**
Part I
I was walking home with my only real friend Carl, a fellow Atheist I’d met online miraculously by total coincidence. We were keeping it a complete secret because I couldn’t have imagined what would happen if we were exposed. The community was literally more tight-knotted than Salem in the 1600s, so I cannot emphasize enough how shocking this encounter of those two together was…
**
We’d had a nice day out in town together, Carl and I, spending most of the afternoon riding the ferryboat down the sights of Magdalene River. Now, however, the streetlights were just flickering into constellation in Maple District, a significantly remote, broad range of modest sanctuary houses where the most respective zealots "reflected intimately with God to inherit His strength & callings." Thus, apparently not expecting anyone, Phyllis and Henry were lost in undressing, fervent kissing in careless, impatient stumble through her townhouse threshold. We, too luckily, had been guarded by the dark aarangement of trees beneath a shady highway underpass that granted an indirect, surreptitious glance at the two feverish hypocrites.
"What do we do?!" Carl exclaimed heatedly.
I threw my hands in midair uncertainly, masking panic. "We aren't doing anything wrong," I reminded. "So we should continue walking>"
"But they might see us!" Carl argued incredulously.
"That's their problem, Carl, not ours. They're the ones getting themselves into trouble," I stood pridefully, beyond disgusted by the two zealots whose coalitions socially disenfranchised nonbelievers like us. I boldly moved indifferently forward almost perfunctorily, like nothing had changed, and Carl reluctantly followed.
But a few steps more and I'd eyed a stack of pink envelopes placed neatly on the hammock in Mrs. Donning's porch