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Show Acting Alone pa g e ig pana, trying not to laugh. "We're praying a rosary." "One time when I could still walk a few feet," grunted Simone, "I saw an old blackbear in the woods, and I thought it was Gorgonia hobbling along. In full habit, as usual." Simone made an amazingly successful effort at imitating the hobblings of a blackbear/Gorgon. She somehow kept still enough not to catch Mother Superior's eye, and remained perfectly flat on her back in the stretcher the whole time. She immediately got winded from the effort. She breathed a heavy sweetness up into Polycarpana's face. "Hell, Polly," she said. "Oh Hell." Polycarpana gently wiped her friend's forehead. Simone Stylite's body had gone crazy since her last stint in the locked ward of a certain Colorado Springs hospital. Some of the older nuns surely thought or dreamt possession at Simone's worst moments or their own worst moments. Every morning Polycarpana had to wrap Ace bandages around her cellmate's limbs, to keep them from swelling even larger once the day's activities began. And sometimes, as now, a stretcher was Simone's only means of locomotion. Simone's self-appointed totem was not the prescribed pillar saint Simeon, but rather the armless Shmoo, Al Capp's famous creation. She woke up sometimes at night, all the circulation in her arms and legs gone, and she shrieked in terror for Polly and the nuns from the surrounding sleeping porches to come group-massage her back to life. When her fingers would bend, Simone Stylite embroidered crazy-colored, armless, lovable Shmoos on the secret inside of her garments. |
