The interior of the church smelled of frankincense and people, an odiferous masala of several hundred perfumed bodies wearing their finest apparel. The congregation sat silent as the priest in his chasuble intoned prayers from a text lying open on a pedestal before him.
The words were a soporific for Robin who began to drowse. Lest she lean on her four year old to the left, she nudged closer to Mike on her right and pressed up against his body hoping no one in back thought the move improper. Mike, meanwhile, was so attuned to the lector he took little notice of the slightly intimate contact.
“And in Joshua,” the priest intoned the words languorously. “‘This then was the lot of the tribe of the children of Judah by their families; even to the border of Edom the wilderness of Zin southward was the uttermost part of the south coast.’” If everyone else could keep their eyes open this early Sunday morning, Robin thought, they must be on more than caffeine. And then Robin spread her arms and flew toward the ceiling.
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It was a trick she learned when she was her son’s age, the ability to loft toward the highest place inside a room. She freed herself from responsibility for a few minutes of refreshing aerial dynamics, like a bird or a butterfly. The trick allowed her to watch from afar whatever bored her and to comment on the situation without being observed. She had complete control of her flight pattern and could swoop and dive, hover around a light fixture or squirrel herself inside the corner where ceiling met wall.
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