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Show Acting Alone pa g e 463 That sounded as though it might be a line he was rehearsing for the morning's homily. Polly hoped it wouldn't be too rambling and dreary a homily. Not today. He sat down in stiff brocaded billows of his liturgical garb and sighed. His tiny feet swung free from the great height of the wingback chair. He sighed once more and even seemed to weep a bit. Polly could tell that he was about to have one of his odd, maudlin fits in which he compulsively reminisced about a day recently past that had apparently been traumatic not only for him but for everybody else around here as well (though one wouldn't know that anyone else but the priest had suffered, to hear him speak). "That day," he whimpered, "I saw our Mother's grave open wide. And, as I sit here before you, I swear it was vacant, empty! It reclosed itself that day, I am positive, for the sake of a proper exhumation, to answer the question that has been tormenting me ever since that horrible day -" Wait, thought Polly. Was he talking mere magical mummification now? Or was Bopp insinuating the near blasphemy of a non-Christly, pre-Parousia resurrection? Was this little man doctrinally misinformed or merely crazy? Or did he just have a fine sense of melodrama? Polly wanted to grab them by the shoulders, shake both Bopp and dead Gorgonia's cellmate and point out that Judgement Day had not come that weekend when she'd been in D.C. haggling with Senator Nimrod over the right of poor people to live and breathe and even eat an occasional meal. "The air was green, sisters, and I heard bombs and burpguns and saw, across the clearing, armies clashing among the aspens." The chaplain put his round little head in his soft hands, stunned at the next part of the |