THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#30)

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words
A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World

I blinked and wiped the blood out of my eyes with my sleeve. When I tried to clear my throat, blood gushed out of the wound again. I said in a raspy voice, “Someone so full of Giver she can’t die.”
Still clutching the dog by her collar, never taking his eyes off me, he jumped to his feet and began inching backwards toward his wretched tent. “Okay, you’re alive or whatever. Now git out. Git out and don’t never come back, you flippin’ monster.”
The lacerated flesh of my neck still hurt terribly, but I managed to stand up and slowly make my way to the edge of the bay, where I scooped some water on the gash and also on my face and arms. My dress was covered in blood, some dried, some fresh, some half burned off from the night before. I walked in all the way up to my neck and stood there as rust-colored clouds of old blood from the night before mingled with fresh new blood in the water around me. The man watched from his tent, face still contorted in fear. Feeling a sharp tug of despair, I turned my back to him and kept on walking until the water was over my head. Then deeper and deeper until I was several hundred feet below the surface.
I sat in murky darkness at the bottom of the bay reveling in my blissful isolation from all the humans I’d failed to convince about the world of Light and Love. The wound in my neck closed up, the blood replenished itself in my veins. I ate plankton and kelp as the salt water hydrated my body. I would happily have stayed here in the ghostly company of groupers, sharks, dolphins, seals, and the occasional grey whale strayed off its migration course, except I knew I was not fulfilling my purpose. The truth was, all Giver had told me to do was live in my indestructible mortal body and align people to the world of Light and Love. I’d assumed that meant showing them my special powers as proof that such a world existed beyond ours. So far, doing that had not produced the desired result. Instead I was stuck here on earth, a savage realm that offered no grace at all.
I did not know what to do.
Finally Giver spoke to me.
Go home, Giver said. There’s someone in Sequoia whose heart will listen to you. You must let what happens happen. By your example that person will adjust his behavior to Giver and you will have done a good thing in the world.
I heard myself object: Only one?
Giver said: One is all it takes.

(to be continued tomorrow)