A/N: By the way, Den will outlive us all.
2. Religion.
She was staring at me from the bottom of the hill. The air was warm from cloudless sun, and I squinted.
I hadn't really looked at her in years; I see her all the time. Like clothes. Once you have them on for a while you can't feel them any more.
Her eyes were bright blue that day.
She still looked like me, only older. Not that much older. Only seventeen years.
"Are you just going to stand there?"
A wind blew and my dress billowed around me like a flame. It was white, because it was summer and I saw a painting once of a girl in a white dress on a hill in the summer time. I couldn't quite see her face, but if I could have I thought she might look like me. Or my mother. There was a little girl next to her, so maybe I was the little girl and my mother was the woman in the white dress. It was a nice painting, moving and still at the same time.
I ran down the hill and my mother watched me. For a moment, I thought to stop and walk beside her. I kept running.
Maybe it was rude.
She had waited for me, and once I could not have moved even a step ahead without her. Now I am leaving her, if only on a long road in the middle of a nowhere place called Resembol or home. We are going to church. I know the way.
I could never actually leave.
By the time I arrived, I was panting like a dog. My mother was only a short distance behind me, though she never increased her pace. I'd looked behind me often to see if she would.
Grass pooled around the foundations of the church like quivering, mossy hand, cool and soothing green. A limb from the single charred tree had fallen down in the last thunderstorm, and there was a raking, splintered gash on the branch where it used to be. I walked, slowly, gingerly, up the few pebbles of path that had once led to the door.
My mother came up behind me as I looked inside my ghost church, hand on my shoulder like grass to this building.
Black bits of ash and the rotting woodchip remnants of a few scorched timbers were all that remained of my father's house.
"Hi, Dad, Uncle Al," I said, and stepped in.
It wasn't religion so much as faith, or love. That's all a god needs, I think, all a god is. Dad wasn't a god.
Behind me, while I followed old hallways and empty rooms, I heard my mother whispering his name, over and over, face-to-earth and ghost-to-ghost. Maybe her body would pale and levitate, if I imagined hard enough.
Instead of religion, we had my father, and the church of memory. The ground was green where he had touched his burning feet.
