An Imperfect Miracle by Thomas L. Peters

him a few sticks of chewing gum to calm him down some. In between chomping on his gum and scratching his belly and yanking up on his belt, the guy did a lot of talking.
    â€œIt’s television that’s done it. It’s made everybody in the whole country stupid. Fifty years ago you wouldn’t have seen all this hubbub over some silly thing like this. People don’t know how to think straight anymore, so when they hear somebody on television blathering about the Virgin Mary showing up on a wall somewhere, then they figure they all gotta go and see it. What a sorry bunch of sheep, if you ask me.”
    â€œI don’t know, Harold,” the chubby lady said. “People say it looks just like her.”
    The guy grunted and then yanked up hard on the seat of his pants, where I guess it was binding him some.
    â€œPretty soon the stupid people will take over the whole world, and there won’t be anything left for educated, intelligent folks like us to do except sit at home and moan for the good old days when you could reason with people.”
    â€œQuit being so cynical, Harold,” the chubby lady said. “Maybe she really is some kind of a message from aliens, like your friend Joe says. Or maybe she’s an alien herself who’s just landed on earth, and those steps are her spaceship.”
    The guy grunted and rubbed his chin a little, like he was thinking it over. They kept the line moving along pretty fast, and finally the bearded guy and the little chubby lady shuffled up near the steps and sort of bent down and started squinting at Mary. They reminded me of people staring in at the polar bears at the zoo. I knew because Dad took me once to the big zoo down in Pittsburgh after I’d been bugging him about it for a long time. Then he spent the whole drive back home griping about how expensive it was and how the country was going down the drain.
    â€œIt doesn’t look like anything but a dirty old block of concrete to me,” the guy finally said, straightening back up again. “No self-respecting aliens would ever travel in a spaceship as sorry as that.”
    â€œI don’t know, Harold,” the chubby lady said. “See her little eyes and her cute little nose. I think she even has a mouth too, although it’s not much of a mouth. It’d be nice if she had some teeth. Maybe the town ought to chisel some in for her. I doubt if the aliens would mind. They must be friendly, or else they would have blown us all to bits by now.”
    The guy snorted and then scratched himself some more.
    â€œIt’s all television’s fault. Do you know if they got any good restaurants in this stupid little town?”
    Then they left and it was my turn. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I just folded them in front of me like I did at church sometimes. When I got to the bottom step I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to kneel or not, but since we never kneeled at our church I decided not to. I waited for Mary to say something, but she just kept staring at me with those big sad brown eyes. Her face looked even more baked into the concrete and permanent than it did before, which I was glad about since I’d been a little worried that she might fade away under the hot sun.
    I wondered if I should ask her for a favor, like most of the other folks were doing. But I didn’t have a runny nose or a scratchy throat or anything much that was bothering me. I looked over at Carlos, who was smiling at me real bright and happy now. It made me feel pretty important, since it wasn’t like he was doing that for everybody in line. Then I remembered what Carlos had told me to say, and I asked her in a loud whisper if she’d do another miracle to prove she was real so that the town wouldn’t bulldoze her.
    â€œHealing up that old guy just now was pretty sweet, but not everybody got to see it. Couldn’t you do something way up in the sky, like paint some