Fondly, she turned the page. "Ephesians 6:12", it said.
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Below, she read:
Nám ier, gon nám ína bid kabefesa. Nám asqum bid errsadd nuu kof fhizas bid fova.
***
Her little girl was now a woman, tall and stately with a bearing worthy of Galadriel. Beside Iris sat a charming young man, reminiscent of Leon Patillo. His name was Tyrell. That he loved Iris dearly there was no doubt. That he respected her virtue and guarded his own there was also no doubt. These three things, springing from a genuine relationship with Christ, made him precious, and he was no idiot. Iris had chosen well. Sophia loved this man as if he were her own son...but she couldn't help but notice there was something wrong with him.
It was nothing unusual. Truth be told, she had expected it, but that didn't mean that it wasn't important. Indeed, its apparent omnipresence was precisely what made the treating of it urgent. The entire outside world was trying to feed it, make it worse.
Behind his sweet eyes and in the darkest, least examined parts of his soul there lived this thing...this pitiful, hideous thing that looked like a cross between Gollum and a spider monkey, forever rubbing wounds raw and wailing, "They stole it from us," denying him the peace and fullness of joy that she wanted for him. It was hurting him, but he clung to it like Frodo Baggins to the One Ring.
She knew this creature well, for she had housed it herself when she was his age, staring at the cold blue screen and learning all the worst things about "business as usual". She had finally evicted it only after years of introspection and had been extremely resistant to all external attempts at correction, so that this man should also be resistant was no surprise. What saddened her most was not his resistance but the fact that Iris was reinforcing it, however innocently. Her protective instincts had kicked in for him and while that was understandable, it was also tragic.
Tears stung her eyes.
Oh sweetie, I generally love this instinct of yours, but now is not the time for it! Stop obstructing my path and let me at that evil spirit!
With an effort of will, she calmed herself down and retreated into patience. This was a war of attrition; it would take time. There would be other opportunities to help him give that foul squatter the boot. Lots of them. After all, he was going to be her son in law. Time would vindicate her; it always did.
As the conversation turned to more pleasant subjects and everyone relaxed, she could feel the creature leering at her, hear it laughing.
Maybe not today, you little runt, but one of these days I will cast you out! Sooner or later, your new host will tire of you as I did and when he does, I will laugh at you!
---
She shuddered. Was this what the "consciousness" that she had heretofore assumed was a universal and indispensable part of the black psyche looked like from the outside? Like Gollum? And Lazarus had harbored that same spirit within himself previously, as a Men's Rights Activist? If that was true, then even his more visceral reactions to race as a topic made perfect sense. MRA topics were just as repellant to her as racial topics had been to him, if not even more so. She looked up at the ceiling.
And you listened to how many years of that?
Looking back down at the book, she noticed something new. The ink was slightly blurred in places and the pages were bumpy. Tears. He had not faked these, hadn't even shown them. This book had been squirreled away in a very dark corner of his closet. No one even knew that he had written it until Iris found it after his death. Great-Grandma Ese might have known, but if she had, she had kept quiet about it.
Sophia had talked glibly throughout adolescence about "white tears" and how much pleasure it would bring her to consume them... Now here they were, literally right in front of her, and there was nothing funny about them at all. On the contrary, she was ready to add some tears of her own. She wiped her cheek, let the water collect on a fingertip, and gently dabbed it onto the lower right corner of the paper. It wasn't much and no one else on Earth would know, but God would know and if He knew, then it might reach Lazarus too.