Sticking Points (Dreamseeker Fiction)

At Anna and Wade's church, war is evil--the vestibule doesn't have a fancy signboard commemorating soldiers who sacrificed their lives. Thou shalt not kill, period. The church folks have no intention of chucking this mainstay belief.

Still, they maintain God sent Abraham packing up the hill to slaughter his son. They're untroubled by the grim sacrifice rules in the Old Testament. They link God's grace to a grisly crucifixion. Good Lord. Is theirs a bloodthirsty God?

Rattled by the logic, Anna is working on a book. But she's making snailpoke progress. Besides her theological pickle, she's hampered by her loopy state of mind. Her pages want to devolve into a hopeless hodgepodge. Trying to sound lucid, she only muddies the situation.

"It's the dumbest little things that bog me down," she says tonight. "I'm telling you, I'm demented."

"Nah," rebuts Wade behind her in the steamy mirror, the shower spout dropping its last dregs. "Not demented." He slaps his washcloth at his yawning underarms and slick chest, the black hairs uncoiled and swollen like sidewalk worms after a rain. "Just touchier than all get out. What is it now? Give me an example."

Pressed against the washbowl to meet her clouded face in the glass, probing with the tweezers for that chinny-chin-chin pig bristle of hers, Anna resists. "Don't make me say! It's all so dumb."

What is she to think? Is her church's salvation theology any less crazy than her mental flailing, her stumped search for the right words? Why the animal-carcass stipulations? Why that dreaded scene at Golgotha?