Chapter 11: Home/less

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.— Matthew 25.40

The evening before, Rev. Bea walked home and I’m not sure whether the first drops of rain touched her face before she got back to THE Magic LANTERN or whether tears left their traces on her craggy face.
She unlocked the door, entered, came back out with bowls and food, fed her cats. They greeted her and shared what they had — their sinuous bodies round her 13th Doctor stockings — and made their way back into the night.
She looked for a while at the new painting on the brick wall to the right of the door. Other artists had already tagged over Gospel’s fantasia of snake-tailed mermaids and joyful red fish. She did not know what to make of it. She played World of Warcraft now and then, when she could borrow someone’s computer, but for the most part the real world compelled her so strongly that art seemed like an excess, sugar poured on stiff whipped pink icing. Salt treated with brine.
Why these garish colors, when even the May night screamed with honeysuckle, gasoline, police sirens, blood, cats, earth, the shout of katydids from the hillside? Their cries struck the brick and reverberated back, deafening. Then, too, the city groaned with life. Three kids exulting past on a stolen bike. A gray kitten in the gutter, skull crushed by a car. Chickens — 18-wheeler after 18-wheeler of pullets crammed into cages, legs twisted and broken, leaving feathers and often a whole wing flying off down the highway behind them. And that was before they reached the processing plant — one of the few businesses left on Broad Street. Some nights each flare of inchoate terror made a separate shriek in her dreams.
Humans —

On that, the collection of specific needs facing her, she could focus. Rev. Bea opened the door again and entered.
She hit the switch.
Upstairs, Susan, the proprietress, was working on some piece of choreography. She’d rolled out the big mirrors and turned and turned in front of them. Sundress whirled out from her shoulders. Tough calluses rotated on the floor as slickly as ballroom shoes. Her hair, loose silver curls faded down from gold, opened out from her topknot. A flower under the hanging, open-bulb lights.
Humming, Rev. Bea crossed the room and pushed aside the green curtain. Behind it, on the east side of the room, was a door. Rev. Bea opened the door to reveal a brick wall, and she stepped inside with her right foot forward — widdershins — and stepped again, around, a spiral, and passed right through the illusion of a wall and on down, round and around the iron stairwell she went.
It was a bit of a trick, because there were no railings until below floor level, and then space opened out on all sides. Rev. Bea wasn’t given to imagination or she would have felt, as everyone else did, joyful terrorized vertigo as the walls unspooled on every side. Even with a narrow rail springing to hand, finding oneself 15 feed in the air on a narrow, wedge-shaped step was a trip.
Rev. Bea spiraled the rest of the way down. The underground story had a dry wooden floor, well-raised above the true stone floor. The bricks walls were some of them mirrored, some covered with hangings, to magnify or dampen the light at need. There was a bathroom, complete with elderly club-foot tub, in a partitioned corner. A wood-burning stove with a pipe leading back up to heat the upper space. Lamps.
And youth.
“I cast grease,” Desi said.
“Where?”
“Here.” A long finger tapped the grid. Stella marked the squares.
“I come to a halt and fit another arrow. Can I get a shot?”
Stella, the GM, looked at Archibald. “Yeah, sure, if you don’t move beyond that point. To be clear: you can’t see the spell effect area.”
“Gotcha.” Archibald nodded. “18 plus six, that’s 24, a hit?”
“Yessir, it is. He’s not down. Mad as hell, though.” The GM scratched a few more points off the ogre magi’s total. They looked at Desi. “Top of the round.”
Desi nodded without glancing up.
Desi grinned. Their fair hair, shaved on the left side and worn long on the right, slipped out from behind their ear as they leaned over the board. “Create flame. There.”
“Oh myyyy … ” Stella noted the postion. They grinned back. “As you no doubt hoped, the grease catches fire. There … to there.”
“Is the magi on fire?”
“His toes are fucking warm. And let’s see … his cloak is on fire.” They rolled a couple of dice and noted the totals.
“Hellooo,” tootled Rev. Bea, sweeping around the game in her rusty, pine-needle-scented skirts. “Going all right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Archibald said. He lifted up ponderously. He was an incredibly large person, with café-au-lait skin and Yul Brenner features. “We’re wailing on him.”
“There’s veggie meat in the fridge, and I bought bread,” Rev. Bea said, nodding at the kitchenette set up in one corner. “Did someone wash the blankets?”
“Not yet, ma’am,” Archibald said. He rolled to sitting and arranged himself, searching for the best position from which to stand.
“Thank you, thank you,” Rev. Bea said. She tootled another greeting to a fourth youth who was sitting on a beanbag in a corner, writing in a spiral-bound notebook. He raised a hand in return. “Welcome to Ponyville.”
“Friendship is magic,” Rev. Bea replied. She took off her boots, padded into the kitchenette in pink candy striped stockings, and began making tea.
All the four youth would stay at THE Magic LANTERN that night. They were staying there — not quite indefinitely, but something close. Susan let them camp as long as they weren’t “living” in her space. It was an odd charity with no guidelines and no official existence. Two or three or five youth at a time, always artists (dancers, because Susan knew dancers, but sometimes writers and painters and game designers, too), always poor or quirky or dedicated in ways that left them without a roof to sleep under. Rarely quite homeless, they stayed with aunts or friends, too, cycling through sofas and back seats, with THE Magic LANTERN one of the quieter, more reliable ports of call. Few stayed too long, though, because Rev. Bea insisted on chores and Susan insisted on artistic production — broadly defined.
Tea made, Rev. Bea arranged some Dollar General cookies on a plate, called the young people from their game, and poured herself a cup to take to her bedroom.
They thanked her, but no one touched her. Rev. Bea was a bit like a tall cedar tree, casting a dark cool shade all around her. You trusted her, but you didn’t expect familiarity.

Rev. Bea’s room was little bigger than a closet. She shut the door and sat on the mattress that took up most of the floor. She unbuttoned her shirt and pulled out the clerical collar. Unbuttoning the rest of the way, she revealed a Dragon Ball Z t-shirt. She pulled off her floor-length black skirt and crinolines and lay down in her t-shirt and pink striped stockings. The stockings had holes in the toes.
Her gaze softened and slowly rose. She had no proper ceiling; by some accident, the little room opened completely to the top of the building, as if it was a chimney shaft. High above, street light filtered in through tall windows, making bars of dim light on the brickwork of the interior wall. A bat flapped and skittered out into the night.
Rev. Bea pulled a cord to turn on a lamp, no more than a bare bulb. She read a chapter of the nearest book at hand and turned off her lamp again. Her books were stacked in piles all around the mattress. Though the reference was obscure by then, you might have compared them to the irregular sandstone towers around the village of the Mystics in The Dark Crystal. Her hands floated out and rested on a pile on either side of her. In the dark she identified Lovecraft, Kierkegaard, the King James Bible. She rubbed her fingers over the spines.