She hadn’t meant to do it, hadn’t noticed that her feet had fed her into the church, into the dark stray mauve of the granite slabs, up the blotched red of the worn carpeted aisle between the pews, up to the coffin sat aloof on its wooden bier, but she opened the lid anyway, and in she climbed.
It wasn’t the first time she’d lied to him, but the strength of the lie, the sheer unadulterated outrage of it was a shock even to her on her first full day in the cellar of the convent, shackled.
The frog was not from here, not with those iridescent turquiose spots, the pearl pink toes, the foreign croak, but she wasn’t xenophobic, no sirree, and so she popped it into her mouth, and swallowed.
She was driving, one hand on the wheel, the other hand lipsticking, Trevor the toddler screaming in the back, the rain swimming across the windscreen, when they announced it on the radio, her husband George was born again.
SANDERLINGS 