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repeated.
    “You didn't know, then? Then you’re not omniscient, like you claim to be,” I said, “you're just like Jehovah. You really know nothing about humanity at all.”
    “Bill,” Thatch said. He put his hand on my shoulder. All three bodies turned to look at me now. The crowd silenced.
    “You’re not even benevolent, are you?” I asked. “You don't value human life, not really, only insomuch as it benefits you. Your powers are limited. Your powers are no powers at all. You’re not even a god.”
    “Bill,” Thatch said again, “come off it.”
    “That’s the secret, isn’t it?” I said. “Jehovah wasn’t a god and neither are you. You’re just the same kind of thing in a different body, whatever you are.”
    The Triple Goddess said nothing. The police cruiser holding the prophet backed out into the road and drove off. The crowd began to disperse. Mimi and the children and the boyfriend went back into the trailer. The Triple Goddess climbed back into the limousine and the limousine drove off. Eventually the state police left as well, so that it was just Thatch and I standing out there in the red dirt with the sun scrawled heavy on our backs.
    “I’m sorry, Bill,” he said, “ sometimes things just happen this way.”
    “There never was a god, was there?” I asked. “Not one that cared for us, that wanted to cure our loneliness.”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “None of us know that. After they found Jehovah dead off the coast we thought well, here’s the fake god, and then She stepped forward and well, here’s the real god, but-”
    “-But it doesn’t work like that,” I said, “ it’s never as simple as that.”
    “I suppose not,” Thatch said. “You want to go back to the station now?”
    “No,” I said, “no. I’ll catch up to you later.”
    Thatch left. I stood there for a while out in the front, back poised like a knife. I walked away from Mimi's house toward the field.
    And I'd learned as I stood outside in that gray field with Tuesday, looking into the stretch-limbed abyss of the faery world, that the Triple Goddess was wrong.
    I crawled into Tuesday’s faery hole and lay down in the hollow impression her body made. I pulled at the roots with my fists, scratched and scratched over her scared nails, this once-warm body hiked up to the hips, bled out, skull scuffed, silenced by the arm and ribs of the prophet of the true living Triple Goddess. The serial killer of the benevolent. The death of a girl who wanted to be married underneath the dogwood tree, but instead had the blossoms pushed into her mouth and spilled into her collapsed eyes.
    I curled into her and she was cold.
     
     
     
    The Dog that Bit Her
     
    Every night my wife June stood with her arm outstretched over the threshold of our door, eyes closed, waiting for me to come back home and take her hand. No amount of time on a psychiatrist’s couch, no medication, no reassurances could convince June to close the door and go inside before I returned.
    “A neurosis born of childhood trauma and fear of abandonment,” one psychiatrist said after the other. What was never taught in the Freudian hell they were spawned from was that knowing the origin of a problem rarely dispelled it. Tell me doctor, what is logic to the red-headed woman with the numb arm outstretched, shivering until her eyes almost fall into her palms like seeds? See her here, knuckled white, holding her tattered skirt together with pins, her hair blowing so hard in the wind I think it might punch the moon. Watch me disappear, cease existing, until I close my hand around hers and lead her back inside.
    “One of these days something’s going to snatch you away,” I often said to her. I lead her over to the couch when I got home and I kissed her chin. She clung to me without speaking.
    “I thought you would never get home,” she said like always. “A butterfly landed on my hand, and I thought it was you. But it wasn’t. It was just a