Beckie had come to Arvada to be close enough to her sons so they could visit her on weekends. Unfortunately, the visitations did not go well.Beckie’s tiny studio apartment was crowded and in a not-too-nice area. Everyone was crammed into a small space; two of the boys slept on the floor. The youngest shared his mother’s bed. She did not have cable TV, video games, a basketball court, four-wheel drive ATVs for whizzing through the forest, or a pool with a diving board for doing tricks. Beckie did not ski or snowboard. She drove an old car. Most importantly, she cooked food they no longer liked. Beckie still like to fry eggs in grease, make baloney sandwiches, and serve chocolate milk.It was a pain for any of the guys to spend the weekend at their mother’s place. They complained often and loudly. They were disrespectful to her, calling her names to her face. Once she become so angry that she slapped one of the guys. None wanted to come back to her house ever again.As the visitations diminished, Beckie began to call deeper and deeper into a persistent, all-consuming depression.Beckie’s world lost its colors, going to gray then finally to black. Black as the darkness itself that she felt in every extremity of her body. It sat like a thousand-pound weight on her neck, pressing her down to her knees, to the floor itself. She stopped eating, but the stress itself ballooned her weight. Her voice dropped from her pleasant alto to a deep bass. She began to have delusions, seeing things that were not really there.One terrible night, the father of evil, Lucifer himself visited her, claiming her sacred soul as his own. “It is strange,” Beckie thought, “he doesn’t look like any of the pictures she had seen.” He bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Burton, the very nice mechanic who had worked on her car. “I never knew that the Devil could be nice. It is just part of his trickery. He is the master of all deception.”

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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