A sign from God (from By The Light of the Carnival)

an excerpt from my published novel

Lady Fortuna was only listening to her own thoughts. “At first I thought God was trying to tell me something. I've always expected to be bonked on the head by God, just out of the blue, for having been so…” She looked up in unease. “A lap bar… from Heaven.”

“A lap bar is a pretty big thing to just fall on somebody!” the snow cone man said. “Do you want me to get Miss Toulon to arrange for you to go the hospital just to check on it? Sometimes people feel fine for awhile after getting hit on the head, but then they drop dead later.”

“Damn no! Don’t be stupid.” Lady Fortuna waved him off. “Maybe if I'm still feeling like this or worse, I'll go the last day so the bills can't chase me. Never go to the doctor the first day of the carnival, idiot. I think my hairpiece saved me. Just think if I didn’t have it. And lucky the hair was piled up high. I’d be dead if it wasn’t. I bet I’ll still get a bump, though. A lap bar is heavy hitting you, even though it didn’t fall from the very top.”

The snow cone man said, “A bottle of pills won't be that bad.”

Lady Fortuna pulled some combs out and removed her coiled up black hairpiece. “No it’s not bleeding so I don’t need stitches.”

“Suit yourself.” The snow cone man left them.

Joe looked at her in concern. “But you can get a concussion and not need stitches. Your eyeballs can change directions, or sizes, or something like that, so we’ll have to keep looking at you to make sure you still look back at us right. This could be serious.”

She carefully put her ball of hair back on the top of her head. “Just to say hello to a doctor is six to ten bucks, these days. Shocking! I already took a few aspirin and I think my hair was cushion enough.”

Joe asked, “You sure?”

“I don’t even need any of my special old fashioned herbs. Aspirin is good enough for this.” Joe wanted to gently push her ice pack aside and put his left hand on the top of her head to heal her bump, even if it was just a try, but Lady Fortuna was rather intimidating so he kept his distance. She smiled. “I’m fine for now. Go now. Leave me.” She looked hard at him. “What. What. What do you want? Is there a bug on me or something?”

He took a deep brave breath. “Let me put my hand on it. It has a healing touch.”

“You’re full of ca-ca. Are you a farmer? You look like a farmer.”

“Yep.”

“That’s a symbol for death, the farmer.”

“Noooo… we grow things.”

“The Reaper.”

“And we grow things.”

“The seeds symbolize death and then you plant them and they grow all over again. The first farmers saw that and so that’s how people first decided there should be an afterlife. I don’t know if I know anything about anything much, but they sure knew that. They could just see it. Seeds. And people are better than seeds. For sure.”

Joe nodded. “Sure. Seeds grow. But we now know that they really aren’t ever dead.”

Lady Fortuna grabbed his hand and looked at it. She jolted. “You have a stigmata!”