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Trouble is my business, said Philip Marlowe, the best of the private eyes.
Occam was a friar—points for that—but Occam’s razor was a joke. Answers nested in contradictions. First impressions were usually wrong.
Our priest, Father Reese, gave a dreadfully uninspired homily “honoring” Jack Corolla and extolling the graces of repentance. Somehow, he turned Jack’s death into another reason to hate ourselves. What about mercy? Comfort? If punishment is straight, forgiveness is queer, if only because we are addicted to apologizing.
Sister Honor quietly harrumphed and whispered across me, to Sister Augustine. “Just what we need right now, half-hearted words from Father Reese. How shameful of me to say, but to not praise the Lord fully feels inappropriate and in fact dangerous, as we have already been infiltrated by Evil.”
Father Reese’s homily was pathetic. Like Sister Honor, I grieved for the congregation who hungered for inspiration in the wake of Jack’s fiery death. The reassurance of the Word was what all of us wanted in church. Defibrillate us. Shock our hearts. Tell us that pain is okay. That life is fucked but still worth it. Tell us that pain is a crucial part of everyone’s story—every birth and rebirth. Tell us we don’t need to answer every question. The divine mystery sparked my conversion. If it worked on me, it could lift anyone. Perhaps Father Reese was exhausted. We all were. But come on. So often
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Panes, pain.
Sometimes routines comforted. Sometimes routines replaced thinking.
His casket-black eyes, his mouth spilling with tiny opossum teeth.
God bless you,” I said to him but also to myself to keep from punching him in the teeth.
Every hardboiled sleuth, even Mike Hammer, that dick, had an office.
Sometimes the potential of a thing was better than the thing itself.
“And stop trying to be anything. Just be yourself.” “I don’t know what that is.”
