PART TWO:


True man laughed at him and the others watched his horrid dreams with token, clear, still nights. But that was just fine. His family had been living in Houston, Texas for a while now.

The name she spoke was one that reminded her of the man she lived with in a false castle in a deep before confederation south. She had always been spiritual. That’s what he loved about her, and it didn’t need to be a statement. It just needed to face these opening words. He found when he share these words she would at least get angry. When he did not she sat silently and drank tea.

Their engagement was considered their modern dilemma; a mindscape scraped and studied, opened to a point of desired submission and truth in scientific study. They will take lives from those who spoke lively of certain situations. He knew she did not understand. That was what he liked most about her.

And for those reasons specifically our hero had never wanted to kill in his life.

So the woman decides it is best to walk to her sisters to talk. It was a lively afternoon marked with dancing shadows caused by trees. Big poplars lined her stone tile walkway and they always shook in the wind at this time of year. Otherwise things were soft and calm house around the house that day.

The fourteen who answered the door was excited and shouted, “Aunty Alice, is Richard here?”
“No,” Alice replied, “I need to talk to your mother.”

She was let in the house and her sister came to the corner of the door. They greet each other politely.

The woman stands in front of white lights. Her forward leg is bend at the knee and high in the air in front of a flashing behind her. The surrounding yard reflects her motions with long narrow shadows the people in the doorway.

She smiles, “I’m losing it, sis. I need to settle down.” The niece shows her protest and is motioned inside the brown suburban home.

“Talk to me, Stanly,” she says. Alice’s sister used to call her Stanly often. It came from a game that they would play together. It was one that needed those silly hats and cardboard boxes. She kept it secret until later but began to call her younger sister by that at sixteen. It was just what she needed.

Alice’s sister had stopped using that name again by eighteen because she got into the club scene. This was the first time in 20 years that she made that snide reference. It makes her smile.

“It is that the minds of reasonable people are never influenced by outside forces that meet men of former glory.” Aunt Alice began, “If men of words and men of action are taken in distinct directions, and men of face are sent for glory than the only man of face that exists is some one true God. The one that the Gods all claim is their God. He was lying to us because the one that hides so far behind a tree that you could only see layers. These are of the beings followers but they guard you as they show you that the creator is behind them. And you know to trust these men. But martyr beware, you do not know one space from the other. The other that left us open, sister. That one. Richard was wrong.”

The sister listened politely and asked Alice inside. Alice politely declined. She wished her family a good night, making the best smile she could and walked down the shaded boulevard.

The road was beginning to face the end of summer now. There was only one word to feed that hymn. And she thought of another benefit to bureaucracy. Commoners appreciate the security in one million people between you and the man you made the law.