sometimes pick up things like poppy seeds, and egg salad,” Sister Helen said.
Sister Mary put a third EPT wand next to the first two. By now, Sister Helen’s face was turning red and splotchy.
“Stop putting your urine on my cookies!”
“Sister, I’m pregnant.”
As Sister Mary had suspected, saying it out loud just made her feel worse. She slid out of her chair and onto her knees and tried to bury her face in Sister Helen’s lap. “Please, sister,” she cried. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Who was it?” Sister Helen demanded.
“No one!” Sister Mary cried. “I’m a virgin!”
“No,” Sister Mary said. “Someone must have gotten you pregnant. Was it a homeless? Was it Randy Funkers or his unemployed father? Who was it?”
“No one,” Sister Mary cried out in despair. “Please! I swear, Sister, I am a virgin.”
With her head buried in Sister Helen’s lap, she didn’t notice the sister’s bright red face, or the cold sweat that had broken out across her forehead, or her shallow and labored breathing. She felt Sister Helen stroking her hair and that just made her cry harder. Actually, Sister Helen was trying to punch her in the head, but the pain shooting down Sister Helen’s left arm was making her feeble.
Sister Helen was crushed. She saw everything she had worked for at the Poor Clares reduced to a farcical community theater production of Agnes of God with Sister Mary’s overly sensitive womb in the lead role. She tried harder to punch the young nun, to tell her to get out of town, to take a long bus ride to Texas or Mexico and to change her name and never come back and maybe be accidentally killed by human traffickers along the way. She wanted to say all of this but blood vessels were bursting in her brain like fireworks and all she could manage was a weak: “Hoo, hoo.”
“Oh,” she thought to herself. “I always knew Sister Mary would be the death of me.”
There was a perfunctory knock at the door and Sister Barbara entered. In one quick glance she took in the still-warm corpse of Sister Helen, the sobbing Sister Mary on her knees, the EPT wands on the TV tray and Maury on the television. Utterly beside herself, she picked up a copy of TV Guide, rolled it into a tube and began to beat Sister Mary with it like a bad dog.
“Oh, sister,” she cried out in despair. “Oh, sister, you’ve done it again. You’ve done it again!”
Satan had had a long day. First, he’d had to secure five thousand gallons of liquid feces, which he’d finally managed to find in a contaminated hog lagoon in Western Virginia.
“And that EPA comes down here to my business that’s been here for thirty years and they tell me that I’m killing my neighbors. What the hell do they know about my neighbors?” the owner of the hog lagoon that was, indeed, killing his neighbors, said. “If I was killing my neighbors, don’t you think somebody’d’ve said something by now? By the way, what the hell you want five thousand gallons of pig feces for?”
“We heat it to boiling and sort of put it in this big lake, then we take the souls of the damned and dip them in it for all eternity.”
The hog lagoon owner stared at him.
“It’s an everlasting torment,” Satan said. “For the damned.”
“And that’s your business,” the owner said. “You get the EPA meddling with you? No, sir, you don’t. But I do. Tain’t the America I grew up in, I’ll tell you that for free. You want a receipt?”
“Please.”
Then Maryland Sulfur and Steel, who sold him discount sulfur, refused his check.
“What do you mean?”
“The last one bounced.”
“This one won’t.”
“I’ve got a note from my boss right here. It says: DNAC. That means, Do Not Accept Checks.”
“Look, if you sell me this load of sulfur now I can pay you the balance we owe, plus the bank fee for the bounced check.”
“How?”
“With a check?”
Now he’d have to find some other source of sulfur. Maybe they could use rancid garbage instead. No, he probably couldn’t afford that either.
Depressed, Satan made his way to the nearest airport and then down the escalator to Hell. The escalator to Hell was one of Satan’s lesser ideas. He hadn’t been sold on elevators when they’d first come out and escalators had seemed much safer and more reliable. Also he had been worried that if he’d installed elevators it would only be a matter of time