further questions, your honor,” Eddie Horton said, and sat down.
“Your witness,” Judge Gold said to Nero.
Nero stood and straightened his toga. He had been stress-eating Cheetos, and there were little orange smudges all over his wrinkled toga, which had turned from white to a sort of off-white grayish gray.
Nero walked to the front of the courtroom and paused dramatically. Then he turned to Frita Babbit.
“Would you state your name and spell your last name for the record, please?”
Frita Babbit looked confused.
“Frita B-a-b-b-i-t,” she said.
“Ms. Babbit, that’s quite a tale you told.”
“It’s not a tale, it’s a true.”
“That’s for the judge to decide,” Nero said.
“I think it’s true, too,” Judge Gold said.
“Oh. Well. All right, so it’s a true tale,” Nero said, adjusting. “Now, Ms. Babbit, you said something that interested me very much. Would you mind if we went back to what you said about this so-called ‘Satanic’ church?”
“It was a Satanic church,” she said.
“So you say, so you say,” Nero said.
“He sounds exactly like someone in a John Grisham novel,” Satan thought to himself.
“You claimed that this church was called the Knights in Satan’s Service, correct?”
“Yes,” Frita said.
“And access to the Devil church of the Knights in Satan’s Service was via the toilet in your upstairs hall, correct?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Indulge me, please. What kind of toilet was it? Toto or American Standard?”
“American Standard,” she said.
“Interesting, interesting...” Nero said. “And did you require one flush or two to go down that toilet?”
“One flush,” she said. “Sometimes two.”
“So at night, your parents would put you in this American Standard toilet and would convey you to the Devil Church with ‘one flush, sometimes two’? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes?” she said.
“Ms. Babbit, are you asking me or telling me? Is that what happened?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“You don’t remember. You don’t remember if your parents sent you to the Devil Church every night to be impregnated and to kill babies with one flush or two flushes.”
“Steady now, Nero,” Satan thought. “Don’t push too hard.”
“I think it was one flush, but sometimes it was two.”
“Well perhaps THIS will refresh your memory,” Satan said, and with a flourish two sheriff’s deputies rolled in a television cart. “You might be interested to know that the toilets in this building are American Standard toilets and last night I took the liberty of flushing myself down one of them. Perhaps you heard how many flushes it took? No? Roll the tape.”
“But I – ” Frita Babbit began.
“Roll the tape,” Nero called.
The screen showed one of the public restrooms in the courthouse. Nero stood in one of the toilets. He bowed to the camera, and then he flushed once...twice...three times. Nothing happened. Four times. Five times. He was still standing there. A rustle spread through the courtroom.
“Lights, please,” Nero said. “Your honor, I would like to consider this Exhibit D in this trial, unless the prosecution has any objection.”
A shaken Eddie Horton stood up at the prosecution’s table.
“I have no objection your honor, but this is highly irregular,” he said.
“And so is this courtroom,” Nero crowed. “Ms. Babbit, I submit to you that I am the approximate size and shape of a very large baby and I could not flush myself down an American Standard toilet. I submit to you that it is impossible to flush a human being down a toilet with one flush, two flushes, three flushes or even TEN FLUSHES!”
A buzz went through the courtroom.
Satan resisted the urge to jump out of his seat and punch the air in celebration. This was as close to a touchdown as they could get. Nero hadn’t let him down.
“Now I remember,” Frita Babbit said. “We had Toto toilets.”
The buzzing in the courtroom turned off like a switch had been thrown.
“Toto toilets?” Nero repeated.
“All the abuse clouded my mind, and forced me to block things out. Of course, American Standard pipes are too small,” Frita Babbit said, smiling serenely. “But we had Toto toilets which, with their larger exhaust fittings and gentler U-bends, are exactly the right size for facilitating Satanic ritual abuse.”
“I see,” Nero said.
Satan felt defeated. But no, he’d trusted Nero so far. He wouldn’t give up on him now. This was, after all, the man who had allied himself with his own stepfather to rise to power at sixteen and then poisoned him and taken the title of emperor. He always had a trick up his sleeve.
“If we could ask you to turn your attention to one of your previous statements,” Nero said. “You said that