At first you don’t panic. It has to be somewhere, and you check the pile of unopened mail just below the slot in the door, right next to its dish. It was there a week ago, and now it isn’t, and you circle the front parlor scanning shelves and tables for the familiar chain with its tags and trinkets.
Soon you’re searching the pockets of coats in the closet, of old pants lying in the hall, of musty shirts in the moist hamper. It isn’t anywhere, and you feel your breath go tight. You find yourself rummaging through papers you haven’t disturbed in years. You open the refrigerator just in case. You search the pantry.
Soon your whole house looks strange to you. Every item slightly off-place, but you can’t remember when you may have moved any of it. You hunt through everything you own, altering it all, and removing any trace of how it might have been a moment ago, or a moment before that. And you think you might be going a little off-place yourself.
And then you find the key. Right where you left it in the dish you’re sure you checked. You fit it into the front door’s lock, and it works. And everything would be fine if its shape weren’t slightly wrong; if there weren’t that chip of unfamiliar nail polish. If you weren’t sure that someone had mistakenly left you the copy of the key they took. A week ago.
NRA: A piece of bread would buy a bag of gold - An obsessive vigilance worrying about the imminent Mark of the Beast plays a large role in the day-to-day culture of Rapture Christianity. So it's a bit od...