ears can pass so quickly. Adam and Eve beget Cain and Abel, and soon there is the first murder. The world burgeons with human beings, and human beings burgeon with sin. Women birth children, suffer their curses, die alone. Men work the fields, take their solace in ownership of their wives and children. Each generation begets its sins onto the next. One man contracts syphilis. His wife goes blind, and his child is born doomed to die. Are we not all, though? Born doomed with death already inside of us, the seeds of it planted. In birth, we are in death. So, Nannette gave death to a daughter, Nanette, and she passed death down with her through generation upon generation. Melissa gave death to a daughter, an Angel, who flew with speed to her home.
Sometime in the future, another Charlotte will be born. Perhaps a child of a child of a child of Charlene, the fictional other daughter of Charles Rose. She will be born a priestess, and at the age of three, she will decide that she must build a church on a hill. Like Solomon, she has a vision of a temple. Her doting parents provide supplies, and she builds her temple, dressing it in pink ribbons and lily flowers. She dances every day on the temple floor, because there she has her visions of God.
The visions are from a tumor in her brain. They give her an ecstacy that is indescribable. Sometimes she falls on the floor of the temple, and groans with the power and weight of the sublime that is within her, within her temple.
Her parents find her there one day, groaning on the floor, writhing in the cool smell of pine dust. They bring her to a doctor, who looks inside of her brain with machines. She sits willingly through the tests. She is in the glory of God and has nothing to fear.
They find that she has a tumor in her brain. She smiles and nods. The tumor is a gift from God, she believes. Her parents cry. They think that their little girl is too young to understand, and they schedule her for a surgery to remove the tumor. A tumor is never a gift, they believe.
Surgeons operate and remove the tumor, and then it is gone. The little girl wakes from the operation with a pale and frightened face. She has changed. God has been taken from her. She is never the same after that. She wanders the empty chapel, knowing that once something was here, something that she can never get back. She wanders it in desperation, looking in all the cracks and seeing no light, only darkness.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Charlotte decorates her church in black ribbons and spends her days crying in the pews.
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