Free In the Image of Grace by Charlotte Ann Schlobohm Page B

looked like
they were a nice couple. Probably in the midst of their studies
deciding what to do with the rest of their lives and yet they were
there getting their minds corrupted by my father, Mr. Carl and
Pastor Dave. It was all so insane. They were filling all those
people’s minds and hearts with a bunch of nonsense and it was
making me very upset because it was all at my mother’s expense.
    My father scanned the audience. “Now we all know that
new children were to come to carry on the image of Grace. The
perfect image of what the Xtials are.” He looked up at the screen
and shook his head up and down as if he approved. “Grace is exactly
what we should be like, she has no disease. She has no genetic
disorders. She is perfection in itself. This is what we strive for.
We need to do away with so much human suffering we brought on
ourselves. With the new children we can get back on track.”
    “Four new children were made in the image of
Grace.”
    I felt like I was going to vomit. He was talking
about my sisters and me. We were the ones that were supposed to
carry on the ideal for the human race, or the Xtial race, or
whatever hogwash he was spitting out. I leaned up against Jeremy
for support. He wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on
my head. If he wasn’t holding me up I was pretty sure I would have
passed out and fell to the ground.
    “This is fucking bizarre,” he whispered.
    On the screen the picture of my mother fizzled away
and one of my sisters and I fizzled in. My heart dropped. I felt
immediate sadness. It was the same picture from the newspaper that
Elizabeth left in the bathroom the day she killed herself. I
reached up and grabbed Jeremy’s hand and squeezed it. He kissed the
top of my head. Elizabeth looked perfect, but you could see the
sadness in her eyes. Her eyes were trying to tell us to save
her.
    “The four new children in the image of Grace,” my dad
said pointing up at the screen. He did not even say my children or
acknowledge that he was our father. Everybody started clapping. I
looked at the ground. I did not need anybody recognizing me. “At
The Clonation Foundation these four beautiful children were made in
the image of Grace using our cloning technology.”
    At first I did not believe what I heard. I heard
Jeremy say “What,” to himself. My father had to be pulling a fast
one on these people. It couldn’t be possibly true.
    “Thanks to all our donations and investors we get to
keep this project moving forward. I would also like to take a
moment to acknowledge our surrogates for three of the new Grace
children. Grace herself carried the first child, but unfortunately
she was called back home. She is there now spreading the word of
how things are going here.”
    If she went back to Pluto or wherever it was that my
father claimed these alien beings were from, why was she considered
a missing person? Obviously somebody didn’t believe that she was
magically teleported away to a demoted planet.
    My father continued on. “We were given a sign to set
these children onto the world. The sign was a sad one, yes it was.
The first child was taken from us. She was taken so we could see
that we were successful. They bleed and die like we do. We no
longer have to protect them from the world. They are humans, but
they are what humans are really supposed to be. They are ready for
the world to see.”
    My father paused and paced back and forth on stage
while people screamed out and cheered. “I would like to call up the
three women who had the privilege of carrying the three new
children whom the world will get to know. Come up here.” He waved
his hand towards him signaling three women to come to the stage.
Seats started squeaking and people started parting, so these women
could get up. The three women walked single file down the aisle in
between the seats and up to the stage. They were all roughly around
the same age, late thirties. The first one to walk on to stage had
shoulder