"JOAN OF ARC HEARD GOD, CHEMISTS PROVE"

--National Enquirer, 1/31/86

	

There was a division of territory in the old lands at that point, and the upright stood up and down-home assassins lay low. The upright therefore became the supernal heads and the lousy warts became trash. Thus all was made right, and the division of lands was accomplished.

Mary heard a voice in her head, which commanded her to rescue the ailing admiral's fleet from the doom of the Spanish. She set out to conquer the thing, and her hard-trudging barefoot, often naked figure exultantly mastered the fields of her yesteryear, the year of her own strangers' full, proud possession of same while she'd mended the doilies, fixed the bedding, and occasionally hiked up her skirt to roam free over cotton, wheat, corn, and oat fields near cows, horses and sheep. Of forests she had been afraid.

The troops behind her were many but a different sort of thing waited them, for the Spanish would fix them with points. Thus Mary's plan would be foiled and the voices winked out in the gathering dark in her eyes.

Chemists suggest a failure of meaning--the voices had not kept stride with the flow of events, the beings behind had vanished, emptied, stupid, vanished. But chemists are often misled, and who is to say that the people who say she was mad, or created by France, or myth out of air, are not right?