his direction. Lose the porn mustache, she thought, and you might have something here.
Marianne shrugged. "With you."
"Great." He smiled and arched an eyebrow. "And Cain is a man, right?"
Straw Hair wanted back in: "Right."
"With normal male urges, right?"
"Right."
"So he's walking around. And he's feeling his oats. His natural urges. And one day, while walking through a forest"-another smile, another pet of the mustache-"Cain stumbles across an attractive monkey. Or gorilla. Or orangutan."
Marianne stared at him. "You're kidding, right?"
"No. Think about it. Cain spots something from the monkey family. They're the closest to human, right? He jumps one of the females, they, well, you know." He brought his hands together in a silent clap in case she didn't know. "And then the primate gets pregnant."
Straw Hair said, "That's gross."
Marianne started to turn back to her drink, but the man tapped her arm again.
"Don't you see how that makes sense? The primate has a baby. Half ape, half man. It's apelike, but slowly, over time, the dominance of mankind comes to the forefront. See? Voila! Evolution and creationism made one."
He smiled as though waiting for a gold star.
"Let me get this straight," Marianne said. "God is against incest, but He's into bestiality?"
The mustached man gave her a patronizing, there-there pat on the shoulder.
"What I'm doing here is trying to explain that all the smarty-pants with their science degrees who believe that religion is not compatible with science are lacking in imagination. That's the problem. Scientists just look through their microscopes. Religionists just look at the words on the page. Neither is seeing the forest in spite of the trees."
"That forest," Marianne said. "Would that be the same one with the attractive monkey?"
The air shifted then. Or maybe it was Marianne's imagination. Mustache stopped talking. He stared at her for a long moment. Marianne didn't like it. There was something different there. Something off. His eyes were black, lightless glass, like someone had randomly jammed them in, like they held no life in them. He blinked and then moved in closer.
Studying her.
"Whoa, sweetheart. Have you been crying?"
Marianne turned to the straw-haired woman. She stared too.
"I mean, your eyes are red," he went on. "I don't mean to pry or anything. But, I mean, are you okay?"
"Fine," Marianne said. She thought that maybe there was a slur in her voice. "I just want to drink in peace."
"Sure, I get that." He raised his hands. "Didn't mean to disturb you."
Marianne kept her eyes on the liquor. She waited for movement in her peripheral vision. It didn't happen. The man with the mustache was still standing there.
She took another deep sip. The bartender cleaned a mug with the ease of a man who'd done it for a very long time. She half-expected him to spit in it, like something from an old Western. The lights were low. There was the standard dark mirror behind the bar with the anticosmetic glass, so you could scope out your fellow patrons in a smoky thus flattering light.
Marianne checked the mustache man in the mirror.
He glared at her. She locked on those lightless eyes in the mirror, unable to move.
The glare slowly turned into a smile, and she felt it chill her neck. Marianne watched him turn away and leave, and when he did, she breathed a sigh of relief.
She shook her head. Cain reproducing with an ape-sure, pal.
Her hand reached for her drink. The glass shook. Nice distraction, that idiotic theory, but her mind couldn't stay away from the bad place for long.
She thought about what she had done. Had it really seemed like a good idea at the time? Had she really thought it through-the personal price, the consequences to others, the lives altered forever?
Guess not.
There had been injury. There had been injustice. There had been blind rage. There had been the burning, primitive desire for revenge. And none of this biblical (or heck, evolutionary) "eye for an eye" stuff-what had they used to call what she'd done?
Massive retaliation.
She closed her eyes, rubbed them. Her stomach started gurgling. Stress, she imagined. Her eyes opened. The bar seemed darker now. Her head began to spin.
Too early for that.
How much had she drunk?
She grabbed hold of the bar, the way you do on nights like this, when you lie down after you have too much to drink and the bed starts twirling and you hang on because the centrifugal force will hurl you through the nearest window.
The gurgling in her stomach tightened. Then her eyes opened wide. A thunderbolt of