My head whipped around to again stare at her. As I instructed her? I didn't think she was a slave to do exactly what I told her. Then it dawned on me,...she wasn't a slave, as she said she was a new life form. As a new life form, she was still learning so... I guess I really was her teacher. Briefly I thought again that she would soon be through with me, not needing me. Then I remembered she was also in love with me, I also remembered she got mad about me thinking she'd not need me the last. The Chairperson of the Council was an 82 year-old woman -- a nice lady but a weak leader, so I found myself practically running the Church single handedly, chairing several committees, and doing all the bill-paying and bookkeeping myself. I was only 24 and ran prayer groups, helped at Mass and other services, visited the sick and elderly, etc. People started to think of me as the pastor, even though I had no such rank or authority. Part of my duties was overseeing maintenance in that leaky old. Unless it was an update on some study she was running on our particular subset of the change, which as far as I was aware of, she wasn’t.“Cas, how has school been?” Mom asked when we all sat down.“Fine I guess. Honestly we’ve had so much to deal with, I haven’t been paying as much attention as I probably should.”“How about the rest of you?” Mom asked.They all said variations on what I’d said. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was dropping so much on them, but they’d been as involved in other. He wanted a picture of me. I sat on a log, right at the side of the stream, my bare feet splashing in the water and my jeans dirty, and he took my picture. He must have used an entire roll of film on me sitting on that stupid log, and I loved every second of it. Then, suddenly, the water had somewhere to be. It rushed over my feet, shocking me with its newfound energy, and I laughed. I felt something oddly cold on my back, then a rush of water came down the hill, toward my log, toward me. I.