The final bell rang, and Mrs. Nelson stood in front of the whiteboard, smiling at them as she scanned the class. “Before we get started today, I thought I’d give you a little heads up on your next assignment. It’s not due until next week, but I want to give you a little time to think about it. As we’re going to be discussing gender perspectives in this unit, I’m going to have you revise your plays, switching the gender of the protagonists.” Her gaze rested finally on Nick, her smile broadening. “For some of you, of course, this will involve extensive rewriting…”

2

Pastor Walter Peters looked out the window of his church office to make sure one of the auxiliary ladies was not on her way up the drive, then toggled from the sermon he was writing back to the website FreshBets, to see if odds had changed for the game tonight.

He gambled sometimes. And the Lord did not always smile on the choices he made. Like last week when the Suns lost and he was out over a hundred. But it wasn’t a big deal. Only pious old biddies like Norma Crenshaw would think it was.

Which was why he had to be so careful.

Life would be so much easier if everyone could just be honest. Norma and her ilk were always so certain about what God thought, which actions He approved of and which would send a person straight to hell, but the truth was that their actual knowledge of the Bible was spotty at best. They only used the Good Book to reinforce their own prudish beliefs. He’d often thought about building a sermon or two around verses that would set them straight. They would be shocked, no doubt, to discover that it was worse to be a glutton than an abortionist. Because, according to Deuteronomy, if your child was a glutton, you were to take him to the edge of town where the men of the community would stone him to death. While Exodus said that if you caused a woman to miscarry, you were merely to pay a fine.

Sermonizing about that might shut them up.

But no one really followed the Bible. Rich people did not give everything they had to the poor in order to get into heaven, as Jesus explicitly said. Worshippers proudly displayed their faith on bumperstickers and t-shirts, rather than keeping their beliefs to themselves and praying in private as proscribed in Matthew. Most of his parishioners—true believers all—had not even bothered to read the first few pages of Genesis, where a curiously human-sized God, apparently speaking to other gods as He walked through the Garden, decided to expel Adam and Eve not because they disobeyed him and He wanted to teach them a lesson, not because they had become tainted with sin, as commonly believed, but because He was afraid they were about to become gods, too.

“The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever...”