The Adventures of Dammit In the Real World--part 2
The Adventures of Dammit In the Real World--part 2
by Emily Mills ©2000
Saffron wasn't really sure who these strange men were, but she knew that she didn't much like them. They had taken her away from home, away from her mamma and daddy and away from Maggie! Who the heck was she supposed to talk to now? She settled for staring angrily at the bad man who was sitting in the chair next to her and snoring heavily. This place was no fun. It was all nasty bright colors and weird cross-thingies with little naked dolls nailed to them. There was nothing to do, her diaper needed changing, and she was tired, so she opted to do what any normal baby would do at a time like this--cry.
The unearthly screeching woke the man in the chair up, who jerked awake and nearly toppled over at the sound.
"Jesus H. Christ!" he exclaimed and hopped to his feet. Lucian came running into the room then looking less-than dapper with his hair in tangles and his shirt half untucked from his trousers.
"What the hell is going on in here, Bez?" he demanded as he tried in vain to straighten his hair. "Tammy and I were in the middle of...ah...reading Bible verses to each other and all of the sudden it sounds like the soundtrack for the seventh circle of Hell in here!"
Bez stared at his feet and shook his head. "I dunno boss, I was just sleeping and the kid all the sudden like starts wailing it's head off! I didn't do nothing to it, I swear!"
Lucian found a pacifier and jammed it into the baby's mouth, effectively silencing her for the time-being. His nostrils flared as he caught a whiff of the preseant Saffy had left for them in her diaper.
"Good Lord above, Bez! Change the kid's diaper, would ya? That's probably why the thing is screaming!" Lucian ordered. "We need to keep it relatively healthy otherwise using it for ransom will be no good!"
"Right, sorry boss," Bez mumbled and proceeded to lift the child out of the crib and take it to a nearby table to change it's diaper, something that the very large and rather uncoordinated man was really probably never cut out to do. When he finished, it looked as though the baby was being eaten alive by some deranged diaper from another dimension, but it held, and that was all Bez really cared about.
In the other room, Lucian sat on the corner of a bed and looked at his wife, who was sitting in front of a mirror and tending to her bouffount with an economy sized bottle of hairspray.
"Did we get the ransom note sent off dear?" he asked. Without looking away from what she was doing, Tammy replied,
"Yes of course Lucian. They should get it today."
Good, he thought, this kid will drive me insane if we have to keep it much longer. Good thing it served as his ticket to finally bringing that cursed deity in, otherwise he wouldn't put up with all this nonsense.
Steve finished his circuit of pacing the room for the umpteenth time and paused to stare at the empty crib.
"I can't believe that bastard has our kid," he said dejectedly. Maggie and Helen had decided, upon Steve and Sarah's urging, to stay at the house for the duration of this situation. It had been two days since Saffy's abduction and the ransom note had just come a few minutes earlier in the mail. The police were on the case, but as usual had not come up with anything yet. Helen sat in a rocking chair perusing the
note as Steve contented himself to pacing and Maggie sat on the sofa comforting Sarah.
"This is so wrong, listen to this damn note: 'If you foul souls would like your bastard child back, you must give us the one called Maggie within the next week. Though I firmly believe that no child should be raised in such a house of depravity, we will return said infant unharmed upon such time as you give us God. If you should choose not to meet our demands, the child is ours forever more, to raise in such a manner as we deem fit,'" she paused and shook her head. "These people are insane. They give perfectly good Christians a bad name."
The phone rang then, which was directly next to Helen, and she promptly answered it.
"House of Depravity! Deranged heathen speaking!"
Maggie shot her a sideways glance and Sarah restrained a fit of giggles as she saw the look of horror that swept over Steve's face.
"Give me that!" he demanded and grabbed the phone away from a very humored Helen. She grinned cheekily and went back to studying the note.
"Hello?" Steve inquired into the phone. "Yes, this is he." A pause. "No, no...I'm sorry, I completely forgot to call in and let you know. Yes, if you would please handle things there for a few days, at least until we can sort this mess out. Oh and call Mrs. Baum and have her reschedule her appointment, you know how particular she is about having me do her checks. Thanks a lot," and he hung up the phone. "I totally forgot to call into the office and let them know that I wouldn't be in for a while. Good thing I have compitant assistants."
"Well, I'm sure Mrs. Baum can stand waiting for her pap-schmear," Sarah quipped. Helen snorted and shook her head. A moment of silence passed and then, as if struck by a sudden bought of clear-thinking, the musician turned on Maggie and gave her a confused look.
"Waitaminute. How come you don't know where they're holding Saffy, oh omniscient one?"
"Good question. One that warrants a good answer, and so I shall attempt to give you one. Now, I've already explained to you about how I can be here with you and still go about performing the duties of an omipresent being like myself--how Maggie is simply one incarnation of my whole 'self' and how I continue to fully function even now. Well, this particular part of myself, Maggie, has her limitations because she is human. The rest of me is perfectly aware of the situation and all the details that pertain to it, and is at this very moment seeing what It can do about anything--which is also, as you know, very limited due to the whole free will thing. So Maggie, or rather, I cannot access my full abilities and in this form am subject to most of the same limitations as you all are."
There was a semi-puzzled silence in the room as each person digested all of this in their own time. Helen was the first to pull herself out of her private musings and respond.
"Okaaaay, so now that that's settled," she chuckled. "What should we do now? What can we do?"
"Pray?" Steve offered meekly. Maggie just chuckled and winked.
Saffron finally decided that she had had enough of all this craziness and was crawling her way out of the crib. It was bad enough that these maniacs had taken her away from the people she loved, but to top it off, she was missing Blues Clues. That was just plain low of them.
The big man in the chair who was supposed to be watching her was again sleeping soundly and so Saffy made her way across the room and towards what she was pretty sure was a door. The creation that was posing as her diaper was hindering this process quite a bit, however, and the baby found herself making very little headway on her journey. Frustrated, she stopped and sat there pouting, deciding on whether-or-not crying would actually be a good course of action in this situation. As she pondered this, another door in the room opened and a very scary woman with huge pink hair came ambling out. Upon noticing the small child on the floor in the centre of the room, the woman got wide-eyed and rushed over.
"Child! What on God's Earth are you doing?" she scolded as she picked up Saffy and began to take her back to the crib. Rats, the baby thought, foiled again!
"BEZ!" the lady shouted. Again the man in the chair snapped awake and nearly toppled his chair. "You lazy little...I swear! Can't we trust you with anything?"
"Sorry, ma'am," he apologized sheepishly and straightened the thinning hair on his sweating head. She grumbled something and tucked Saffy back into the sheets of the crib. The baby gave the lady with the tarantula eyelashed a cross look and began to sob quietly.
"Oh, now look what you've done, Bez! She's upset!" pink hair woman said and began making goo-goo noises at the child. Saffy decided that she really didn't like the faces this lady was making at her--in fact they were downright terrifying--and so her sobs turned into wails accordingly.
"Tammy! What the Hell is going in here?" Lucian demanded as he stormed into the room. "Why can't you keep that damned thing quiet?" Saffron continued to let loose gut-wrenching screams.
"Good Lord, I don't know sweety! She just won't stop!" Tammy replied frantically as she continued tickling and goo-gooing at Saffy. All the kid really wanted was for this scary woman to get away from her. That and to maybe watch some Blues Clues with her family.
After a good twenty minutes passed and Saffron's wailing did not let up, Lucian finally snapped and threw his arms into the air in surrender.
"THAT'S IT!" he bellowed. "I can't take this any more! There has got to be an easier way of getting to God than by putting up with this...this...Hell Spawn!" And at that, Lucian scooped up the still screaming baby and made a mad dash for his car. He was pulled out of the garage and speeding off down the road before Tammy or Bez could stop him.
Helen and Maggie had gone off to traipse around town in search of any clues that might lead them to finding Saffy. They had left a frantically pacing Steve and an introspective Sarah at the house.
As they walked down a main street of town, Helen turned to her partner and spoke.
"Maggie, this kinda shit won't ever stop, will it?" The deity turned to her wife and smiled knowingly.
"Probably not. Hopefully after a while some of the more extreme things, such as this whole fiasco, will die down," she said a placed a comforting hand on Helen's shoulder. The blonde woman stopped walking and lowered her head.
"It's really tiring, especially for a lowly human like myself," she joked quietly. Maggie shook her head and guided her companion to a nearby bench to sit. The deity placed a gentle finger to Helen's chin and lifted her head so that their eyes met.
"You are not lowly, got that?" Maggie began firmly but softly. "God doesn't just give a big portion of It's heart away to just anyone."
"Heh, I guess not, but She chose a pretty unbalanced someone," Helen chuckled, still meeting Maggie's intense and loving stare.
"I like unbalanced. And I love you, so no matter what happens, no matter if some crazy decides to cover himself in Nutella and jump into our bedroom at night spouting apocalyptic notions and playing the harmonica--"
"That's a lovely image, thank you," Helen cut in sarcastically. Maggie raised an eyebrow at her and continued.
"No matter what, we'll see it through together, you got that?" Helen nodded and let out a long sigh.
"Yeah, I know. It's just that sometimes being strong all the time is a bit taxing. We'll live though," she offered, content for the time being. Maggie leaned in so that their foreheads touched and they sat like that in silence for a moment. Just as Helen looked up, she saw a sleek luxury car go zipping by with Lucian in the drivers seat.
"Hey! That was the creep who took Saffy!" she shouted and jumped to her feet at the same time that Maggie did. They both broke into a run to follow the car and soon found that, oddly enough, it was headed for Steve's house. By the time they caught up and were running up to the front door, Helen was gasping for breath and sweating profusely. Maggie, however, had barely raised her heart rate. They noticed that the front door was open.
Steve looked up abruptly from his pacing as he heard a car pull up and then stop in the driveway. He stared out the window, disbelieving, as Lucian stormed up the front walkway with a very angry Saffron in his arms. He nearly wet himself, he was so happy. Sarah jumped up from her seat and rushed to the door and threw it open just as Lucian came up. He thrust the baby forward at her.
"Take it! Good Lord, if I had known you were raising one of Satan's own minions, I would have never taken her!" he screamed. Saffy, to her credit, stopped crying the minute she found herself back in her mom's arms. Sarah glanced at the poor-excuse for a diaper and then back up at the fuming Reverend with a sardonic grin.
"You certainly have a way with children," she said. Steve had been standing, fixed to the spot, in a state of shock during all of this. Finally, he looked at Lucian, his eyes blazing.
"You sorry son-of-a--" he began but was cut short by the sight of Maggie staring at him from over Lucian's shoulder. The deity sauntered into the house and stood between Steve and the reverend, arms crossed. Helen made her presence known directly behind Lucian.
"I suggest you learn something from all this, Mr. Tartarus," Maggie said, leveling an unflinching stare at the man. "Don't have children for a very long time." Helen restrained a giggle. "And more importantly, don't ever come near this house or these people again."
Steve glared at Maggie with disbelief showing clearly on his features.
"You're going to let this bastard go??" Still facing Lucian, Maggie continued. "Consider this a lesson in grace, reverend. You're free to go because, luckily for you, I'm not the God you preach about who is vengeful. I believe in forgiveness and unconditional love--"
"And oh man is she damn good at it too," Helen mumbled, mostly to herself. All of the others looked at her; Steve blushing, Sarah chuckling, Lucian disgusted, and Maggie with loving amusement.
"Yes, well, as I was saying," she picked up. "You're free to go if you promise to clean up your act and seriously reevaluate your life. I suggest you do that."
For a moment it looked as though Lucian was going to make some snide remark, but instead his face softened as he gazed into Maggie's fathomless eyes and he bowed his head slightly.
"I promise, and thank you," he said and then turned around, moved carefully around Helen, and left. Steve collected himself and then turned to embrace his wife and child with tears running down his cheeks.
"We should let them have some time together," Helen suggested quietly to Maggie.
"Good idea," she agreed. The deity tipped a wink to the happily burbling Saffy, who giggled with delight at the action, and then followed Helen out of the house.
Epilogue:
A short four days after the return of Saffron to her parents, it came across the news that Lucian Tartarus had completely redone his ministry. Helen and Maggie watched the story on TV from their apartment while on the phone with Steve and Sarah, who were also watching it from their own home.
"In recent news, the notoriously right-wing, radical televangelist, Lucian Tartarus, formerly of TBN fame, has comfounded everyone with a complete change of heart. The once major hate-monger has declared himself to be what he calls a 'Born Again Godist,' and has reversed his opinions in several key areas so that he is now adamantly pro-gay, pro-choice, and a number of other liberal ideals that he once preached to be 'evil'."
"Born Again Godist? That's a new one," Helen chuckled. Maggie just sighed bemusedly and continued running her fingers through the blonde hairs on Helen's head, which was currently in her lap.
"Whatever works. I'm just glad to see that he's kept his promise." The announcer continued.
"In somewhat related news, a local man has made a fortune off his newly named coffee shop and the gimmick he's pushing along with it. The shop, formerly known as 'Pete's Coffee', was renamed 'Pete's Heavenly Coffee' after what the owner, Pete, describes as a 'purely religious experience.' The owner claims that one day his cappuccino maker completely died, but sprang miraculously back to life after divine intervention. God, better known as Maggie these days, had apparently been dining there with her wife, singer/songwriter Helen Eveston, when the machine gave out. The minute the duo exited the shop, the machine whirred back to life because of what Pete is sure was the hand of God helping out. The faithful have been flocking to his coffee shop in droves ever since, each wanting to drink from the 'Blessed Cappuccino Machine of God'. Now we go to Bob with today's weather..."
Both Helen and Maggie took a moment to blink a few times and then simultaneously broke into a fit of raucous laughter.
The End.
(First draft finished 8-5-00, by Emily Mills)
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