Excerpt: A Nota Amore

In a small country town in Australia, with a really daggy name, there lived a clergyman and his gentle wife, Penelope. They had 6 full-grown offspring, and now spent their time alone working the Parish as any pair of business partners should, if they want to make a decent profit. At least those are the words Father Worldly used when ear-bashing his wife into compliance with his sometimes-not-so-Christian enterprises.

The children, after starting out as excellent Christian members of the community, had almost all departed from the church now. Their knowledge of what the churches were actually responsible for throughout the world having opened their eyes to the real Truth.

Their firstborn was a member of a dramatic society, wore long red knickers on the outside of his clothing, and sang and danced the most outrageously political lyrics in public. He had broken his father’s heart, and the two no longer spoke, except when the boy called his father, desperate for funds.

The second was a farmer, loving the outdoor like, away out in the outback where there was no church but the desert. Out there, no hymns but the sound of rain, or of water running in a dry creek bed, giving its own praise to the world, to the accompaniment of white-backed magpies, currawongs, and sometimes screeching galahs.

The eldest girl was almost crippled, after a creepy friend of her father’s from the Sunday School at their second-last parish had forced himself on her in the vestry one dark evening after the service. He had injured her spine as he bent her backwards over a table in the heat of his passionate lust.