Iglesia ……………………………………… Episode 23

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

 

(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all of the episodes by clicking on the tag.)

Previous Episode and previous pertinent episode!

Well then! She, a good Catholic girl for all of her life, felt like she was in Heaven….but she was wearing a burkha and was standing in what was obviously…now…a mosque. And of course, that meant she was dead. She most assuredly wished to have a word with the manager!

She was starting to feel sharp again instead of feeling all gauzy and disassociated from her body, she threw a couple of punches in the air and jogged in place a bit and felt even more like her old self. Which meant she was starting to get seriously pissed off.

Then she looked around the beautiful blue, black, and gold mosque…and noticed there was no door. Fuck that….she walked over to the nearest window with every intention of climbing out and hunting down someone to verbally…and quite possible physically abuse. Then as she got closer to the window…she had to stop and just look. She had heard the term breathtaking beauty, but now she felt it. She had to consciously start breathing again. She had looked out the windows while she was lying on the platform in the center of the room. But then she had only seen window sized segments, framed like pictures. Now as she approached and saw the entire tableau of the valley the mosque was situated in, she was quite literally stunned by the beauty.

She had seen pictures of Alpine valleys that were a pale shadow of this one. A ring of snowcapped craggy mountains of gray and purplish rock leading down to a fringe of fir and pine and spruce with a lazy river running and curling down the very green and grassy center, running occasionally over rocks that made small cataracts and waterfalls. The colors were so vibrant, they…vibrated! The greens were so bright and…green, it felt like an assault, the blues of the sky and water contained what seemed like a thousand different perfect shades of blue, the white of the snow was blinding in its whiteness. And she could hear the sound of the river as it danced and swirled over the rocks and there was simply no other word to describe it….the water was …laughing! The trees were so perfectly shaped and colored they looked more like Christmas trees than any decorated tree she had ever seen. The rocks, though they were the essentially just the same browns and tans and grays of all rocks, though these were browner and tanner and grayer, were so perfectly formed they resembled some sort of exotic gems. It wasn’t just the colors and the shapes though…all of the elements of the landscape were in exactly the right place…you could FEEL that! And each piece and element perfectly complimented and offset each other element, contrasting…yet combining and harmonizing to such an extent that the valley just …oooozed beauty …and peace.

She slowly…again…returned to herself. This place had a way of separating you from yourself. She shook her head to clear and realized that what had brought her back this time was an old friend, her anger. The same anger that had propelled her all of her life, that had driven her. Driven her through school at the top of her class after she had overheard her teacher telling her mother not to expect much from her. Driven her out of her small town and through college. Driven her to the big city and to becoming a cop, and driven her up through the ranks of the cops.

And now someone here was going to get introduced to her old friend!

“Fuck this shit!” she yelled in her head, “let’s kick some ass!”

But just as she began to swing her leg over the golden window sill, she heard suddenly and startingly heard a voice behind her! And before she could wheel around and see where it was coming from, who it was…her mind instantly registered it as the voice from an old sitcom…..

It was the voice of Apu, from the old sitcom The Simpsons, and it was saying….”I would not do that if I were you, my friend.”