I sat in the playground of the church on a swing. It was a sad excuse for a swing and an even sadder excuse for a playground, to be perfectly blunt. But, not dissimilar to most organized institutions, when the budget comes, the kids get the shaft. A strange woman walked up, chewing on a sock. I had never seen her before, but she smelled horrible. Her hair was knotted and disheveled. She wore ragged sweats � swaddling clothes, one might say. Her mouth was covered with paint, like a child with an ice-cream cone. She accosted me about the church�s views on various issues. I�m a child on a swing-set. What do you want from me? I thought. She didn�t seem to care that I didn�t know what she was talking about. She kept rattling on, twitching, acting paranoid. But she remained affable the entire time. I had never met anyone like her before. When the woman who was supposed to be watching me finally came out from her solitude, she grabbed my arm and dragged me away. I was thrown in a room, left to watch the ragged woman through a window. Several church employees formed a circle around the woman. She tried to back up slowly, nervously, but it was futile. She couldn�t escape their interrogation. At this point, I snuck out of the room and around the corner of a fence. I could only make out mumbling at first, until my ears managed to adjust to the tones from around the side. The ragged woman was asking about salvation. She was dying soon, she claimed, and she needed to know the path to heaven. �This is private property and you are intimidating and accosting the children of our church,� yelled one man, who always wore a cheap suit and always said boring prayers. As the woman started retorting, he cleared his throat loudly. He did that during the prayers, too. My mother had always said it was a nervous habit. Either way, it prohibited me from hearing the beginning of her sentence. ��didn�t even care. And the path to heaven does not lay on private property.� �Well the cops are already on their way. Either leave now or suffer the consequences,� said a woman wearing a pant-suit and golden earrings to match her golden necklace. Her pinched face seemed to beam with delight as she warned the poor woman. Why are they being so mean to this woman, I wondered. She seemed so pleasant to me. Nothing indecent about her, aside from her admittedly unkempt appearance. It just seemed so tragic. She obviously needed help, but no one would give it to her. She said herself that she was dying. She ran away before the cops showed up, and I got in a bit of trouble for sneaking out of the room. About an hour later, during the church service, I peered at the window as two cop cars drove slowly down the street. In the back seat, crying and licking her hands, was that poor, ragged woman. She was just a silhouette now. Reduced to a two-dimensional image, an unwilling passenger coasting along a highway, uncertain of her future, but knowing her time was fleeting. And her quest for heaven must have led her to a jail house � strange how our destinations change so abruptly � but she was right about one thing: the path to heaven, if it exists, certainly doesn�t lay on private property. |