Read Online The Edge of Ruin by Melinda Snodgrass - Free Book Online
Authors: Melinda Snodgrass
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once
my
worshipers get organized, and agree to power sharing,
their
worshipers are going to come and kill
my
worshipers, and they’ve got a lot more warm, crazy bodies than I have.”
The silken black duvet cover snagged on a hangnail as I began to pleat it between my fingers. “That’s sad.”
“Which part? The killing or the fact that charity, love, forgiveness, and mercy are way less fun than righteous vengeance and punishing the infidels and the sinners?”
“Both, and what does that say about us as a species?” I said.
“That you suck, but you sure are tasty.” Cross lifted the bowl to his lips and slurped down the last of the soup.
Cross’s flippant response hit me wrong. Maybe it was the pain making me testy, but I wasn’t finding Cross amusing at—I peered at the Bose clock radio—two seventeen in the A.M. “Kenntnis thought we were worth the trouble. He believed in our ability to grow and change.”
“Yeah, but do
you
?” And the creature’s brown eyes were suddenly swallowed by his expanding pupils until they were just stone black. I had seen it happen a couple of times, and it still had the nape hairs trying to climb up my scalp. A million years of evolution were screaming at me that this thing was evil, and it would kill me, and I needed to run like a … a … I tried to not use the profanity, but nothing else would serve.
A motherfucker.
Papa can’t read my mind. He can’t know that I’m cursing like a sailor.
But you’ll slip and say it out loud sometime.
Stop it! Focus. Answer the question.
What was the question?
Are humans perfectible?
I got control of the cosmic kibitzers in my head, and thought back on the violence I’d witnessed in four years of police work. There was the toddler killed when his angry father had thrust a hose up his rectum and turned on the water as punishment for a full diaper. A woman beaten by her boyfriend until her face was just pulp, knifings at a party, drivers shooting each other because they got cut off in traffic. And beyond my small and petty personal experiences, there was all of history rolling out dark, and violent, and terrifying. There was the destruction of the Cathars. Auschwitz. Pol Pot’s killing fields. The body-choked rivers of Rwanda. I lay there unable to muster a single argument for why mankind deserved to survive, and I hated Cross for making me face how evil humans really were.
Maybe we do deserve to be cattle for the Old Ones.
Then my eye was caught by the Impressionist paintings hanging on the walls to either side of the gigantic bed. Shimmering water, flowers in dreamlike colors, misty landscapes. Twining through my errant thoughts were the haunting strains of
Il mio tesoro intanto
from Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
, and then the music modulated in the final movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. I could almost feel the keys of the piano beneath my fingers.
Next I looked at the enormous LED television hanging on the far wall, and I thought about the scientists, inventors, engineers, and machinists who had created that wonder of technology. I remembered thunder shaking the ground and vibrating in my chest that time Papa had taken me to Cape Canaveral to witness a space shot. I had been nine. The ship lifting skyward on a pillar of fire had been blurry because of the tears that filled my eyes. All of these were testaments to mankind’s genius.
Is that enough?
Were art and music and technological prowess enough to offset the horror? Well, there was love and sacrifice and generosity that sometimes transcended the hatreds between people.
It wasn’t rational, but a certainty that all these things were enough to justify our existence filled me. The tension headache pounding in my temples eased.
“Yes. Yes, I do.” Cross must have heard that certainty in my voice, because he straightened in the chair and his eyes became human again. “Now get back out there. Walk on water. Turn water into wine. You may be a fraud, but at
my
worshipers get organized, and agree to power sharing,
their
worshipers are going to come and kill
my
worshipers, and they’ve got a lot more warm, crazy bodies than I have.”
The silken black duvet cover snagged on a hangnail as I began to pleat it between my fingers. “That’s sad.”
“Which part? The killing or the fact that charity, love, forgiveness, and mercy are way less fun than righteous vengeance and punishing the infidels and the sinners?”
“Both, and what does that say about us as a species?” I said.
“That you suck, but you sure are tasty.” Cross lifted the bowl to his lips and slurped down the last of the soup.
Cross’s flippant response hit me wrong. Maybe it was the pain making me testy, but I wasn’t finding Cross amusing at—I peered at the Bose clock radio—two seventeen in the A.M. “Kenntnis thought we were worth the trouble. He believed in our ability to grow and change.”
“Yeah, but do
you
?” And the creature’s brown eyes were suddenly swallowed by his expanding pupils until they were just stone black. I had seen it happen a couple of times, and it still had the nape hairs trying to climb up my scalp. A million years of evolution were screaming at me that this thing was evil, and it would kill me, and I needed to run like a … a … I tried to not use the profanity, but nothing else would serve.
A motherfucker.
Papa can’t read my mind. He can’t know that I’m cursing like a sailor.
But you’ll slip and say it out loud sometime.
Stop it! Focus. Answer the question.
What was the question?
Are humans perfectible?
I got control of the cosmic kibitzers in my head, and thought back on the violence I’d witnessed in four years of police work. There was the toddler killed when his angry father had thrust a hose up his rectum and turned on the water as punishment for a full diaper. A woman beaten by her boyfriend until her face was just pulp, knifings at a party, drivers shooting each other because they got cut off in traffic. And beyond my small and petty personal experiences, there was all of history rolling out dark, and violent, and terrifying. There was the destruction of the Cathars. Auschwitz. Pol Pot’s killing fields. The body-choked rivers of Rwanda. I lay there unable to muster a single argument for why mankind deserved to survive, and I hated Cross for making me face how evil humans really were.
Maybe we do deserve to be cattle for the Old Ones.
Then my eye was caught by the Impressionist paintings hanging on the walls to either side of the gigantic bed. Shimmering water, flowers in dreamlike colors, misty landscapes. Twining through my errant thoughts were the haunting strains of
Il mio tesoro intanto
from Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
, and then the music modulated in the final movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. I could almost feel the keys of the piano beneath my fingers.
Next I looked at the enormous LED television hanging on the far wall, and I thought about the scientists, inventors, engineers, and machinists who had created that wonder of technology. I remembered thunder shaking the ground and vibrating in my chest that time Papa had taken me to Cape Canaveral to witness a space shot. I had been nine. The ship lifting skyward on a pillar of fire had been blurry because of the tears that filled my eyes. All of these were testaments to mankind’s genius.
Is that enough?
Were art and music and technological prowess enough to offset the horror? Well, there was love and sacrifice and generosity that sometimes transcended the hatreds between people.
It wasn’t rational, but a certainty that all these things were enough to justify our existence filled me. The tension headache pounding in my temples eased.
“Yes. Yes, I do.” Cross must have heard that certainty in my voice, because he straightened in the chair and his eyes became human again. “Now get back out there. Walk on water. Turn water into wine. You may be a fraud, but at
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