The Sadist's Bible by Nicole Cushing Page B

a shar pei started loudly
    denouncing the president. “You wanna know what Obama stands fer?” the lady said. She
    was worked up. So excited, her shar pei wrinkles were flapping against one another.
    “One Big Ass Mistake, America!”
    The rest of the table let out raspy, old-people cackles. All of them, male and female,
    sounded like witches.
    “He’s a secret Muslim,” one of the older men (a chubby, bald fellow) said. “At least,
    that’s what I think. Maybe he’s not, but I think that explains everything .”
    “Why, yes, of course he’s a secret Muslim,” the shar pei woman said. “I can’t see
    how people don’t see through that. I think he’s doing things to control the weather. Then he’s blaming it on coal, because he doesn’t like Kentucky. He knows Kentucky will
    never vote for him, because we’re good Christian people and not Muslims.” There was
    another idea the shar pei woman was trying to verbalize. She stammered to get it out.
    There was some urgency in the matter. She shook her shar pei jowls again, as though
    trying to shake out the word she was looking for. ”S-s-so he’s trying to put coal out of business. And he’s messin’ up the weather...with some sorta weather machine...to do it. I guess what I mean to say is that he’s...well...you know... framing coal for this global warming thing.”
    Ellie didn’t have an opinion, one way or another, about the president. Like everyone
    else in the church, Jesse had put up a yard sign for Romney. He’d gotten very excited
    about it. He loathed Obama. But he never once referred to the president as a “secret
    Muslim”. And even he would have thought it sheer lunacy to accuse the president of
    harnessing the power of the weather against his own people, simply to avenge an
    electoral slight. But one day, forty or fifty years in the future – if he lived that long –
    Jesse would probably be spouting nonsense every bit as...well...as deranged as that.
    About some future president, Republican or Democrat. Deranged ...that was the right word, wasn’t it? Yes, deranged.
    The brain was just a part of the body – like any other. It, too, could be eroded away
    by the wash of decades. She thought about the forest of gnarled appendages at the nearby table. If something as hard as bone could be gradually warped by time and disease, then
    what hope was there for the brain? It was, after all, only soft tissue.
    And at that point Ellie felt a shudder. I’ll be exactly like those old people, too,
    someday , she thought.

    As we grow very old, our mind breaks down.

    She heard a loud whirring. A grimy plastic mannequin hand set a plate of scrambled
    eggs and biscuits in front of her, and a bowl of grits to the side.
    It was René again: the plastic/mechanical arm, the massive sinkhole in his skull, the
    mouth without a bottom lip. The unintelligible mumbling. It was impossible, of course,
    that he was waiting tables at two different places so far apart from each other. And yet, there he was.
    He placed his cold plastic hand over Ellie’s cold flesh hand and gently patted it.
    Then, with some force, he moved her hand off of He Wants Us Broken . Picked it up.
    Made pleasant, approving moans. Brought the tract up to his still-intact upper lip. Planted something akin to a kiss on it and returned it to the table. Then he crossed himself with his mechanical hand and said three words. “Haweh. Haweh. Haweh.”
    And this time, Ellie thought she understood what he meant. Could it be he was
    saying “Holy, Holy, Holy”?
    Before she could be sure, he returned the tract to her hands. He placed his whirring,
    filthy plastic hand on her chin and tilted it up so that her eyes met his. There was power in his touch. Not sexual power, but rather absolute power. It was as though she’d been touched by the hand of royalty.
    He muttered some more unintelligible words. Something, she intuited, about her .
    Then he giggled and limped off to the kitchen.
    Her eggs