Tip-toeing through the apartment’s front room and around his brother’s sleeping family, Tom groped about for one of the green uniforms.  It was morning, but the aluminum foil that blocked the night’s neon also left the room dark in the day.  Finally, under the couch cushion, he found a shirt.  His young niece stirred at his hand’s intrusion and murmured, “Si, senor, tu esta muy macho,” in her sleep.

One-by-one he unlatched the front door locks and then slipped out quietly.  The line of Johns waiting their turn at his neighbor’s thriving home business was short and Tom was able to easily skirt past to the street.

“Sabah il Kheer,” recited the policeman, eyeing Tom up and down.  “Sabah il Noor,” Tom replied.  Just as the man’s hand began to move to his rifle butt, Tom remembered to add, “il-hamdu-Allah.”  Still the hand grasped the rifle and a gleeful snarl parted his lips.  Wincing at the memory of past beatings, Tom’s eyes grew wide at this unexpected threat.  Frantically his mind raced through the commands of Shira law. 

It came to him; “My prayer mat is upstairs because I’ll be back by afternoon.”  Begrudgingly, the policeman relaxed.

Only a surgeon and inventor, Tom could not afford both public transportation and the small apartment, so he would walk to the stoning pit.  His neighbor from the larger corner apartment was already sprawled in his lawn chair, a stack of empty beer cans beside him.  Obviously Unemployment Bonus checks had come and Tom hated himself, again, for choosing his pathetic profession.

“Que paso?” his neighbor slurred, “donde esta su nina poquita?”  Tom recalled his grandfather’s stories and wondered how different his son and daughter would have been in those days.  Still, there was no sense fighting reality, the New York Nuke had proven that decades ago.  Sadly he replied, “she’s upstairs.”

Undoubtedly the old man was eccentric.  Some said he could recite ancient Bible verses and that he possessed a gun.  Folks called him The Last Conservative, and Tom was surprised that he had lived this long.  While Conservatives had lost the Last Crusade to the Liberal-Muslim alliance, holdouts had gone underground and, in fact, it was Liberals who were first exterminated by their scheming allies.

Tom hated the stonings.  As a surgeon, he had two hands and was expected to throw extra rocks.  The one-handed people participated, but most were not accurate.  If only he been a rap star, or one of the powerful Partisan Press.  Tom secretly admired their huge mansions and ability to curry favor from the Tehran elites.

It was obvious that the old man was senile from the way he proudly stood.  His white prisoner’s tunic had smears of red and blue that seemed intentional although his message was lost on the stoners.  There was no mistaking, however, the pagan cross he had formed from the bloodstained rocks littering the ground.  Tom picked up a rock and his mind drifted to the line of burka-clad young girls waiting for his scalpel to exorcise their blasphemous passion.  He reared back and hurled the first stone.  

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