bird. Once they made me have a baby with a bald eagle, and then they wrapped it in an American flag and burned it.”
“Tell us about Satan,” Horton said, trying to control the unstoppable torrent of crazy that was gushing out of Frita’s mouth. “Tell us about how Satan abused you.”
“Satan abused me three times,” Frita said. “They summoned him by playing a Slayer album backwards six hundred and sixty-six times. While they were doing that they spanked me with a Bible. After I had been spanked for six hundred and sixty-six seconds all the people in robes suddenly fell to their knees and began to have Satanic sexual intercourse and then a bat flew into the room and made me pregnant. That was Satan.”
“The bat impregnated you?” Eddie Horton asked, to clarify for the court.
“It flew right up my butt. I had a half-man, half-bat baby and its first words were, ‘Hail, Satan.’ Then the Dungeon Master took it from me and later he told me that the bat baby had become the head of a small internet start-up company delivering dog food to people who lived in Manhattan during the dot com boom in the late 90’s.”
“And the next time Satan manifested, what form did he take?”
“The next time I was in my backyard thinking about all the Satanic ritual abuse I was suffering and listening to the radio, and Satan appeared to me as a snake. He said that I was really hot and that he couldn’t stop thinking about me and then he made me pregnant by biting my ankle. That baby got flushed down the toilet by the Dungeon Master.”
“And the next time you were ritually and Satanically abused by Satan?”
“That time I was in the Devil church and they were making me kill my best friend with a George Foreman Grill. It was horrible. She was screaming at me to stop and I was pressing down, and pressing down, and pressing down. It was such a traumatic memory that I completely blocked it out until a few weeks ago. But after she was dead and Joe Biden and Steven Seagal were eating her body, a huge poodle came into the room. Somehow I knew this was Satan, too, and that he wanted me to have his baby. And so he made me pregnant by licking my hand a lot until it tickled and then there was a warm feeling in my tummy and a baby grew there. He used Dungeons and Dragons to make the baby grow really fast and then I had the baby and that was really terrible because I had just squashed my best friend to death with a George Foreman Grill and I had the baby and I was screaming and Satan ran away and forgot to turn off his spell and so my baby grew up, and went through puberty, and became middle aged and then died as an old man all in ten minutes.”
“How did you know that it was Satan all three times if he came to you in three different forms?” Horton asked.
“Because his thingie is shaped like a pitchfork.”
The entire courtroom turned to look at Satan.
“Keep doodling, sir,” Nero said, under his breath.
Satan doodled harder.
“Are they still looking at me?” he asked.
“Keep...doodling...” Nero said.
“That was the three times the Devil abused me,” Frita Babbit said. “Satan’s pitchfork wiener ruined my life. Later, I wanted to get married but every time I told one of my fiancés about the abuse they always ran away. Also, I can’t use toilets. I’m too traumatized. I use plastic bags from the grocery store. I wanted to go to college and study Comparative Literature and then go to graduate school and get a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and really give something back to the world, you know? But I can’t. All that abuse gave me ADD and ADHD and so I can’t study. And that’s how Satan ruined my life. But I want everyone here to know that while I was victimized, I am not a victim. I am a strong woman. They can’t hold me down. I am proud, and beautiful and empowered and no one can stop me but myself. And I won’t stop me because the only limits I choose to acknowledge are no limits. I reach high, for there are stars lying hidden within my soul.”
There was a quiet moment, punctuated only by the sound of muffled sobs from the visibly moved spectators.