Alainn had no idea just how badly her life had collapsed until she noticed that the crucifix that normally hung suspended from the rosary beads on her rearview mirror was missing.  Looking at that empty space in the middle of her car forced her to acknowledge the gorge that had opened within her.  It had been two years since her mother (and closest friend) had died from liver cancer and, consequently, she had lost her faith in God.   (Catholicism is great for raising a child, but as far as being a source of comfort in times of tremendous loss it was a washout.)  She muttered to herself, “I must get this straightened up…someday…someday.” It was almost a mantra--the word “someday.” She repeated it often as a promise to herself.  It was like a dream she often revisited in order to sustain the hope that there was life after---well, after this life.  Then the questions came.  Had she really been living lately or just existing?  What was the last truly remarkable thing that had happened to her?  This thought, this feeling of complete devastation should have brought tears to her eyes.  Any normal person would have been broken hearted after such emotional explosions, but she was so numbed by the blitzkrieg of loss that had plagued her recently that she found herself unable to express anything. She was equally unmoved by rage, grief, jealousy, or any other member of the beautiful variety of human shortcomings. 

 

            Alainn chalked up the pause in her daily routine to nothing more than a variant--a “pulling away of the gauze” as Virginia Woolf might call it.  She shrugged, sighed, and pulled her remaining foot, scuffed high heel and all, into her white, nondescript Toyota Camry and shut the door.  The driver’s floorboard was about the only clean space the car had to offer.  The backseat was a jumble of boxes, bags, fliers, junk mail, and envelopes hastily thrown over her shoulder as she migrated from work to home and then back again.  Boxes and cups of all varieties of synthetic materials littered the passenger floorboard advertising fine establishments such as McDonalds, Checkers, Krystal, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Alainn, again in a startling moment of absolute awareness, thought briefly about her diet and wondered when she had last eaten something that hadn’t come prepackaged in a box in an unnaturally well-formed shape.  Again the sigh, the wistful glance, and that whispered repetition of “someday.”  “Someday I can get this straightened out.”  In truth, the strand of rosary beads was the only object of individuality and grace in the entire car, and it was now broken.  “Just like me,” Alainn thought. 

 

            About the only thing she had to look forward to was the hour of complete silence in her miniscule office on the seventh floor of the Tradewinds office plaza.  In order to miss the enchanting rush hour traffic she left early and spent the time she would have lost working in her office on jobs she couldn’t finish the day before.  Despite the fact that her office was small, boxed in, and smack dab in the middle of things it did have one small saving grace--a window.  This wasn’t a window with an excellent view. It wasn’t a window that symbolized freedom, hope, light, or possibility.  In fact, recently and more often than not, Alainn found that she spent more and more time looking out her window and wondering what it would feel like to throw herself out of it.  A moment of absolute peace and calm, harmony and perfection--exactly what she was looking for--before she plummeted, screaming, eight point two meters squared straight down towards the steaming blacktop below.

 

            She arrived at the office at exactly 7:05 and half walked/half lugged herself into the cool air of the building from the humid, oppressive spring air outside.  After a quick ride up the elevator, which was filled with the silent self-chastising phrase, “You know you should really be taking the stairs you fat ass,” Alainn arrived on the seventh floor and her aforementioned office with the suicide window.  However, in truth she had no idea how she had gotten there.

 

            Alainn had gone to a wonderful four year university and majored in English because of her overwhelming obsession with the written word; however, passion and a fire in your gut for good literature does not provide provisions for the larder nor the electricity for the occasional hot bath.  So instead of earning millions as a writer or even spending her days quoting Voltaire and teaching Vonnegut, she ended up working for a pre-packaged diet company called 4-Ever Trim as an advertising agent.  She had always thought it both ironic and sad that she had accepted a job working for a company that couldn’t be bothered to spell its name correctly.  The pay wasn’t great and she didn’t agree with any of the diet programs she created campaigns for, but it kept her about one and a half steps away from poverty.   She laughed to herself and muttered, “Hell, who actually believes a fruit drink that has the same consistency of snot can actually help you ‘shed unwanted fat like snake sheds its skin?’” (At least she hadn’t written that terrible pitch. It was created before she began her illustrious tenure in her current shithole position.)  The current commercial she had written the script for showed emaciated women daintily munching on ribs and pizza while sipping 4-Ever Trim, which any normal person knows is crap, but surprisingly people sent checks and money orders from all parts of the United States to buy up the fruity mucus product she helped to ram down their throats--- in the nicest way possible, of course.  Today’s challenge was how to best market 4-Ever Trim in order to reach men between the ages of thirty and forty.  Alainn automatically went for the old reliable “babes in bikinis” technique (Wouldn’t Hugh Hefner be proud!?) and began sketching the script for her new magnum opus.

 

            She actually lost herself in her work for a few hours and before she knew it people were starting to drift unwillingly into the office.  A few stopped to say hello, but most just traveled on either too busy to notice or too hung over to care about another human being, and she continued to work almost uninterrupted until 11:30 when, as usual, her friend Belinda stuck her beautiful brunette coiffure in her office and asked if she wanted to go to lunch.  She plastered on her best bogus smile and said she only needed to grab her purse. 

 

            Lunch was nothing more than a quick burger on Huey’s patio downtown.  It was a local restaurant that had nothing spectacular to offer other than the fact it wasn’t a chain and therefore made up in character what it lacked in cuisine.  Belinda, of course, made due with a waif’s portion of a salad and a gargantuan glass of spring water.  Alainn begrudgingly admired the fact that Belinda could stay thin after weeks of being separated from the wonder drug now known as 4-Ever Trim.  In fact, Belinda was one of the lucky few employees who was offered the chance to lose weight for free using the product they all peddled.  The catch was that she had to stay thin in order to remain in the commercials or she would be forced to pay back all the cash the company shelled out to make her socially acceptable.  What a bitch.

 

            They talked about things that didn’t make a tinker’s damn of difference to Alainn, but she decided to smile and nod at the appropriate moments because contented silence was much better than being asked, “Now really, what’s wrong?” one hundred times over.  While Belinda babbled on about a new boutique in town and how she couldn’t find shoes to go with her new sundresses, Alainn took the opportunity to people watch around her.  (It wasn’t as if Belinda would listen to her if she had said anything because it seemed that Belinda, now that she had gone AWOL from the fat farm, only listened to others in order to gain another opportunity to speak.)  

 

            To her left there was a young man chatting with one of the beautiful Huey’s waitresses, and to her right she saw an older couple laughing and sharing a bowl of fries.  But, oh, the real point of interest was taking place behind her.  All she could hear was two young women giggling about the sexual romp they had taken the previous evening with two other equally gorgeous studs that belonged to the local fraternity stud farm.  Everywhere she looked, people were either experiencing love or a relatively similar facsimile that pleased them.  Everything started to bother her.  The air was too muggy, her dress too clingy, her body too portly, her hair too frizzy, and her life too unbearable.  She felt she had to escape or face the fact that her head might simply topple off her neck just to get away from the world surrounding her.

 

            Suddenly, she stood up and declared that she had forgotten something very urgent that had to be done at work.  She hastily trawled in her purse for cash and dropped a ten dollar bill on the table and took off at a fast walk shouting “Keep the change!” over her shoulder.

 

            The walk back to the office was a blur of color, sound, and scent because Alainn could not focus on any one particular thing in front of her.  Again, she couldn’t cry or scream because she felt nothing.  All she felt was that indescribable feeling of loss and abandonment.  People must have been staring. How could they not? It’s not every day that you see a heavyset woman with ketchup in the corner of her mouth rapidly walking down a busy road not paying attention to traffic.  Before long, she had made it back to the office and was taking the steps two at a time back up to the seventh floor.  She hit her office at a run, threw down her purse, snatched open the window and stopped cold.  The distance between her face and the pavement seemed so much closer today! All of the sudden, she imagined that she heard a carnival barker screaming in her head.

 

     “Why not try a turn on the wildest ride known to man?”  “The cost of the ticket is life and you know God will only let you ride once!” “Your mother had a great time when she traveled screaming to the great beyond way before her time!” “C’mon! Step right up, cash in your ticket, and feel the exhilaration of getting Him before He gets you!”

 

            Alainn caught herself just as she began to lean out the window and barely stifled a scream. Gasping, she pulled her body back in the window and clung to the frame.  She fell heavily into the office chair waiting behind her and tried to catch her breath.  As she gradually came back to herself she got up, closed the window and door, and sat alone in her office.   She considered all the reasons why she should kill herself and came to see that the list was quite extensive, but she hadn’t done it.  Why?  What in the world had kept her from hurling her pathetic Orca frame into oblivion?  What was it?  Then she realized that maybe she wasn’t as lapsed a Catholic as she had hoped she was.  Suicide was still a murder of the self and would condemn her to the “everlasting fires of Hell.”  Isn’t that what Father Jacob had called it?  Was her fear of a place she had only heard of actually so strong that it could overcome her desire to end her misery in this one? 

 

            Alainn put her thumb and forefinger on the bridge of her nose and massaged it for a few seconds.  Finally, she pulled herself together and went to the ladies room where she splashed cold water on her face and smoothed back her hair.  She stood looking at herself in the mirror for a few moments and then resigned herself to return back the mess that was her life.

 

            Needless to say, after the psychotic carnival incident outside her office, Alainn couldn’t focus on developing her snappy new ad campaign for 4-Ever Trim.  There usually wasn’t a problem with this, but today was different.  She had been putting off creating the new ad for some time, and today was the day the boys and squirrels upstairs wanted to see some plans.  Nothing happened.  Blank. Pure and complete blank.  “What language do I speak?” she asked. “Certainly not English! I can communicate in the English tongue, but nothing is coming out onto the page.” After an hour or more of fruitless paper wad throwing she finally decided that she would express herself as she had so wanted to do over the past few years instead of vomiting up what they wanted onto the page.  Suddenly, the words came.

 

Try the new formula of 4-Ever Trim!

The ooey-gooey texture….

The starchy flavor…

Have you ever had mucus this good before?

Imagine losing all the weight you want and not giving up any guilty pleasures!

Sound to good to be true? Well listen!

Shed your shameful fat in no time….only don’t hope that it will stay off.

It can’t. You’re fat, deal with it.

Try laying off the King Dongs and pork rinds…

Maybe get your fat, worthless ass off the couch..

Have enough pride to save yourself from yourself.

 

The advice is free. The shit in the plastic bottle is $19.95.

 

            As soon as the page came out of the printer she felt relieved. She also felt that if she put it in the unassuming inner-office envelope and sent it upstairs she would be signing her own release notice.  The interesting thing was that she didn’t care one way or the other if she lost her shitty job. She wasn’t coming back anymore. So she put her little career time bomb in the package, sent it to the mail room, grabbed her things and left.  No worrying about carrying out a box of stuff from her desk because she had come in with nothing.  No pictures of her family or her dog, no Far Side calendar, no candles, no stupid signs that read “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” no plant to spruce up the place; she simply shoved the pens that were hers in her pocket and turned off the light. She didn’t even bother to close or lock the door.

 

            On the way home Alainn got wedged between a dump truck and a carpet cleaning van. Traffic was slow and monotonous, so whatever sense of euphoria she had gained from quitting her job slowly petered out in the thick of afternoon travel.  A string of very unladylike curse words came hurtling out of her mouth and she tapped her foot impatiently on the brake peddle.  It was going to take hours for this to pass! The local radio station said that a huge wreck involving a tractor/trailer and several cars was stopping up the works a few miles up the road.  “Maybe a busload of midgets or a tour group from the local mental institution got involved,” Alainn thought.  “Or maybe, just maybe a truck fell on Mariah Carey and squashed out her vital organs. Wouldn’t that be both a blessing and a miracle?”  Up ahead, she saw a sign out front of a bar called Celestials.  She decided she would rather waste time draining White Russians on a comfortable bench seat in a dark bar than sitting on her laurels in traffic, so she turned off into the parking lot.

 

            As she entered Celestials, she noticed that there were quite a few more people around drinking beer and cocktails than was usual for a Thursday evening.  She “bellied up to the bar” a la Calamity Jane and ordered her drink.  The bartender kindly took her order and while she waited for her beverage to arrive she looked up and down the bar at her co-drinkers.  At the end of the bar she saw an old man with watery eyes nursing an equally watery gin and tonic with an unfiltered Camel jammed between his gnarled fingers.  Whatever sorrows he was carrying, he made no effort to keep them hidden from the world. His misery was on display for all to see.  In a booth near the back of the room Alainn saw another equally disturbing picture of desperation.  A woman, older than she, was trying to be noticed, but that wasn’t the sad part. She was wearing a pastel dress that had once been fashionable; she had also applied a little too much makeup for the occasion. She was drinking what resembled a wine spritzer.  The heartbreaking detail revealed itself just as Alainn was about to turn back to her own drink.   The forty-trying-to-look-thirty woman was popping a birth control pill out of a mint green slide case and placing it demurely on her tongue to wash it down with her white trash wine.  Alainn said nothing, but inwardly she shuddered.  She thought to herself, “What kind of woman is so desperate and starved for love that she has to advertise her intents that way? Why not wear a giant flashing sign around your neck that read, “ATTENTION!! DESPERATE WOMAN WILLING TO DEBASE SELF FOR LOVE?”

 

            An hour and three White Russians later, Alainn considered getting up and getting in her car, but instead she relocated to a booth on the wall closest to her.  She began to move, drink in tow, and on the way she saw a man enter the building.  He was tall with dark, wavy hair and what looked to be blue eyes.   He was handsome, no doubt about that.  Obviously muscled and toned under his well-cut suit and crisp white shirt.  His hair, nearly touching his shoulders, was too long for a businessman, but it suited his oval face well.  His skin was the color of caramel and he shimmered oddly in the dim light. Almost as if he had some beautiful inner light radiating from him that protected him from the atmosphere of the dingy bar.  He ordered a drink and stood at the bar while he sipped it slowly.  Then, as if Alainn had willed it with the power of her mind, the striking man actually began to walk towards her.  Confidence, assurance….a sense of peace followed him across the room and immediately made her feel at ease the second he came near her.  In a voice as soft as a dream and twice as comforting he asked, “May I join you?”

 

            “Certainly,” she replied.

 

            “What is your name?” he asked politely.

 

            “Alainn.”

 

“Alainn? What a wonderfully unique name? Does it have a beautiful meaning too?”

 

            “Yes. Supposedly it is the Gaelic word for ‘beautiful,’ but I’ve never confirmed it. My parents were both Irish,” she said with a smile.  

 

            “If it means what you think it means, it certainly suits you,” he replied.

 

            She was stunned. This man had actually paid her a compliment! And what was even weirder was that it hadn’t sounded like a tacky come-on either.  It was genuine, she could just tell. It was the same aura that she had noticed surrounding him when he walked in. He was…soothing…like a warm bed to sleep in during a rainstorm.  She wanted to keep talking to him.

 

            “Thank you for the compliment. May I ask your name as well?” she inquired.

           

             “It’s Sebastian,” he answered.

           

            “Sebastian? That’s fitting. Tell me Sebastian, what are you doing in a place like this? You obviously don’t fit in here.”

           

            “You don’t either,” he replied, “but to tell the truth, I felt drawn here today.”

           

            “How do you mean?” she questioned.

 

“Well, I was just passing by. I saw the sign and I just knew I had to stop. I felt like something was waiting for me inside, and when I walked in I didn’t know what it was.  Then I saw you,” he answered.

           

“Me? Now honestly!” she laughed, “Who in their right mind would be searching for me?”

           

            “Many people,” he affirmed, “more than you know.”

 

            The conversation moved onward from names and jobs to more interesting topics, and eventually literature came up.  No one had talked about literature and writing with her in years.  No one at work ever bothered to read more than the occasional celebrity magazine to find a gimmick to sell the fruit mucus, and she hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from college because she was too ashamed of her job.   She had honestly forgotten what it was like to have an invigorating conversation about a topic that interested her, and with a stunningly beautiful man! He was intelligent, easygoing, charming, and he seemed to be absolutely captivated by her.  She felt like she could tell him anything, like a child with implicit trust in a priest.  Only this conversation was much better because there was no dividing wall; she could be physically close to the recipient of her confession.

 

            She decided that she was going to take a risk, probably for the first time in her life, and she suddenly spoke up, “Would you be interested in going back to my apartment to continue our conversation?” 

 

            “Hmmm…awkward,” she thought, “I hope he doesn’t think I’m a blithering idiot.”

 

            “I would love to,” he answered, “but I don’t have a car. Can I ride with you and continue the conversation while we travel?”

 

            “You don’t have a car?” she asked. She thought that little factoid odd considering the Armani-esque suit and the bronze tan.

 

            “No, I find sojourning to be much better for the body and soul,” he said.

 

            She honestly didn’t care if he decided to bunny hop all the way back to her cruddy apartment as long as she could be near him for a few more hours.  She quickly paid her bar tab and realized that he had not had a drink all night. The clear substance that had been in the glass he ordered from the bar was nothing more than water, so he wasn’t intoxicated.  That meant that he wasn’t going home with her simply because alcohol had anesthetized his sense of good taste in women.  Good old Alice had it right, “Curiouser and curiouser!”

 

            When they arrived at her apartment, she was secretly expecting him to knock her to the floor and make love to her before she could get the door closed. It was what the world had conditioned her to think she wanted; however, he was the perfect gentleman and actually held the door open for her.  “So much for Jackie Collins or the Red Shoe Diaries,” she thought with a laugh. 

 

            He actually looked rather out of place in her apartment.  Like her car, it was a wreck.  Trash cans filled to capacity, magazines everywhere, books littered the floors, and the carpet was in desperate need of a vacuuming.  Clothes discarded thoughtlessly days ago were now painful to her eyes, and found herself secretly wondering if she had cleaned her bathroom in recent days.  “This isn’t how gals in $1.99 bosom heavers feel when the dark haired Adonis takes them home,” she thought.  Yet, this man did not even seem like he was in any way sexually attracted to her. It was something….different, indescribable, and somehow better than sex.  He appealed to her higher senses, and she liked this feeling of being completely awake and alive.

 

            “Wine?” she asked.

 

            “That would be lovely,” he replied with a soft smile.

 

            As she uncorked a bottle, she saw he was not studying the objects in the room as most people do when they are invited into someone else’s apartments, and she doubted that he would be the type to make an excuse to go to the bathroom in order to take inventory of the contents of her medicine cabinet.  He simply sat on her tan sofa and looked at her with his dark cobalt blue eyes.  His gaze was not fixed. He was not sizing her up for a rape session, nor was he looking at her with disdain. He was simply looking, and his look was one of compassion, kindness, even of love.  She almost felt like he was telling her that her life would somehow be alright, that she would get over the loss of her mother and the loss of her job and recapture her enthusiasm for living.  She felt all this, for not a word was said.  

 

            She walked over to him in a sort of trance, a wine glass in each hand.  He took the glasses from her and then took her empty hands in his.  Before she could speak he laced his fingers with hers and began kissing her face.  Her eyes, her temples, the corners of her jaw, her neck, and finally her lips.  The kisses lasted no more than twenty seconds, but that time felt infinite and she forgot to breathe.  The kisses were something beyond sexual---she felt a mix of relief and awakening.  Suddenly and without explanation she remembered a statue by Bernini she had studied in a humanities course---The Ecstasy of St. Theresa.  Something about that statue had always fascinated her.  Unlike the stiff, unforgiving marble statues that stood guard over her during mass as a child, St. Theresa was not on a pedestal.  She was more than a cold slab of marble, and she did not appear to be removed from God. She was in the midst of receiving God from an angles arrow to her heart, and she was unashamed to show how the love of the Savior filled her with feeling.  It bordered on sexual, but it was not vulgar or obscene. It was, in a word, rapturous.  Sebastian’s simple embrace made her feel this way. 

 

            Without a word he picked her up in his arms and carried her back to her bedroom. She forgot about her frizzy hair, her worn out makeup, her rumpled dress.  The fat didn’t matter anymore because she did not feel shame.  All she knew was that she felt the most wonderful sense of closeness--- a feeling of salvation.   He placed her gently on her feet by the bed and began undressing her.  Layer by layer, her clothing and her grief fell from her shoulders and she stood before him naked and chaste. 

 

            He quickly removed his own garments and tenderly laid her on the bed.  She was expecting something physical, but again he exceeded her expectations.  He simply began wrapping himself around her.  Legs intertwined with legs, stomachs touching, fingers again interlaced, breath mingling, and foreheads meeting.  Nothing was in the way of their physical communication, and with the cares and baggage of the world out of the way, their souls began to communicate through their naked flesh not with it.  If you looked down upon them in the darkness, you could not tell where one ended and the other began, and it was in this meeting and mingling of naked bodies and naked souls that Alainn began to dream. 

 

            No one object came into focus during her vision, but she had a sense of space and time.  She could see nothing in the void, but she was not frightened because she felt as if she had been here before.  Soon, she began to see colors coming into the space, all of them light and soothing.  She was watching something being created, something appearing, and it was marvelous.  White passed to yellow, yellow to green, green to pink, and pink to blue.    At first, the shade of blue resembled the color of Sebastian’s eyes, but then it faded to the glorious color of the sky in June.  A clear, powdery blue that never failed to bring solace to her in her youth.  She watched it with almost childlike enthusiasm, and the longer she kept her eyes on the hue, the more fascinating and compelling it became.  After an immeasurable amount of time had passed, the color became something with substance. The blue became a living, breathing presence that she could not only see, but also feel, smell, and hear.  All at once, Alainn was actually reminded of swimming in her grandparent’s pool as a child.  She had loved to swim down to the deep end and sink as low as possible into the water where she would spin, twirl, and bend her body in the only place her awkward adolescent form could feel weightless.  Under those few precious feet of water she found freedom.  There was no sound but the dull lub dub, lub dub of her heart beating in her ears, the fluid caress of the almost amniotic water, and the feeling of being supported by a force outside of her own body.  Being under the surface of the water allowed her to escape to a much simpler time and she felt at peace.  This feeling was now coming from the baby blue presence surrounding her. It began to wrap itself around her, yet she was not troubled because somehow she knew that she was being enveloped by the presence of God. She felt a sense of warmth and comfort, as if she were being held by her grandfather in a warm blanket during the dead of winter.  God was the blue drape surrounding her, a tactile form she could experience and receive and understand, and she was neither frightened nor afraid.  For the first time in her long, lonely life she was embracing and being embraced by God.  

 

            The colors of the religion of her youth were simple: black, white, and red.  Black for evil, white for goodness, and red for sin.  Black was what you sought to avoid, white was the life you wanted to lead, and red decided which way you walked after the three Gray sisters decided to cut the thread.  Painful, brutal, and frighteningly clear cut, she had never known God could be a presence like the one she found herself face to face with at this moment.  She was not alone! She was loved! Her failures did not matter, and her past was inconsequential.  Suddenly and unexplainably, Alainn began to weep.  Her tears were not those of pain, of sorrow, or of hurt; they were simply tears of joy.    She washed herself clean in a baptism of her own salty tears and she felt reborn.  She realized that this was the feeling on the countenance of St. Theresa. This was what the love of God felt like, and this was what she noticed had been absent when she saw the missing crucifix.

 

            Alainn had no idea how long she remained, dreaming, in Sebastian’s arms, but when she woke up she instantly knew he was gone.  However, she did not cry or mourn her loss.  He was still with her--within her--breathing as she breathed, and he was now as much a part of her as her own skin.  She instantly turned her head into her pillow and prayed.  She prayed as she had not prayed since she begged God to spare her mother.  She gave thanks, she wept, and she reestablished a connection she had severed angrily so long ago.

 

            After her sobbing ceased, Alainn slowly got up, dressed, and walked to the front of her apartment.  She looked around and saw the mess that was there the night before, but instead of despair she felt a new sense of purpose.

 

            After a quick shower and a bolted breakfast, Alainn began to clean up the first parts of her shattered life.  Within hours the apartment was as clean and beautiful as it had ever been and she felt like it was a space she could truly make her own.  A smile crept across her face as she headed out to the car.  As she walked, she made plans to send resumes to every magazine she had ever done business with to sell ads. Someone would gladly take her on as a writer when she showed them her work from college.  Maybe she could even write some new pieces! 

 

            Her euphoria continued as she waded through the debris that filled her car.  The task took longer than she expected, but she found an astonishing discovery on the bottom of the pile of trash near her passenger seat.  Just as she was about to close the door, she noticed something shining on the floorboard.  She knelt down and picked up the missing crucifix.  It was such a small thing to have such great meaning.  The tiny body of Christ, the cruel cross, His love for the world symbolized in one miniature piece of metal.  Alainn placed her hand over her mouth and the tears began to flow again.  She made no effort to keep her emotions in check; she didn’t have to any more.

 

            She unwound the string of rosary beads from her rearview mirror and headed back inside the apartment where she began looking for something to reattach the two pieces together.  After some searching, she found a beat up roll of Scotch tape and connected the broken sections.  She laid it down on the counter and stared at it.  It looked fragile, gangly, and awkward lying there in its binding, but Alainn decided that she liked that just fine.