slams at Claire’s empty house.
Claire’s silly death plays on in Sally’s head.
Sally’s mother wets herself and resumes passing out.
Sally’s plastic head chatters, screams, and wails until it breaks, in yet another chapter.