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Show Acting Alone Page 46? we wrote letters back 'n forth and all like that, I guess I'd know what old Spikey was up to these days. I guess he's gone and done something else famous overseas or in Washington the State and that's howcome he's not here and not because you didn't send him a invite, huh, Polly?" Shanny's sweet face looked imploringly up from under the silly brooch-spangled Army beanie. Mute, rudimentary intuition had obviously informed her of something terrible. But the child in Shanny wanted not information, but reassurance. So Polly mumbled one affirmative lie, and then another, just to tide her through the ceremony. Most of the serious information passed between them through Polly's smoothing hand on her little sister's padded shoulder. Polly hurried her along to take her place in the procession. What could that smell be, rising so thick and foul and damp from underneath the caved-in floorboards? Polly decided it would be nice to believe that it was simply a spiritual exhalation of sorts, God's olfactory indication that this particular convent was dying, but also rotting, which is to say, reuniting with the earth, being transformed by the inexorable Conqueror Worm into good rich soil, nitrogen and minerals and all the dark materials from which new life can spring as the end-product of the natural death and disintegration cycle, God's own plan and process and so on. Polly listened inwardly to the tone of her mind's voice as she explained away the stench in this manner; she heard the same strident and heavily rhetorical tones that her actual physical larynx took on when arguing some political or social point of whose validity she was not absolutely convinced, deep inside. Over her own silent voice, Polly could now hear Shanny's real voice |