Welcome and enter the hallowed halls of the bloody sacrament (wipe your feet!). The martyr of the week for February 18-24 is St Prix (Feb 24). Prix was the Bishop of Rouen and was the subject of much intrigue during his convoluted life. Depending on who you want to believe, our saint ended his life in one of two ways. The first was that Prix was executed (his head split by a halberd) in retribution for his tattling on a certain Hector, who was defrauding a woman of her estate. The other ( my personal favorite) is that (try and follow me) because Prix arranged the marriage of the King's son(Merovaeus) to the sister of his poisoned mother( his aunt, Brunhilde)) he incurred the wrath of the King's second wife (Fredegund). Fredegund tried to have the bishop banished, didn't succeed so she hired an assassin who fatally stabbed him in the armpit.

Submission: Rain - by E. Heffernan It was a fine, sunny afternoon that one strange day. The sun was casting a warm glow upon my backyard and there was a gentle breeze in the air. It was one of those rather lazy afternoons, and I was simply sitting in my rocker on the porch, creaking back and forth and practicing the ancient art of laziness. But then the strange rain came. It didn't exactly simply get cloudy at once. Instead the sky darkened to a deep purple and then slowly hued down to a deep ruddy cast. The clouds did not roll in from the distance like a normal summer thunder shower does, instead they sort of erupted into existence, high in the sky above me. A slight breeze started up and it carried with it the faintest of aromas. Something that to this day I cannot identify and yet I will always remember. It has no real description, nothing to compare it with, actually, but If I were pressed on the subject I would have to say that it was a strange cross of putrid decay, fresh fruit, and ozone. After a while the rain started to come. Big rain, as my grandfather had once called it. The kind of rain with large, fat droplets that splatter on the ground and soak everything in its path. I was sitting there quietly, simply watching this odd hued rain, When I heard the first thump. It startled me, a loud intrusion after my brain had grown accustomed to the white noise of the rain shower.

I glanced around my porch, thinking that perhaps the slight breeze had knocked over one of my ferns or something of the sort, but nothing was amiss. I had just settled back into my rocker and was prepared to forget the incident when a second thump brought me to my feet. It had come from the roof. I stood there a moment, head cocked and ears alert, hoping to identify this mysterious noise from above, when three more thumps occurred in quick succession above me. I was prepared to go out to the garage and grab my ladder and take a peek at my roof, when I heard something roll down the overhang of my porch and thump wetly into the mud beside my house. I strolled over to where the noise had emitted and peered over the ledge. I was highly unprepared for what stood before me. Lying in the mud, face upturned to the rolling rain, was a human head. I simply stood there glumly staring at it. My brain simply could not fathom any other reaction. As I stood there, there came another resounding thump from my roof. There was a slight gust of wind and the rain increased into a wrenching gail, and suddenly it was raining heads all over my yard. I just watched them. There were big ones, little ones, men and women of many races and ages. And they were falling in my backyard. Not all of them landed as gracefully as my little friend in the mud before me. Many of them simply splattered into pieces with contact to the ground. This heavy downfall of heads lasted a rather short time, actually. About five minutes, top. However this was plenty of time to litter my continued on page 5