Free The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten by Harrison Geillor

just then Mr. Whatever called our attention to the front and started pointing at some crap on an overhead projector. A few moments later the bell rang, and Edwin was— whoosh —gone.
    I’d spooked him. Oh well. I should’ve probably played up the wounded-bunny routine some more instead, but there was something about Edwin… I didn’t want to show him the real me, of course, but I didn’t want to hide myself utterly in a fake persona.
    Ike joined me as I left the room. “Saw you talking to Scullen,” he said, rather sullenly. “He seemed nicer today.”
    I nodded. “I still don’t know what his problem was, but he seems to be over it.” We went to gym class, where I pretended physical incompetence, as per usual, until I could finally get back to the only kind of competition that actually matters: real life.
    In the parking lot, I started up Marmon and drove slowly out of the lot. There was Edwin, standing by a Subaru station wagon with some of his faux-siblings. He looked up at me, and his eyes were the color of pale blue skies this time, almost ice-blue. Weird. I’d heard of eyes that changed color depending on a person’s mood, but that’s just dumb—any changes like that are just the effect of light reflecting differently off the iris, and the fact that the iris changes shape as the pupil dilates or contracts. But Edwin’s eyes were dramatically lighter now, so maybe….
    If so which mood did that particular shade of blue I’d seen in biology class indicate?
    I’d find out. It was a problem vulnerable to an experimental solution.

GODS AND MEN
AND SO FORTH
    NARRATOR
    S tevie Ray took his hat off when he entered the priest’s office, because it seemed like a show of respect was in order, even if Stevie Ray himself didn’t have any particular religion. He was, he supposed, technically an atheist, though it seemed to him just about everybody was an atheist: even Father Edsel, because even though he had faith in his Holy Trinity, there were thousands of other gods he didn’t believe in: Zeus, Ra, Ahuru Mazda, Yum Kaax, Tepeyollotl, Sakhmet, Napir, Bes, Gal Bapsi, and on and on. Stevie Ray’d found a book in the remainder bin at a going-out-of-business Borders in the Twin Cities called The Encyclopedia of Gods, and that thing was more than 300 pages long, nothing but the names of over 2,500 gods various people had worshipped at one time or another, or still did—gods they’d probably believed in enough to kill or die for (or at least change their diet or get up early on Sunday mornings for). And he’d heard that in Hinduism there were a hundred million gods, enough gods that every family could have one of their own if they wanted. Stevie Ray, who’d always fretted a bit about being spiritually bereft, had felt better when he realized that. Edsel and Pastor Inkfist—well, he wasn’t a pastor anymore, but still religious, no doubt—were almost as atheist as Stevie Ray was: he just believed in one fewer god than they did, and the difference between disbelieving in a hundred million gods and a hundred million and one gods just didn’t seem all that significant, really.
    It was a shame, in a way, though, because if Stevie Ray had believed in a god—or at least the right god—he might have worried less about the family of vampires living in town. As it was, in the absence of a god to pray to, he’d decided he had to go and talk to Edsel.
    Father Edsel wasn’t a tall man, but he was a big man, with a big personality, a big bushy beard, and wild eyes, like a biker gang boss who’d decided to take holy orders. He’d been a priest down in Texas or someplace, but he’d done something bad and got sent up here to Lake Woebegotten. Not the kind of something bad where he’d molested little boys or anything, though the church wasn’t above sending priests to tiny little middle-of-nowhere parishes for those offenses, either, or so Stevie Ray had gathered. More the kind of bad where he’d performed an