Dominion by Randy Alcorn Page B

to political charm, usually without knowing it. He’d determined not to spend time informally with any politicians unless he thought he could get more from them than they could get from him. Politics. Patterson, the Trib reporter assigned to the state capital in Salem, had told him, “There’s two things you don’t want to see made. Sausage and laws.”
Clarence was all for laws. It was lawmakers he didn’t trust. He worked to get a jump on his next column, forcing himself not to think about what kept trying to hijack his mind.
Tomorrow’s face-off with Detective Ollie Chandler.

At six o’clock in the morning, Clarence sipped a strong cup of coffee to prepare for the ritual of shave and shower. He stood gazing into his saltwater aquarium, watching the glass steam up from the heat of the cup. The brilliant yellow tangs glided across in formation, while the red-and-white lionfish with its swirling, feather-like spines ominously patrolled what he clearly regarded as his dominion. Hard to believe anything so beautiful could be so deadly.
Clarence loved the order and beauty of the underwater world. It was a world where he controlled the temperature, the water purity, the vegetation, the food, the props. Even the inhabitants. A world he could govern. A world where he called the shots.
His prize possession Eli, the black-speckled moray eel, lurked in the darkness, waiting to scare one of the kids’ friends who came by and tapped on the glass despite being told not to. Clarence chuckled to himself, realizing Eli was more terrified than the children to whom he’d become a legendary threat.
Clarence studied the glowing blue-and-orange Potter’s angelfish and the green-and-blue long nose bird wrasse. He watched as the orange-and-white two band anemone fish darted in and out of his makeshift home. He wondered sometimes how they could stand living in a world so small and artificial. He imagined they must long to live in the adventurous world for which they’d been made, rather than this confined one. Reaching to sprinkle food into the water, he felt certain they must yearn to see beyond the distorted glass, to make sense of the shadowy image they now saw from a distance, the caretaker who provided their food and maintained their environment.
He untucked his shirt and wiped a fingerprint off the glass. There. The world he governed looked perfect now.
You poor dumb creatures don’t even know what you’re missing, do you? You can’t imagine the great oceans beyond. You can’t even see past your little artificial world.
After his shower, Clarence performed the daily ritual of putting in his contact lenses. People wear contacts for different reasons, but Clarence Abernathy wore them because glasses emphasized a flaw. It was never good strategy to give visibility to a weakness. Which was why most people who knew him weren’t aware he was an insulin-dependent diabetic. He took the blood test now: 132. Not bad. Barely above normal. He took two insulin bottles from the refrigerator and stuck a slender syringe into the bottle marked Humulin U, then withdrew twelve units. Next he extracted fifteen units of Humulin R. With his left hand he untucked his T-shirt and injected the insulin, then went to pour his breakfast cereal.
His only other physical liability was, as the doctor put it, anomalous trichromatism. A type of color blindness. He could see the whole range of colors visible to people with normal vision, but he matched colors differently than they. He especially had trouble with greens, often mixing up yellow and green. It was a source of irritation in little ways. Like bringing home Golden Delicious apples instead of Granny Smiths.
He would keep the chinks in his armor invisible. That was critical when you advanced into enemy territory, which Clarence felt he did nearly every day. Especially today, when after finishing his column he would march to police headquarters and demand some answers from Ollie Chandler.
Clarence was