Excerpt: not sure yet

Mrs. Lassiter was a great turkey of a woman, squatting as she did at the old wooden church office desk, glaring blearily over its great frame, her head rocking slowly back and forth, back and forth like a skin bag pendulum, making the red, heavy folds of flesh that dangled from her throat and greatly resembled a turkey’s snood wobble comically. Any interaction with Mrs. Lassiter by children or sensitive adults was preceded by deep breaths and concentration so as not to laugh. It would not do to burst into gales of unsuppressed laughter at this poor church lady who never did nothing to nobody, other than be huge and sagging and wobbly around the head. There had not been a mister Lassiter for many years, more years than the children who were her usual affliction to remember, and indeed most of the townsfolk and church goers forgot long ago that she had a first name, much less the name of her deceased husband. That was fine by her. Today she sat at her post, fingering the stack of papers in her hands absentmindedly, and stared, sightless, out the window at the grey cold November day, and did not see the brown leaves fly past the dirty window, or the dog that sniffed under the cars in the gas station across the street, or the man who stood beside the store with the lit cigarette in his hand.
No, Mrs. Lassiter was thinking about the chocolate silk pie she had made last night, the remaining one she hadn’t eaten yet, and the first season of True Blood that she was only halfway through, although it was for the fourth time. Her head rocked back and forth in its perpetual suggestion of negation, and she turned back to the desk and started up the great whirring beast that served as the church’s computer.