Prism - By Rachel Moschell Page 0,105

just an intellectual debate about which religion was right. The exact moment Stalin had realized this had been when Alejo didn’t flinch with a gun to his head and had said he wouldn’t change his mind about Jesus being God.

That had been a very, very heavy day.

Today, Stalin’s heart felt heavy as well, and as he left the massive cathedral where he had been at mass he bought a strawberry ice cream cone from a vendor on the sidewalk. Then he turned down one of the ancient, narrow side streets to meander his way in the general direction of home. There really was no hurry; in Spain, no one went to bed before midnight, and at the moment it was just after seven. Stalin took a large lick of the sickly-sweet ice cream, the tried to clean a sticky drop of pink off his lips with the paper-thin napkin wrapped around his cone.

All of a sudden, he stopped, eyes falling upon a little sign with a picture of a white dove that said Libreria La Paz. Below, in smaller letters, it said, “Libreria evangelica”.

A Christian bookstore. And a non-Catholic one.

Something about the store drew Stalin towards its rugged stone steps like a piece of lint up the funnel of a vacuum cleaner, but he hesitated. He imagined himself walking into that store to browse books and finding himself swarmed by a pack of hunchbacked crones in black dresses and head coverings, who would then drag him over to a gold-crowned image of the Virgin and force him to recite the rosary until he was born again.

The glass door squeaked quietly and a little girl wearing a hot pink short set skipped down the steps, followed by a middle-aged guy in a polo shirt who could have been her father.

There you go…people younger than eighty come to this store. Maybe it has something for me.

Realizing he had been holding his breath, Stalin drew in a gust of air and then nearly shrieked, feeling the cold drip of melting ice cream soak his fingers. He hurriedly licked all the way around the cold cone, then each finger one by one, glancing around guiltily to see if anyone was watching. Finally, Stalin pulled himself together and clumped up the stairs to the bookstore, some part of him praying to God that there would be some books here worth reading that could explain to him more about what it was that wouldn’t let him just put Jesus at the back of his mind.

A bell over the door jangled softly as Stalin entered, and he was relieved when the man behind the counter only waved politely at him, then turned away to let the customer browse the shop in peace.

It was a small bookstore, with white wooden shelves filled with different titles lining the walls and a small section for music and t-shirts. Ignoring everything but the books, Stalin began at one end, noticing right away that the volumes seemed to be rather thin. Remembering to keep up on licking his ice cream so it wouldn’t flood the bookstore’s red carpet, Stalin cocked his head sideways to better scan the titles, getting more disgruntled as he went along.

In one section, he found books with titles such as “A New You in Forty Days!”, “God Can Control Your Diet”, and “Exercising for Jesus”. Puzzled, he moved on to the next rows of books and saw several covers featuring blown-up photos of people with white smiles with flashy clothes. “God Wants You to be Rich!” proclaimed one book with the image of a slick Hispanic man in an expensive purple suit. Stalin’s brows drew together as he read, “The Ten-Day Plan to Secure Wealth” and “Plant the Seed and It Will Grow”.

A thin rivulet of strawberry ice cream escaped down the side of Stalin’s cone and over his hand, splatting onto the carpet below. A curse was on the tip of Stalin’s tongue, until he remembered where he was and gulped, glancing over at the man behind the counter. Seeing the guy safely reading, paying no attention to Stalin soiling his store and cussing, Stalin turned back to the books, pretty confused.

He had studied Christianity in depth during his masters and PhD, of course, along with all the other religions. They may not have been the most exciting reading in the world, but he remembered a plethora of thick volumes about theology and Christian thought. Those books were not just a little weighty; they were the kind