The fractal graphic is by the author, Deeann D. Mathews

How to Accidentally Grow Into the Impossible Dream

Part 1: The Impossible Dreamers (Who Don't Know They Are Dreaming, Or That It Is Impossible)

“I hate this job, Darcy, and I just don't see how you get so much joy out of it!”

So said John Goodfellow, former designer drug kingpin in Lofton County, to his February valentine, former serial killer Darcy Bowler.

Not quite girlfriend and boyfriend, because both had talked to each other about not knowing how to love the other … and, when everything in Lofton County settled down, Darcy had a lifetime to serve in a specialized facility for the criminally insane while John had to work a rehab program in the hopes of getting a job on the legal side.

They had met at the Church in the Midst of Life, which hosted the rehab program John was working and in which environs Darcy had been remanded after a serious of extraordinary events between the county jail and the facility Darcy was supposed to go to. Instead, she had been remanded to the custody of Rev. James Gordon of the Church in the Midst of Life because she was observed to be as meek as a lamb in the presence of a strong, fatherly figure.

Darcy's psychology was a piece of work, but in the presence of good parents, she reverted to an earlier set of behavior patterns. As long as her father had lived, she had never hurt a hair on anyone's head … he had been her conscience up to 20 years old, and even in her serial killing days, there were people she would not kill because of her father's influence.

Captain H.F. Lee had found a way to tap into that psychology to induce Darcy to turn herself in, and Rev. Gordon had found a way to tap in to the point that he was able to lead her to the faith of her father – and so, Darcy Bowler had come to Christ, and was indeed a former serial killer, and was known to have said to people on the long, strange journey she had to go through to get into the Gordons' custody: “I'd kill you, but Jesus said to go and sin no more!” When a serial killer killed no more, you knew she was saved.

Not that people that messed with “Big Dar,” as the six-foot-four-inch former college basketball star was known in her life working in the church stockroom ministry, got off easy. A whole bunch of criminals who had wanted to lure John Goodfellow back into a life of crime – the whole ring – was in prison raving abut Athena holding a basketball, and assumed to have partially overdosed on their designer drugs. In reality, warm water, mineral oil, and control of small muscles had gotten Darcy Bowler out of the signal bracelet and to the scene, and chalk dust in the eyes had blinded her opponents as she had gone to town with a basketball and her martial arts skills.

Darcy's legitimate job since graduation had been teaching self-defense classes – she was a world-class martial artist and markswoman. Her Marine father had started her on martial arts as a little girl to help her learn to defend herself and coordinate her body after her extraordinary growth spurt as a mid-toddler, and then noticed how she worked with a basketball … and then noticed her eye, from all the way down the court.

The only hint left to those who did not know about all that at the Church in the Midst of Life was at the big bad criminal hour on the basketball court. The men had learned there that physically and mentally, the soft-spoken, sweet new girl was not to be messed with. Offense or defense, she could evade and misdirect all kinds of attack, and she could steal the ball and lob it down the court for a basket from well-beyond half-court.

(The worst part about this: she could start a cycle that just devastated her team's opponents, because she could shoot it from so far down the court that by the time the other team recovered and got back to the ball, she or another team member were right there to contest it, and often could steal and score again and leave their opponents bewildered on their half of the court, only to have Darcy do it to them again as soon as they crossed that half-court line. Brains, brawn, and beauty – it just wasn't fair, but like referee Tarik Gaines said all the time, “She's a serial killer, people – of course it isn't fair!”)

But see, John Goodfellow just couldn't see all of that …because he met Darcy Bowler in her saved and “reverted” stage under the care of the Gordons, he was doubly blinded … to him she was Marilyn Monroe combined with Athena, the tall, statuesque Greek goddess, and Artemis, athletic goddess of the hunt … the latter two were as fictional as Santa Claus, and the first, at least conceptually, was largely a creation of Hollywood, but John Goodfellow just looked into those big blue eyes and that sweet expression and believed in all of it in Darcy Bowler, the blond bombshell of the big bad criminal hour of basketball … .

Darcy Bowler was a classic chameleon, able to adapt herself to whatever behavior she needed to in the person she wanted something from … but, she wasn't doing it on purpose with John Goodfellow. She felt safe with him, was careful not to hurt him and did her best to help … and he felt her trust and was careful to respect that, and was careful not to hurt her and did his best to help.

In other words, John Goodfellow and Darcy Bowler were learning how to love, and practicing on each other.

Which is why he shared his frustrations about working in the stockroom with her, and why she had an answer that made sense to him:

“I never imagined myself doing this, John. But to relearn what good is and be able to do it, instead of not knowing good from evil and then knowing good and having no way to do it … it's a good trade, John.”

“That's deep, Darcy. It's that Genesis 3:15 thing we heard about today.”

“Yup. We are here doing good for the entire city, making sure other people don't get desperate and go the way we went.”

“You know, as a drug dealer, I never thought of things that way. Desperation was my whole business.”

“I don't really think that way either, but I try to imagine how my father Captain Bowler would say it, and he was a good model of our Heavenly Father. Rev. Gordon says that maybe it is the Holy Spirit Who helps me think of these things in terms I can understand, because I don't remember having these kinds of conversations with my dad, but I saw him doing things like this and it made him happy. It makes me happy now too.”

John stopped and sighed, and smiled.

“Well, if you're happy, I'm happy, Darcy. It isn't so bad, after all … it's just boxes and supplies. We'll never get rich doing this, but, I've been there and done that and when you do it wrong it all goes away anyway.”

“That's true, John. That's why we're here, but it is good to be here.”

“Yeah, I need to humble down a little – I was 15 minutes away from hard time – and to hear those officers upset with me escaping them after all, that I had sense enough to stay out of the trap. But I didn't – I was just late. Anyhow, to hear them going on and on … there's no forgiveness in this world we're in, Darcy, no real second chances. People would be mad knowing we can do even this instead of having us behind bars … but it's God in Christ that takes sinners and gives them a new life. Given where fool Goodfellow should have been today, I ought to be glad God bothered to let me be here, especially working right beside you!”

Darcy Bowler smiled that huge smile, and he just knew she felt the same way before she said it.

“I thank God for all that too!”

“Donuts!” Deacon John Bell announced as he brought a dolly full of donut boxes. “Some corporate party got canceled yesterday so I got these half-off as day-olds! Come get some, my ministers of the stockroom, with your coffee!”

“Want one?” John said to Darcy.

“I don't really do donuts,” she said. “But I'd love some coffee.”

“Would you try a piece of a donut if I gave it to you?”

“A little piece, sure.”

“How do you like your coffee, Darcy?”

“Just with a touch of cream, no sugar.”

John went and got a big apple fritter for himself and two cups of coffee, and a big bunch of napkins. He then tore his apple fritter apart, because...

“Ever eaten an apple fritter?”

“Not a whole one. Sometimes my dad would do what you were doing, though … he said the best two parts of the apple fritter were right in the center or the crunchy bits on the edges, and since he wasn't supposed to have them either, he would cut them up and and we would eat a bit every day while I was in high school, eating the center first and the crunchy bits last.”

“Well, mine isn't going to last for days,” he said, “but, I thought you could have a center bit and a crunchy bit if you only wanted a little piece.”

“Okay. Thank you so much, John. That's very kind.”

John handed her the center of the center and the crunchiest crunchy bit on a napkin, and ate the rest as they both drank their coffee and refreshed themselves before working until lunchtime.

Part 2: The Reality Gallery Weighs In

Other members of the big bad criminal hour of basketball and the stockroom ministry just shook their heads this day as they had every day since John had clearly started to show interest in Darcy, and since she had not discouraged him. Since they couldn't talk him out of it, and didn't dare say anything to her, they talked among themselves.

“Goodfellow has lost it – the stress of just barely keeping from being caught up and put back in jail has cracked him.”

“I know – Big Dar is pretty and all, she really is, but she's a serial killer, gosh darn it!”

“Yeah – you get with a woman like her and wake up dead for ticking her off!”

“Frank, you can't wake up dead – you're dead, man.”

“George, you know what I'm saying!”

More thoughtful members of those two groups held their peace on this particular day until after lunchtime, when everybody working got to pick a box from the Healthy Lunch program sets before they were served out to the people at large.

“Mrs. Carson's Catering came through today – their sandwiches are the best!” John said to Darcy.

“I love a good sandwich,” Darcy said, “but I hate these because I have such a hard time choosing.”

“Well, they are all good – tell you what,” John said. “You pick your favorite, I'll pick mine, and then we'll cut them in half and share and each taste two.”

“I can't do any cutting, John – you know my situation.”

“Well, I don't have those kinds of restrictions – I can't handle more than so much of any drug of a certain type, but hey: I can get a butter knife from the kitchen!”

He did and they sat down and he cut their sandwiches into fourths while she went and got him his favorite soda – “Hey, you remembered!” – to go with her bottled water. And there they sat and spilt their potato chips and salad – and John Goodfellow started eating his vegetables for the first time in 20 years – and many, many people shook their heads.

“The man is just itching to be killed – he's going to make a move on that body of hers and end up adding to her body count for real!”

But, two other friends – brothers, actually – shook their heads with deeper, sadder reflection.

“I just look at those two and I realize, of course they are both perfectly cracked, but, I gotta say this, Max: we're both here because we were wrong about love. We were totally wrong. We were totally wrong about love.”

“Look at those two. She's a beauty but a deadly beauty, and he's trying to be the reason she becomes a black widow. He's as ugly as sin – ain't no way in the world he should be anywhere near a woman like that. They're both flat broke, living on the charity of the church and working like two slaves with all that. She's going to the crazy house, and, knowing how hot-headed Goodfellow is, he probably will end up back behind bars eventually anyway. They have no future at all, individually or collectively.

“And yet, there they are, having their little budding love feast courtesy of Mrs. Carson's Catering, looking like they have forever in front of them instead going back to the boxes brigade – who in the world has been doing all these extra orders anyway?”

“I don't know, Orson, but while all this killing that has been going on, we should have gotten whoever had that bright idea to order all these extra medical supplies and freezers and the rest. This is ridiculous.”

“Maybe, Max. Maybe not. They apparently are having a time in New York with this new coronavirus thing, and you know Revs. Baxter and Gordon ain't closing nothing unless the city provides us somewhere safe and the battered women somewhere safe – and maybe still not, because the city doesn't have enough services for the poor and those that might become poor if they have to do some kind of quarantine thing. I had a great-grandma who lived through the 1918 pandemic and told me about it. It got bad, Max.”

“Yeah, Orson, I heard from my grandfather who was a doctor during the last polio epidemic in the 1950s that stuff like that can get bad. His attitude at his clinic always was to be over-prepared. His motto was always 'We can take admitting that we were wrong about an epidemic if we are proven wrong – let people laugh and ridicule. We must not fear humiliation, for our first task is to be prepared to keep ourselves well and keep them alive and help them get well if they are wrong and we are right.' ”

“But, see, that goes back to where we were wrong about love, Max.”

“I don't follow you, Orson.”

“We thought we just had to get grown and get rich, and if we couldn't work our way we could always learn to trick and steal to get money, and then we could buy our way to the women that we wanted if we couldn't quite buy the love. A lot of men think like us, Max.”

“Which is how a lot of us end up in prison, messing with these ungrateful broads, trying to get enough to keep them happy, Orson.”

“But that's my point. What if real love is more about taking what you have and doing all you can with it with and for someone who wants the same thing with you? I mean, look at John and Big Dar over there. He almost looks halfway decent in the light coming from those big blue eyes, and you know John never touches healthy food, but because he shared his potato chips, she shared her salad, and so he's not going to sit in front of her and not eat some.”

“Yeah, you'd almost think they were teenagers or something, Orson.”

“It's kind of like that horrible thing Big Dar does on the basketball court – you know how she'll steal the ball, sink it in at half court or beyond, let you watch that in disbelief and get all disoriented so she and her teammates can get all up on you just as soon as you get the ball to half court and steal it again and start the cycle over?”

“Don't mention it, Orson. Both my ACLs start hurting when you talk about it.”

“Okay, but look at it from the view of being a teammate. It looks good to them. They're just running the plays that work … so, look here. John Goodfellow doesn't have anything, but he uses what's in front of him here to look out for Darcy Bowler. She lets him know how much she appreciates it all the time, and then does a little something to show it, and the play starts again. They're just running the plays, man. They have no future, just like we don't, but they're running the plays. What if we were wrong about love, and we were wrong because we never knew the right playbook and never knew to go after women who knew the right playbook?”

Max considered this and shook his head again.

“Now you have my soul hurting to go with my ACLs, Orson – how do THEY have the playbook, the ugly designer drug pusher with one foot into another 20-year-term and the other on a banana peel, and the serial killer barely missing death row on her way to the crazy house when this corona thing is over – how do THEY have the playbook, and we don't, man? How does THAT happen?”

“I don't know, Max, but Mama always said, we see stuff for a reason. We're not going to be in re-entry forever – we'll finish, and then have to go back into the world, but now we'll know something that might help us not fall back into the same habits … and if the playbook works for them, we're not nearly as bad off so you know it will work for us once we find the right woman!”

Rev. and Mrs. Baxter were quietly eating their lunch and overhearing the conversation of Max and Orson about Darcy and John, and Mrs. Baxter leaned over and patted her husband's mahogany hand.

“You know when we get to Heaven, I just realized something we will realize we were wrong about, down here, Charles.”

“What?”

“The idea that God is not good enough to figure out how to give men like Max and Orson examples they can understand. We have the playbook, but our lives and the Gordons' lives are so different from the men we serve that it is hard for them to see a better future into which they fundamentally fit as we present it. But John and Darcy are their friends from the big bad criminal hour of basketball – they can see that.”

“You know, Onyx, I think you are on to something.”

Part 3: We Now Return to Our Coverage of the Impossible Dreamers

Meanwhile, John and Darcy finished their meal and got up and stretched … Deacon Bell had taught them to do that before and after every break, and Darcy had taught the whole ministry some advanced stretching techniques from her athlete life. But still, on top of that … .

“I'm telling you, I do that back flex you showed me in the morning before my shower, and I just don't have the back lockups any more,” John was saying to Darcy at that moment. “I hate that all the use I get out of it is to put in more hours here, but, for right now, this is good enough!”

“I'm glad to know it helped you,” she said with a smile. “After all, you will not always be here, even though you started the re-entry program over again from scratch – if you can sell desperation, you can sell anything, and there is a big world out there you can sell in.”

“You're talking about that e-commerce stuff? I never could get the hang of it.”

“I think you can be good at anything you put your mind to, John.”

“Well, when you put it that way, Darcy … I wasn't really serious about it before because I was thinking about going back to crime … but, now that I know that I know that I know I'm not doing that, maybe it is time to put these skills to other use. You're right – you got former drug dealers out there selling music, clothing, housing, even religion – once you know how to sell and run a sales business, you know.”

“I know you can do it, John. You just have to prove it to yourself, and the world, but I know you can do it.”

“Maybe I will, Darcy. Maybe I just will do that!”

“One of us should have a future, John. Why not you?”

“Yeah, why not me!”

Then he got quiet, and what he said only Darcy could hear.

“If I have a future, you're going to have a future too, Darcy. You gotta go to prison, but, that doesn't mean you don't have a future. You have a lot of good ideas. You can write stuff. You can learn stuff. Heck, if I wasn't so mad about being in prison, I could have hung out at the library and had two or three degrees by now.”

“I love reading, and crochet hooks are blunt – I've learned to crochet from Mrs. Gordon and I'm really getting good at it, since I can't take my sewing machine.”

“See? You can still do good there – and, they gotta have a stockroom at the Veteran's Lodge.”

“Oh, they have a lot of big, strong vets there. They won't need me.”

“Not doing this, but by the time you get there, the way things are going, you'll be able to move up to administrator or something. I mean, somebody has to have the clipboard and count and keep track of stuff, and you're good at that. What I mean is, you're building a record of good behavior, and that will go with you to prison. It will be a better future and you're actually building it now. I've been to prison, so I know how that works.”

“I really appreciate you telling me this, John. I'm not afraid or anything about it, because I don't need to be out in the world again where there are so many people that need killing. I learned from Rev. Gordon that all I was doing was getting in the way of God handling all that the way He perfectly handles such things, so I don't want to be tempted to going back to that. I like the idea of living a quiet and peaceful life, and the Veteran's Lodge is really pretty and you get a lot of fruit to eat there.”

“You like fruit but not donuts, huh?”

“Natural sugar with natural fiber – it works better for the body than donuts.”

“It's cheaper, too, especially around Lofton County because of Fruitland Memorial Park.”

“That's where the Veteran's Lodge is.”

“Oh, you're moving to Fruitland – well, hey, woman, that's not bad! If you've got to live in near-solitary confinement in a military stockade for the rest of your life, let it be there!”

“I was told by Rev. Gordon that my application has been granted, so, that's where I'll be spending the rest of my life.”

“And it's not a long drive from here … I don't have a car or good credit to get one, but … but I'm going to have all those things! I'm telling you now and you remember it, Darcy: if I have a future, you're going to have one! I don't know how we're going to do it, but you can take John Goodfellow's word for it!”

“I believe in you, John.”

“Heck, woman – I don't even need to own a business now! All I need to do is convince the Veteran's Lodge to give a civilian a job down there!”

“No, that won't work, John. Too many vets want those jobs. Better start your business and offer the Veteran's Lodge services, and then you can come and go as you like.”

“Okay, then I'm going to make myself into a legal billionaire, figuring out what vets need and selling it to them – that's my market and Lofton County is absolutely full of vets!”

“It certainly is. When I turned myself in, four out of the five men in the room were vets – and although I don't know if Captain Lee or Chief Inspector Dubois are available to talk to you, Revs. Baxter and Gordon are right here! They love helping people like us!”

“Yeah, and I can hire some of these other guys here too!”

“And I can give you ideas even in prison! My dad was a vet, so I kind of know what they like, and I had a great team of military wives and women who used to work under me that I learned from.”

“Yeah!”

John Goodfellow could not remember, since before his mother's death, when he had been so happy.

“See, Darcy? It's like this. I know you were praying for me to not get to that appointment I was supposed to be at, because you told me I couldn't do it any more. God had called me out of being a drug dealer, but I just couldn't see it. But you did. You see me. I see you. So, gosh darn it, if I'm going to have a future, then gosh darn it, you're going to have a future!”

“Okay.”

Mrs. Baxter passed by with a dolly full of extra salads, and Darcy plucked one off to share with John.

“You're going to need a lot of strength, John. Please share another salad with me.”

“Yeah, I guess I am going to have to get my diet together, now that we have a future and all that.”