The Ace of Spades

Chapter 7

If there's one thing Mea hates more than simply talking, it's talking about religion.

Religion is so far-fetched, so unprovable, and so tedious. In seventh grade, she learned of all the wars in the world started by religion. That's when she knew she definitely didn't like any religion. Years before that, though, was when she had the closest she could get to proof that religion was just made up by lonely people who wanted some sort of guide in life.

When Mea meets Victor around nine that morning (after quite the successful walk with Jojo the previous night, and chocolate chip waffles for breakfast, Mea was feeling good. That is until Victor begins talking.), he's unpacking his backpack in the cave.

"I'm so sure it's going to rain today," is the first thing Victor says.

Mea shuffles up to sit against the wall. Mea's sure of it, too. It's overcast and dreary, but almost suffocatingly humid. So she nods in reply.

"Anyhow, today we have to bottle the wine. After we bottle it, we just store it until sometime in the first week of August. My grandfather insists that aged wine is best, but I think it tastes like urine the more aged it is. I'm not going to age mine at all."

Mea nods.

"Then again," Victor says, raising his eyebrows, "I've never made dandelion wine at all. I'm just experimenting. Worse case scenario, we just dump it in the bird bath."

Mea's face contorts. She's not a bird and doesn't claim to be, but she can't imagine they'd be too pleased to bathe in wine.

In spite of this, Mea helps Victor pour the wine into old milk bottles through a kitchen funnel. Once the wine is poured, they cork it with used corks Victor brought in his backpack.

Once they start on the second milk bottle, Victor begins to babble. Today's rambling is about the religious program that was playing on television when he woke up in the morning. Mea's got a headache at the thought of it.

"Religion is such a personal thing, you shouldn't put it on TV!" He states. "Everything about religion and science don't agree. I mean, sure, we don't really know how we all got on Earth scientifically, but science takes time to evolve into the right answers."

This is not the sort of one-man conversation Mea wants to listen to. She'd rather listen to his boring verbal essay on why he'd use limestone as a superpower if he were a superhero. Religion makes Mea's skin positively crawl.

"You know how Einstein claimed that the universe was static, it was this certain size and always will be? Then years later his theory was disproved. He even disproved it himself and called it his 'biggest blunder' or something like that. So many times in science these theories will be disproved, and I'm really just waiting for the day religion is entirely disproved."

Mea is beyond annoyed. If people who disliked religion simply ignored it, all these difficulties involving religion would not exist. Mea likes that, tries to follow that self-made rule. Really, Mea just likes ignoring everything.

"New discoveries are made everyday. Science is the biggest thing in the world. Religion is pretty fucking huge, too, but not as big as science. I don't believe that sitting beside a pile of sticks willing it to light by way of some God will actually start the fire. You have to use science to light the fire. If God existed, or any number of Gods, why are people starving to death in Africa?"

There it is.

Mea's thought that, among that proposition in other variations, before and that's why she can't stand to talk about religion. People are suffering while others are prospering - that's not religion, it's science.