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dial. Sure, celebrate the birth of a baby born two thousand years ago…but my son is in hell right now, according to you, because he didn’t live long enough to have a little water sprinkled on his head.
    Some would say only limbo, not hell. How comforting. The bottom line was, the unbaptized infant didn’t die in God’s good graces. Born with the sin of the world already in him…baptism a kind of exorcism. Wasn’t that how it went? Do something compassionate, you elitist scum, she mentally raged at the screen. Baptize my baby. Cleanse him of these so-called sins so he can be free. Go on—you’ve got your magic water in there, don’t you?
    Good thing she didn’t really believe he was cursed to some void…damned to eternal suffering. That would be a horror too great for her to recover from, short of remaining in a hospital of another sort forever.
    Eleven thirty-five now. She was not at all tempted to go down to the end of maternity to the chapel and sit in on their midnight mass…but maybe, just maybe, she’d watch it on TV. Just for the hell of it.
    *     *     *
    A woman sobbed softly, in forlorn moans. Devin was awakened by the sound, her first thought having been that it was the voice of a woman in another room, a woman who had lost her baby tonight. Then she wondered if perhaps it had been her own voice. But also, for some odd reason, she had the impression that the sound had come from the speaker of her television. However, that was impossible, of course, because there was still no sound coming from channel Eight.
    Devin sat up. Apparently mass had not yet begun; the pews she could see were nearly full, though the lights had yet to be brought up. She glanced to the time. Eleven-fifty.
    Ah, something was happening now. A robed figure proceeded up the central aisle toward the dais, carrying something behind him. Another figure had its end, as if it were a stretcher they transported between them. Indeed, it looked like a stretcher. Were they bringing in some poor old woman who couldn’t walk to mass? Why not a wheelchair, then?
    God, Devin thought. Perhaps this wasn’t a Christmas mass after all…but a funeral mass. The shape upon the stretcher the two figures carried resembled nothing so much as a human body covered entirely by a sheet.
    She pulled the TV nearer, squinting at the screen. Shut off her personal light, the resultant gloom making the image slightly clearer. Watched as the stretcher was brought up upon that stage. They lifted the sheet reverently, like a flag folded at a military funeral, and spread it out on the floor at the foot of the altar. Then the body—yes, it was a body—was lifted from the stretcher and laid upon the sheet on the floor.
    Granted, Devin was not a religious person, but she had never heard of this ritual before.
    The figures set a candle at the head of the body, another at the feet, and lit them. The light didn’t do much to illuminate the chapel or its congregation, but it did define the body on the floor a bit better. Devin saw bare feet outlined; she could imagine how cold they must feel. The toenails were so dark, they must be painted. The feet of a young woman. Devin never painted her nails in winter…but this mundane thought was quickly gone from her mind as she concentrated further on the head of the corpse.
    The young woman’s long dark hair was draped around her neck and across her shoulders. Her mouth hung open wide. Devin couldn’t believe that her features hadn’t been made composed. This body hadn’t been prepared for a funeral. Was this to be some ceremony prior to the mortician’s work?
    The candlelight seemed to glint on something at the woman’s throat. A necklace under her hair? No, Devin realized. It was a wet glistening.
    That wasn’t entirely her hair across her throat, darkening it, hair upon the shoulders of the white gown she wore. It was blood so dark it looked black. Soaking into the gown. Winding down her neck. Still drying. And