Unable to echo this

[breathedout]

Unable to echo this [political slogan], Gael is reminded of being a kid at mass, before she took the first step out the church door by telling Jarleth she didn't believe that Mary was a virgin; when she'd stopped saying the parts of the catechism she didn't believe in. Each week, she'd say less and less only uttering the parts that were demonstrably true until there was nothing left for her to say. For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever? No. That's moronic. It wasn't that she gave two shits about honesty—Jesus, if ever such a generous lover had lived, wouldn't be so petty as to monitor lipsyncing during his hymns; it was that she knew that this small movement of the lips, disconnected from the brain, going going going along with things, was a gateway drug. Not to heaven, but to fools' paradise. So her closed lips were a renunciation until she was ready to tell her mother she would never go again. "If you're staying here, you can help me organize this sheet music into sections," Sive had said, as if her daughter had confessed to something so trivial as wanting to skip swimming lessons. That was when she knew that logsitics had nothing to do with Sive's "duties" on Sundays.

—Caoilinn Hughes, The Orchid and the Wasp