Carsten Stroud - The Shimmer

By now, thanks to the margarita factor, the girls had relaxed enough around their new friend that they had begun to open up to her about their trip down from St. Louis, and the Harwood-inflicted grinding hell it had managed to become.

Diana Bowman was cautiously sympathetic.

“Well, yes, I confess I do find certain types of religious practice to be, how to put it, so spiritually confining ...but I sometimes feel that it is as much a sin to ignore the sensual pleasures that God has given us as it is to, what to say, overindulge in them?”

Rebecca and Karen agreed, or thought they did, although her reference to sensual pleasures definitely touched them on a more primal than theoretical level. But Diana seemed to feel she had said too much.

“You know, I have no doubt that your parents—they are here with you, yes?—oh, how nice—Jerry and Marilyn? And Alyssa, the youngest? That they are doing this out of love. I’m sure they just want you to be...happy and safe.”

“Too safe,” said Karen, with some heat. “They never want us to have any fun—”

“You’d think we were in jail,” Rebecca finished, caught up with the injustice of it all.

Diana listened with every sign of sympathetic understanding as the girls raved on for a while about the unbearable oppression of patriarchal fascism disguised as parental kindness.

Eventually they ran the subject down, realizing from Diana’s sleepy-eyed attention that perhaps they were boring their new friend. But what she said next surprised them.

“I’m a Roman Catholic myself, on my mother’s side, and I do feel that the effect Jesus had on the world was, on the whole, a good one. You need only to look at the world these days to see how important His teachings were to Western Civilization.”

Rebecca, the historian, brought up the Crusades and Diana, sipping at her margarita, agreed that the Crusades were simply awful, but that they had happened nine hundred years ago, and what Jesus had brought into the world, long before the Crusades, could be seen in the artifacts connected to Him.

“Oh God,” said Karen, “don’t tell us about artifacts .”

“Really?” said Diana.

It turned out that Rebecca and Karen knew all about artifacts and relics, since Daddy never shut up about them—he had even brought a lockbox full of them along to classify or decipher or something—but by now their heads were dizzy with the surging sea and the margarita sipping so they missed the sudden sharpening of Diana Bowman’s attention.

“So your father works with these artifacts?”

“ God yes. He brought them along, these...”

“Artifacts,” Rebecca repeated with careful precision, feeling the tequila. “He lays them out on the dining room table and studies them for, like, hours . He has a microscope and all kinds of tools.”

Diana was intrigued.

“Truly? He sounds very dedicated. What sort of artifacts are they?”

Rebecca made a hand-waving gesture of dismissal.

“Creepy old dead stuff. From wherever Daddy has to work. All over the world. From New Orleans, this bunch anyway. They were moving graves after that stupid storm?”

“Katrina?”

“Yeah. That. It was like years ago, but now they’re doing something about flood protection, so the graveyards have to be built up. You know the way they bury people in New Orleans? In those concrete churchy-looking little stone houses?”

“Crypts,” said Diana. “They have to be aboveground because the water table is so high.”

“Daddy says they just stuff new bodies into the crypt and shove the old ones to the back of the...whatever...the...?”

“The vault.”

“Yeah, the vault, so that whoever was buried there a hundred years ago gets all crammed up with the new people and it’s all mixed up in a jumble.”

“So your father is trying to sort out who was who, now that the bodies have to be moved?”

“Yeah, although it’s only temporary, ’cause they’re putting them back when the work is through, but he has to figure out which bits belong where, and then there’s all the jewelry.”

“You mean, like gold bracelets and rings and that kind of thing?”

“And lockets and brooches and stuff,” said Karen, not really interested in whatever her daddy was up to. They both felt a spreading warmth moving through their bodies as the tensions of the trip receded and Diana’s silky voice seemed to pull them into a conspiratorial circle. They were too young to notice the voltage that the word locket had sent pulsing through the woman’s body.

“Well, it sounds as if your father is doing the Lord’s work,” Diana said, changing the subject. “You should be proud of him.”

“Oh, we are,” said Rebecca, feeling that they were sounding disloyal. “I mean they’re good people and all that. It’s just this whole Christ thing. Christ this and Jesus that, all the way down from Florissant. It was all, like, so... lame .”

Diana gently disagreed.

“But there’s a true power there, girls. In Jesus. Do you know about the Shroud of Turin?”

This was something important to Diana. They could both feel her...chemistry...change. In spite of their reflexive dislike of the subject, what she was saying—or rather how she was saying it—got their attention.

She was talking about the Shroud of Turin, the moment of Christ’s Resurrection, when His Spirit had flashed out, shimmering so brightly inside that darkened sepulchre...

“A shimmer so powerful that it actually burned itself into the burial cloth he was wrapped up in,” said Diana, leaning in close and placing a soft warm hand on Rebecca’s knee.

“Can you imagine what that must have been like? And Jesus teaches us that that very same Shimmer is inside each of us. That divine spark shines inside us all, waiting to be... released . How beautiful .”

Rebecca found she liked the feel of Diana’s hand on her knee, but the subject of Jesus Christ’s Light Bulb Moment was not nearly as interesting to her, at this twilight hour, as the particular hazel-and-gold colors in Diana Bowman’s eyes and the spicy scent that was coming off her body. From the look on her sister’s face, she was feeling the same sort of sensual pull.

Rebecca felt a warmth rising on the skin of her belly and flooding up to her breasts, her throat, her cheeks. She’s gay , Rebecca was thinking. And she likes us. Both of us.

Diana drew back, smiled at them.

“But it’s getting dark, and you two need to be going back to your room, don’t you? Your parents will be worried, no?”

Rebecca looked at her cell phone.

There were three text messages, all in the last few minutes. She had felt the phone buzzing but ignored it, knowing what they were about but feeling that, where Mommy and Daddy were concerned, it was easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Mommy: We’re going out to get something to eat. Coming?

Mommy: Leaving in five?

Daddy: Girls?

After a moment’s thought, as Diana watched her with some amusement, Rebecca texted back.

Becca: We’re at the Chapel for Eventide. So pretty here. Can we stay?

A pause. The resort was fenced and gated, studded with security cameras and patrolled by armed guards. And it did have a little chapel beside the tennis courts.

Daddy: Okay. But home by midnight. Pinky swear.

Becca: Pinky swear. Hugs.

Daddy: Karen got her puffer with her?

Rebecca tipped the phone to Karen, who read the message, fumbled in her pocket and came up with a small silver canister with a little plastic mask attached—her rechargeable puffer. Karen had asthma, usually caused by stress.