Ryu-zaki6

When I was a little girl, I went to church. Our church was an illegal one: the building was unregistered. We would sit on the benches made from stolen floorboards and listen to a man dressed in black as he read us tales of angels coming to save righteous men from evil, their swords clean and their trumpets blaring. The man dressed in black was old. He was sick. His Bible was missing pages. One day in March, my mother turned to me and said clearly, "Masha, I want you to remember something for when you grow up." Maybe she knew she was dying. "God loves murderers." I just looked up at her, thumb in my mouth. My mother was still a beautiful w