January nights in Riverside were damn cold. Frank Wozniak shivered at what would await him when he walked out the door. He buttoned up his coat, grabbed his bottle of vodka, his pack of cigarettes, and his lighter. He took one last look around the place – the light green wallpaper that had started peeling a couple years back, the old wooden barstools and tables were near their breaking point, and all the liquor bottles lay in glass shards on the floor.
Annabelle Marie Evans was a wild whippersnapper of eight whole, entire years old. Ms. Annie – with a proper Southern diphthong on that initial vowel sound, thank you very much – fancied herself a doer. She would not be left behind as the world kept on just spinning around her; no ma’am, she would be the very force behind that great big scooter that they call life; it would be her leg propelling the world forward and she would wait for nobody, woman or man, to give her a push.
The dream was older than anything he possessed – older than the few articles of worn clothing that lay in a pile in the corner of his bamboo hut; older than most any memory of his family; and certainly older than his vocation to the priesthood. In a way, the dream seemed to define Father Clement Becherelle’s very being, even as his life – through his own volition – confined this dream to the chambers of his imagination nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. Yet, in spite of its perpetual confinement – or perhaps because of it – the dream was his constant companion.
