Now indignant, she resumed reading. Here she found "Proverbs 27:6".
Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
Below the reference, she read:
Is irrem ërr asbislav boba reha trimas bid ávu. I hheash ërr trim bid zerries dizas boba reha.
***
She saw a colorful house made of sweets in the distance, under a bright blue sky. In front of the door stood a beautiful white woman with platinum hair, smiling angelically and beckoning to Sophia's pride and joy: a wee little girl with mocha skin and sandy blonde curls. The girl smiled in reply and started running toward the woman. A bone-deep chill washed over Sophia and she ran like the wind to overtake the girl, snatching her off the ground and carrying her bodily away from the house.
The girl kicked, screamed, scratched, and even bit all the way back home and started crying when she finally put her down but Sophia raised a fore-stalling hand, took a calming breath, and pointed back at the house as she started to explain. Her mind projected an image of the house onto the wall. The image zoomed in on the house, past the woman, past the door, and into the kitchen. Inside the oven were two little children just like her, clearly dead and baking.
***
Residual horror shot up and down her spine like an electric current. If she hadn't looked into Jonestown right before seeing this, she might have dismissed it as paranoia, but now she couldn't. She now knew that this not only could happen but had happened. For hundreds if not thousands of Black people in the United States, Jim Jones had been that beautiful woman and Jonestown had been that candy house. Nine hundred people had been cooked in that oven, many of them Black and many of them children, on November 18th, 1978.
How many more would die that way if such instincts went forever unchallenged? Even one such death was too many, so how smart was it to monopolize race as a subject? How smart was it to write others off as having no valid insights that contradict your own because they "can never understand"? It was not a question she enjoyed asking, but history had proven in gruesome detail that it needed to be asked and a part of her knew that she would not have pondered that question in good faith if anyone else had asked it for her. So...was race a safe subject to monopolize? She couldn't quite bring herself to say yes, so she found herself defaulting to...maybe not.