THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#9)

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

It was almost sunset. Sky and ocean turned red as my blood under the dark purple rain clouds massing overhead. Heading north, I flew over the settlement with its decaying wooden houses, then an enormous high wall enclosing some clusters of cabins and barns built around a big box-shaped cement building I guessed was the duke’s castle.
Veering inland, I found myself passing over an ancient redwood forest as the storm broke. A giant tree three hundred feet tall towered over the rest. Lighting down in its dense canopy, I crawled inside a blackened hollow burned by lightning at the top of the massive trunk. Ferns, huckleberry bushes, even tiny saplings grew in the tangle of spreading branches around me, shielding my hole completely. Here I felt safe for the first time. But I was wet and cold and the bullet wound in my indestructible mortal body hurt me sorely. I’d had nothing to eat but that bowl of broth since coming back from the dead and my hunger was severe, more pressing now to my physical body than even my injury. I prayed to Giver for the strength to ignore it, but I couldn’t. As a matter of fact, I almost seemed to hear Giver telling me it was wrong to ignore the body’s needs altogether.

(to be continued tomorrow)