Thousand: Two Hundred Seventy-Eight

beckoned. I felt it rise from my chest and burst open in his hand, a white white lily. The visitors must then have returned me to my bed, for I remember watching the digits on the clock radio slowly count toward dawn, my body aching as though fevered, but weighted down. I could hardly move. When at last I stumbled from my bed, I found on the floor of the bathroom a broken vase and in a pool of water a lily, whole and undamaged. So this led to your starting a cult? Samuel asked, after a pause in which