Above The Thunder by Renee Manfredi

now a story of a cloister of nuns in southern France whose order was being disbanded—disordered would be a better word, she thought—because of the scarcity of new novitiates. She’d had a dream last night. Two dreams. One was of her granddaughter. The child didn’t have any skin. Or, she did have skin, excerpt it was black and baggy with decay. When Anna took her hand it stretched all the way across the street and still the child didn’t move. Anna walked frantically, tried to pull Flynn—who looked nothing like a girl at all, but had a horrible, malicious face—but she walked for miles and miles, tangling people in the grainy translucency of her granddaughter’shand, the lines on her palm sticky as spider’s silk.
    “I had the strangest dream last night,” Anna said, flicking the channel to local news to get the weather. She thought back to her first dream, a direct result, she was sure, of having read a P. D. James novel the night before about the human race dying out. “I dreamed I was the last person left on Earth and God was speaking to me and I refused to speak back. I was mad as hell about something.”
    Greta rose. “Come and eat this giant breakfast.”
    “Okay. On my way.”
    Anna tucked into the breakfast without much appetite. There was no room, she decided, for anything other than the dread that was already filling her.

FOUR
S TUART’S C OAT
    J ack and Stuart, two Marilyns in a sea of Monroes, were riding down Beacon Street on a rose-covered float behind the Elks and just in front of a high school marching band. It was the Fourth of July parade, and PFLAG—Parents and Friends of Gays and Lesbians—had sponsored the float to raise public awareness of “gays in the mainstream, being civic leaders and holding jobs as lawyers and bankers and teachers.”
    Except that gays didn’t, of course, go into surgery or onto the trading floor dressed as a fifties sex goddess; this campy image was exactly what PFLAG was trying to overcome. The men were supposed to ride in the parade dressed in their typical work clothes, but there were no volunteers until somebody suggested dressing up, something like “fags in drag, and dykes on bikes.”
    The president of the Boston chapter of PFLAG, a woman whose son had died of AIDS two years before, was incensed when she learned of the costumes. “You’re promoting a stereotype. All gay men love fashion and movie stars. All lesbians are butch and wear leather jackets.”
    In the end the Marilyns had won out. “After all, if we’re going to be ridiculed,” someone said at the meeting, “we might as well be ridiculed as someone else.”
    The lesbians were divided—more agreed with the president of PLAG than not, but still, many of them, having heard of all the Marilyns, planned to come as John F. Kennedy. As it turned out though, not one JFK hadshown up, and all fifty men sang Happy Birthday, Mr. President, to no one in particular.
    “It’s just like those bitches to bail,” Jack said, adjusting his breast, which had slipped out of his halter-top. At a prosthetic supply store, he had found shelf after shelf of breasts in all shapes, sizes, and colors. He had no idea women would need this many options. He shopped for two hours, finally buying five pairs, two of which were for Stuart, C cups in Ecru and Bisque. The first pair was a standard young shape, round and high, very Heidi of the Alps, the other clearly for an older woman: National Geographic low-riders, the profile like change purses sagging with quarters. He bought the same size for himself only in slightly darker tints: Barely Beige and Born to be Beige, manly colors, Robert Mitchum shades. Just for good measure, he bought the pair of Rose of Sharon DDs he couldn’t decide about in the store.
    Stuart was mad, of course, when Jack walked in with the bag of boobs.
    “So what?” Jack said. “Don’t you think women buy them this way? The average consumer of these things must try a hundred and fifty