By the light of the moon

and her brothers all robed
alike, holding a hymnal identical to each of theirs, she had been
warmed by a profound sense of community that she had not known
before or since. Sometimes Jilly felt that the excruciatingly
difficult task of establishing rapport with an audience of
strangers and inducing them to laugh against their will at the
stupidity and meanness of humanity was far easier than closing the
distance between any two human beings and keeping them even
tenuously bonded for any length of time whatsoever. The infinite
sky, the trackless desert, and the isolation of each armored heart
were characterized by the same nearly impenetrable remoteness.
    Along the shoulder of the highway, tongues of light licked up
here and there from the dark gravel, and for an instant Jilly
feared a return of votive candles and of displaced church pews,
feared the reappearance of bloodless birds and sprays of
ectoplasmic blood, but she quickly realized that these quick cold
flames were nothing but reflections of their headlights flaring off
the curved shards of broken bottles.
    The silence fell not to her or to Dylan, but to the gentle ax of
Shepherd's voice monotonously chopping through the same three-word
mantra familiar from television commercials: 'Fries not flies,
fries not flies, fries not flies....'
    Jilly was baffled as to why Shep would choose to chant the
advertising slogan of the very restaurant at which she had bought
dinner less than two hours ago, but then she realized that he must
have seen the promotional button that the counter clerk had pinned
to her blouse.
    'Fries not flies, fries not flies...'
    Dylan said, 'I was clubbed down as I was returning to the room
with the bags of takeout. We never had dinner. I guess he's
hungry.'
    'Fries not flies, fries not flies,' said Shep, rocking from side
to side in his seat.
    As Dylan took one hand off the steering wheel and reached to the
breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, Jilly realized he wore a toad
pin that matched hers. Against the tropical-flower pattern of the
colorful fabric, the grinning cartoon amphibian had not been easy
to see.
    'Fries not flies, fries not flies...'
    When Dylan removed the promotional gimcrack from his shirt, a
strange thing happened, and the night took another unexpected turn.
Holding the button between thumb and forefinger, reaching toward
the console that separated the front seats, as though he was
intending to deposit the unwanted pin in the trash receptacle, he
appeared to vibrate, not violently, yet with too much force for the
episode to be deemed a mere shudder, vibrated as though an
electrical current were quivering through his body. His tongue
fluttered rapidly against the roof of his mouth, producing a
peculiar noise not unlike that of a stalled car straining to start: 'Hunnn-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!'
    He managed to hold on to the steering wheel with his left hand,
but his foot either eased up on the accelerator or slipped off the
pedal altogether. The Expedition's reckless speed began to plummet
from a perilous 95 miles per hour to a merely dangerous 85, to a
still hazardous 75.
    'Hunnn-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na,' he stuttered, and
with the final syllable, he snapped the toad button out of his
fingers as though he were shooting a game of marbles. He stopped
vibrating as abruptly as he had begun.
    The little metal disc pinged off the window in the passenger's
door, inches from Jilly's face, ricocheted off the dashboard,
dropped out of sight among Fred's maze of branches and succulent
leaves.
    Although they were decelerating, Jilly sensed that because she
had slipped out of her safety harness, she was at grave risk,
sensed also that she didn't have enough time to shrug into the
straps and engage the buckle. Instead she pivoted to face front,
clutched the seat with her left hand almost desperately enough to
puncture the leather upholstery, and with her right hand grabbed
the padded assist bar immediately above the passenger's door. Just
as Dylan confirmed the value of her intuition by all but standing
on the brakes, she braced her feet against the dashboard. Knees
bent to absorb whatever shock might come, she launched into a
mental recitation of the Hail Mary prayer, not with a petition to
be spared from the curse of a fat ass but with a plea to save her
ass regardless of what grotesque dimensions it might acquire in
years to come.
    Maybe the Expedition's speed fell as far as 60, maybe even as
low as 50, in two seconds flat, but