By the light of the moon

when first installed, but maybe
it had been mostly gray or green, or pink, for all she knew. Right
now, here in the heart of a rainless summer, these shingles
appeared smooth and black because a fine powder of soot had settled
upon them from the oily air of smoggy days.
    This soot proved to be as fine as powdered graphite. Powdered
graphite is an excellent lubricant. So was this.
    Fortunately Jilly started near the peak of the roof; therefore,
she didn't at once slide all the way off and drop to whatever
expanse of bone-breaking concrete, or impaling iron fence, or pack
of savage pit bulls, might be waiting for her below. She glided
about ten feet, regained traction too abruptly, almost pitched
forward, but stayed upright.
    Then she slid again. Skiing down black slate. Big jump coming
up. Building momentum for an Olympic-qualifying distance.
    Jilly wore athletic shoes, and she was pretty athletic herself,
but she couldn't arrest her slide. Although she waved her arms like
a lumberjack in a log-rolling contest, she teetered on the brink of
losing her balance, teetered, and then one foot flew out from under
her. As she started to go down, realizing that she was going to
smack slate with her tailbone, she wished she had a fat butt
instead of a skinny little ass, but all the years of doughnut
denial had at last caught up to her, and here came the void.
    Like hell. She refused to die a Negative Jackson death. She had
the willpower to make her destiny, rather than be a victim
of fate.
    The round and round of all that is, beautiful in its
eleven-dimensional simplicity, folded to her command, and she left
the roof, the soot, left the slide to death unfinished.
    * * *
    Falling toward the floor of the church, Jilly vanished, and with
her disappearance, the screams of the wedding guests spiked,
causing the organist to abandon the keyboard. The many screams
broke off as one in a collective gasp of astonishment.
    Gazing down on the spectacle, Shepherd said, 'Wow.'
    Dylan snapped his attention toward the work platform on the east
scaffold, where the gunman with the rifle stood. Perhaps too
stunned to act on his original intentions, the killer hadn't yet
opened fire. His hesitation wouldn't last long; in mere seconds,
his hatred would prove powerful enough to purge the wonder of
having witnessed an apparent miracle.
    'Buddy, here to there.'
    'Wow.'
    'Take us over there, buddy. To the bad man.'
    'Thinking.'
    'Don't think, buddy. Just go. Here to there.'
    Down on the floor of the church, the majority of the wedding
guests, who hadn't been looking up during Jilly's midair appearance
and subsequent plunging disappearance, turned in bewilderment to
those who had seen it all. A woman started to cry, and the piping
voice of a child – no doubt a certain pigtailed girl –
said, 'I told you so, I told you so!'
    'Buddy—'
    'Thinking.'
    'For God's sake—'
    'Wow.'
    Inevitably, one of the wedding guests – a woman in a pink
suit and a pink feathered hat – spotted the third killer, who
stood at the edge of the work platform atop the east-wall scaffold,
leaning out, looking down, restrained from falling by a tether that
anchored him to the wall. The pink-suited woman must have seen the
rifle, too, for she pointed and screamed.
    Nothing could have been better calculated than this cry of alarm
to snap the gunman out of his merciful hesitation.
    * * *
    Sooty roof to scaffold platform, Jilly folded in to the church
with the expectation of finding the third gunman and kicking him in
the head, the gut, the gonads, or any other kickable surface that
might be presented to her. She found herself facing a long run of
deserted platform, with the painted-plaster frieze to her left, and
with the massive marble columns rising through the open church to
her right.
    Instead of a multitude of screams, as there had been when she'd
folded in midfall to the roof, only one rose from below. Looking
down, she saw a woman in a pink suit attempting to alert the other
guests to the danger – 'Up there, up there!' – pointing
not at Jilly, but some distance past her.
    Realizing that she faced the back of the nave, not the altar,
Jilly turned and saw the third killer, twenty feet away, tethered
to the wall, balancing on the edge of the platform, peering down at
the crowd. He held the rifle with the muzzle up, aimed at the
vaulted ceiling – but he began to react to the woman in
pink.
    Jilly ran. Twenty-four hours ago, she would have run away from a
man with a gun,