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Unspoken

Richard Osgood

Grace prayed in French because she knew God hated the English, which by extension included Americans, and by default the English language. Grace was American but God cut her some slack because she prayed in French. At first she figured Russian must be God’s favorite language, or better yet, Chinese. The great irony, she thought. God and Buddha sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. She tried Latin for a while, even had fun carrying the words around with her on weekends, ordering soup at Hungarian diners and asking Walmart greeters for directions to the ladies room. But in French she prayed on street corners or at baseball games or in the canned pasta aisle at Hannaford’s where folks dismissed her as eccentric or unstable and screamed obscenities at the players on the diamond to drown her voice, or crossed the street to avoid the contagion of her presence, or feigned a change of heart and returned the Raviolis to the shelf. About-face was another thing she knew God hated.