Zora and Nicky: A Novel in Black and White Read Online Free

a nursing home population without prunes. But what I’m not writing interests me more than Dad’s sermon. And it looks like, based on the earnest faces around me, our members are wolfing down his every word like starving dogs begging at the master’s table.
    I’m gonna blow. Big projectile vomiting, which I hope lands on my dad. Or maybe on the hackneyed, stained-glass scene of the anemic-looking good shepherd.
    However, providence is with him. Dad, that is. Maybe with the anemic good shepherd too. Instead of regurgitating like my dad is doing, only in a different way, I decide to think about God. Now, I could just fantasize about what I’ll do to my girlfriend once I marry her—okay, I plan on getting a few favors once I put a rock on her finger. The mere thought of Rebecca, fair and unsullied, stirs the cauldron of lust constantly brewing in me. I ponder God for two seconds, Rebecca a full five minutes, and my ex, the stunning Brooke Bennett, for a good while longer.
    I still think of Brooke fondly as a gorgeous version of the rich young ruler whom Jesus told to sell all he had and give it to the poor. Brookie wouldn’t walk away heavy hearted and still rich as sin. She’d hit her knees and wash Jesus’ feet with her tears. I know this. Innocent Rebecca would drop dead on the spot if she knew exactly how well I know Brooke, and how well she knows me. God, help us.
    I met Brooke at Berkeley, I the prodigal son, and she a Bible thumper with a social conscience. Suddenly Bible Boy, who I’d heartily abandoned, returned with great zeal, and I tried my best to impress her with my advanced Scripture brainwashing, er, memorization. Brooke had me strung out like she was meth and I was in need of a thorough intervention.
    By some miracle, I talked her into moving in with me and being my lover. Jesus promptly talked her out of it. I’d have married Brooke. I would have, but she loved Jesus more than me, as well she should have. She ended up joining some kind of Jesus-freak community and became a sprout-eating hippie nun who makes her own clothes. But sometimes I miss her.
    A lot of times I do.
    I really should have married her instead of making her. But maybe I did God a favor. After I deflowered her, she stopped thinking about giving to the poor and actually gave them everything she had. I deserved her hasty departure. And no, I don’t actually think I did God any favors, not at all. I wouldn’t know how to do God a favor if He wrote it on my calendar accompanied by fiery angelic visitations. My best effort to serve Him has me sitting on the front pew, wishing someone would kill me rather than force me to endure one more sermon that moves nothing in me but my gag reflex.
    I can’t take one more minute of the lies I sit through Sunday after Sunday.
    I get up and walk out, passing our pew dwellers without looking at them. Who cares if I disappear? If I vanish into thin air—personally raptured— right in front of them, nobody will notice. On second thought, Rebecca will. She’s made it her job to scope me out during services, probably to see if my eyes stray to any female over age eleven and under fifty. She’ll see me shuffle out, but will she be able to read the defeat branded like a scarlet letter on my face?
    What of the words of Jesus, written right there in the New Testament, in red?
    “If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.”
    You have to forgive me. I think in the King James Version, having heard “it’s the only true word of God that exists” drilled into me from the time I was a fetus. I don’t care what translation of the Bible I use; all of them say a real shepherd goes after one lost sheep. Even the bad stained-glass shepherd is good