When I awoke, the sun was teasing me through the branches of the coconut trees. A taste of decomposing eggs was in my mouth. Like a black flower, flies were clustered upon it.

I expected the congregation to condemn me when I entered the church. I was handed a book of hymns and allowed into a pew, but it did not take long for my neighbours’ vexation to appear. Each leaned as far away from me as balance permitted, some finding it impossible to stay in the same row. The woman closest to me brought a handkerchief to her nose. Just as onions, garlic, and alcohol cause one to smell abominably the next day, so does gluttony.

I hoped the Eucharist would take away my sins, yet when the moment came, the sliver of Christ’s body evaporated on contact with my tongue. I requested a second helping, but was pushed along. Our Saviour continued to bleed on the cross, I heard the blood dripping, drop by drop onto the floor. Jesus was Jewish, I thought to myself, wondering, out of the blue, if His bleeding on the cross had made His meat kosher, wondering if His meat had a sell-by date, wondering if He, in a way, put an Egyptian mummy to shame, all He had to wear for eternity was a loincloth. I rushed out of the church before I could think any more such nonsense.

My feet were bleeding, throbbing in my red pumps; the heels were worn down by running. Dirty, sweating, I was starting to feel like an animal in my hair dress; it was sticking to me like my own skin and the mass of woolly hairs were turning into mine.

Dr. Timberland’s front door was unlocked, his window still open, his square of grass still there, serene, tidy, welcoming, as it had always been. For a few moments, I did not breathe. My legs transported me to the bedroom, and the bathroom where it had all happened.

It was as though someone had returned in my absence and the blood that had wet the sheets had been cooked to a welldone brown. The water in the bathtub was cold, and the tint had changed, like the clear water one leaves overnight in a burnt pot.

I looked under Dr. Timberland’s bed, lest he, like a dying creature, had sought refuge there. Something stuck to my palm, a flattened raisin. It was not a raisin at all, but Dr. Timberland’s dehydrated aureole. I did not know what to do with the wrinkled speck. It repulsed me to have it pasted on my palm. I shook my hand, but it wouldn’t fall off. I attempted to flick it away, but the aureole was a malediction, for whichever of my fingers I used for the purpose, it simply stuck to that one’s cuticle. Desperately, I wedged it between the iron bars of his bed and the wall, but knowing it was there bothered me. I took it between my teeth, and appropriated it with little satisfaction.