400k wds, some neologisms. Story of a young bohemian bawn and bred in the briar patch that lay between the borders of St. Elvis Era and the Eleusinian Feels of alternity.
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So now, at age twelve, Bubba was ready to leave the Church, wasn't he? If anything could happen, if the logic, the validity, of consensus reality was as full of holes as baby-Swiss, then might not there be dangers untold Out There? In one breath the grownups were apt to say that there were no such things as ghosts, vampires, or fairies, then in the next breath say that the story of Adam and Eve was gospel truth. If they fibbed about the one, then how about the other?
Suppose he stepped out of the Church door and into the arms of Dracula? By leaving the Church, would he be throwing away any protection it may have provided against ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night? (BOOM BOOM!) If Bubba abandoned the concept of God, might God then abandon the concept of Bubba?
He hashed it out and hashed it out. He considered the likelihood that the Devil himself couldn't exist if there were no God for him to mirror. Finally he decided that God, being a loving God (despite Scriptural evidence to the contrary), would not punish His creation for seeking the truth, wherever that search might lead. He stepped out into the Dark. And waited.
Nothing happened. He waited some more. Still nothing happened. Well okay, maybe God was lying in wait to pounce on him a little farther down the Path. Still, there were things to do, people to see. Life must go on, with or without Sunday School. Bubba figured that if God wanted him to believe in Him, He could damn well let him know in no uncertain terms. In logically consistent terms. The poe boy swung his gaze from horizon to horizon, and, seeing no vampires nor demons belting down the throughway, he stepped onto the Path. Little did he know...
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Mundania hath many a ploy in her repertoire of lessons for reinforcing Sinsorrow. Take Sheba's Breasts, for example. (Better yet, I'll take Sheba's breasts, along with the rest of her. For your part, you can take a powder. Go see a ban 'bout a bogle.)
Sheba's Breasts were two mountain peaks in H. Rider Haggard's novel King Solomon's Mines. The reader first encounters them as a major landmark on a treasure map found on the corpse of a Portuguese explorer in Darkest Africa. Surviving the desert, the intrepid Seeker must make his way through the pass between Sheba's Breasts to enter Kukuanaland, where lie the most fabulous diamond mines on Earth. (Freud would be so tickled with the geography in Haggard's novel!)
As one crosses that desert, weary and dying of thirst, wary of poison pools that lure travelers into the afterlife, Sheba's Breasts stand on the distant horizon, beckoning one onward.
When I was thirteen, having divested myself of the framework of consensus reality, I proceeded to investigate reality structures that had a foundation in science fiction and outre fantasy. Stories based in this theme are legion, both in Twilight Zone genre films and in the literature. It goes like this:
