“Let us brand God's name into our hearts. God grant this for Jesus’ sake. May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in faith in Christ and Jesus. Let us stand before the altar and profess our faith. I believe in the living God, creator of all human kind, that creates the universe by power and love. I believe in Jesus Christ. . ”
Mrs. Mulhoffer turned to look at her husband and Ginger saw that her cheek was flushed, her eyes bright with enthusiasm. Mr. Mulhoffer nodded slightly to affirm her, but he disapproved of such shows of emotion and he straightened his shoulders and sat up taller against the pew. Tiny hairs stood up on the necks of all the middle-management men. And in the cry room their wives gazed dreamily at the Deerpath Creek pastor walking in long victorious strides back to his seat. He looked like the sensitive guy on their afternoon soap and he'd spoken their language, TV commercials, cereal, sports. The word pandering came to Ginger's mind.
Her father's eyes were closed, his shoulders hunched forward as if he were trying to protect himself from the words of the sermon. The organist started up with an unfamiliar tune, more like a pop song than a brooding Germanic ballad. The guest pastor smiled to himself and her father, turned his body, and glanced out the window at the blurry cars speeding away on the highway, her father's face set in a superior expression that even Ginger sometimes hated, the one he wore when he tried to explain that TV was bad for you, that reading was better than video games, and that Disneyland was purely for pagans.
Ten: SANDY
The hunchbacked troll staggered in wearing a paisley shirt and a brown suede vest, smelling of crabgrass and wet fur. Nervously, he jiggled the cat's-eye marbles in his pocket as he leaned against the back wall and rooted around in the stack of dirty magazines. From a brown paper bag he pulled a tiny orange and peeled it with great reverence, lifting every last stringy ligament off the fruit. He offered her a wedge, pressed it between her chapped lips; his fingertips tasted of salt and smoke, and the orange so much like happiness that she started to cry. Anything could set her off now, birds tittering behind the boarded window or the sound of water rushing through the pipes in the wall. He stood over her and said he hated to see her so sad and would she like to hear his silly song, the one to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle.” She nodded her head and the troll began to sing.
Swim Swim Sad little fish / How I hoped to make a wish.
That this girl will spit up gold / Into a dish or into a bowl.
Swim Swim Sad little fish / How I hoped to make a wish.
He used an outstretched pointer finger to conduct himself and giggled so hard afterward that his lips spread up and his weedy teeth showed. From the bottom of the bag, he pulled a pomegranate, broke the red leather skin, gobbled up a handful of crimson jewels, and spit the seeds into the carpet. He offered her a few of the bloody kernels, but she shook her head and lifted the afghan up to her nose; static like crazed punctuation flew out of the blanket's wool weave.
She'd shown her brother how to make sparks between the blanket and the sheet, told him she was a witch, that she could do other tricks, make a tiger appear on the living-room couch or a dolphin leap out of the bathtub. She could fly out the window if she wanted, all the way to China. One day, when their mother was gone, she promised to show him how to levitate his cereal bowl, how to get a ghost to make his bed.
The bear claimed to be a warlock. If you had a headache, you could call him and he'd put a clove of garlic into a silver bowl of olive oil and say a prayer to Saint Teresa of the Little Flowers. He didn't want any payment, only a little respect, and he did this for her daily because she always had a headache and a sore throat and a runny nose. But the bear wouldn't listen, just shook his head and explained about the pink room upstairs where lavender clouds moved lazily along, and the unicorn waited, watching over the little girl who French kissed her pillow every single night. There, he said, a thousand butterflies sang a song about angels and rosebud bedspreads as they swayed in unison over a rippling lake, and a white pony with a pink mane and eyelashes long and black as a movie star's drank, and the blue unicorn, its horn made of crystal, ran through the shallows, sending up sprays that sparkled like diamonds.
“Your old dad is going to teach you about the birds and the bees,” the troll said, tapping his forefinger against her knuckles, trying to get her to hold his fingers like a baby, his mouth fixed into a stiff smile, as if he'd only seen the facial expressions of people on TV. “Hey dolly. Hey cutie pie,” he said as he stroked the skin of her cheek, told her she smelled like butter, that her skin drove him insane. Tears glazed his gray eyes and he looked up into the ceiling and whispered, “Little baby girl.”
In his new manifestation as a butterfly, the caterpillar was only interested in sentimental stories of transformation, tales that made his mascara run and turned his tiny nose pink. “When Donna Polito gave birth to her second child,” the butterfly began, his blue and silver wings making a glittery and glamorous backdrop, “she felt a singular moment of joy at baby Miranda's first cry and then nothing. Her world went black and she slipped into a coma. Infection ravaged her body. She needed a machine to breathe. After fifteen operations, the doctor told her husband to make plans for her wake. But he couldn't do it. ‘Maybe love will succeed,’ he thought, ‘where medicine has failed.’” The butterfly looked at her with the pleading eyes of a TV evangelist. “So that night he recorded the voices of his two young sons and the next day brought the tape to the hospital room where his wife lay near death. ’Mommy come home!’ they pleaded on the tape. Suddenly his wife's eyes fluttered open.” The butterfly paused to dramatize this moment by batting his own long lashes obsessively. “You see, she'd dreamed she heard her children's voices and she looked into the eyes of her husband and whispered, ‘Take me home.’” The butterfly dabbed at the corner of his eye with a wisp of fluffy milkweed and said, “Something similar could happen to you, but only if you hope hard enough, my dear.” And he flew out of the pink spotlight and the unicorn stepped inside the circle of light and nudged his wet nose against her cheek. His crystal horn sent out rainbow slivers like a prism.
“You were chosen, for your similarities to raindrops and day-old kittens, to the first white crocus and a baby's tender heart,” the unicorn began. A gold filling in his mouth shone like a piece of glass in the sand. He raised his creamy blue hoof and balanced it on the edge of her mattress. “These are the qualities of a princess,” the unicorn confided, “and so we directed the troll to you.”
The troll fed her pear slices and a few cubes of Swiss cheese from a cracked floral plate. He wore the clip-on bow tie, the red shirt with the lima bean — shaped grease spot, and sat on the edge of the bed, gingerly, as if he didn't want her pee stains to soil his clothing. As always she was mesmerized by the reflection in his glasses, today the image only vaguely familiar. The wet gag hung around her neck as she shredded the rubbery cheese and limpid pear flesh against her back teeth. She leaned forward slightly and asked him what had happened to the cat. His eyes startled and he yanked his head back as if a chair had talked or a piece of pizza. Setting the last pear slice back onto the plate, he lifted the cloth from her neck and retied it tightly around her mouth, the corners pulling like a horse's bit. He stood, walked to the boarded window, his hands in his pocket worrying the marbles.