The Turquoise Pen

Flocks

Noël R. King

At first I assumed they were a Sunday school class returning to the sanctuary for the main service. They moved in a group and seemed to know each other quite well.

Then, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I heard one of them snarl.
“What is your problem?” I heard another one snap. “Why can’t you get with the program?”

“Be nice! Be nice!” I heard yet another one admonish the first two. “No internal warfare! No internal warfare!”

Oddly, they seemed intimately connected to each other—like when a large family sits in the pew together—but hardly aware of the rest of us. And they seemed so compellingly intense. What in the world were they doing here; who were they?

Fascinated, I continued to eye them throughout the Sunday service. I even followed them out to the church parking lot afterwards, where they all proceeded to board a maroon and white 55-passenger bus, which roared off the gravel lot in a cloud of dust.

“Weird,” I said under my breath, as I watched them. The pastor was standing right next to me, a lull in the usual flow of parishioners coming by to shake his hand and wish him Godspeed (to which he always replied, “Thank you, thank you! The same to you, dear sir/ma’am!”).

“Oh yes,” the pastor replied. “The Max Klines.”

“The Max Klines?” I echoed. “Who are they?”

“Well, they prefer to be called Maximus or Maximum now,” the pastor said, “but those of us who still remember Max before he became ‘the Many’ tend to call him/them by his old name.”

“Huh?” I said. I was beginning to think the pastor had been standing too long in the hot July sun. His words had perplexed me before, but heaven sakes alive—what did he mean?

“Well,” the pastor continued, “Max used to live in one human body like the rest of us. Over a period of time, however, he began finding more and more aspects of his psyche manifesting as real, live persons in his house—and each of them refused to leave once they had arrived.”

“You mean like split personalities?” I asked, appalled.

“Sort of,” the pastor responded, “only each of these people was a real live person, a different aspect of the whole Max. I soon lost track of which was the original Max, truthfully.

“It sure was rough in the beginning,” he added. “In fact, several of them tried to kill each other. At one point, there were about a dozen of them in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds, attempted stranglings and poisonings, etc. I had the so-called pleasure of visiting them at that time.”

“Did they all live?” I asked.

“Sadly, no,” replied the pastor. “Three of them succumbed to their wounds. (‘Thank you, Mrs. Wiggins. The same to you!’) The interesting thing is that within a week of those deaths, Max found two little babies in his bedroom—apparently some new junior Maxes to help replace the expired ones.”

“Are they dangerous?” I asked. “Could they hurt me? Not the babies, I mean—the big ones?”

“Maximum is very powerful,” admitted the pastor. “When they focus in different directions, it can get quite chaotic. I have had to ask them to leave church more than once when that has happened, frankly. On the other hand, when they are all focused on the same thing, they can build you a new church in a day, raise a million dollars for the Poor Fund, or write a bestselling book in a week. When that happens, my friend, they are veritable miracles in the flesh.”

“My goodness,” I said. “That’s amazing.”

“Yes, it is,” said the pastor. He added, “You know, when the Good Lord gave me charge over His flocks of sheep, He never told me that where I would find the flocks would be inside the sheep. They never mentioned that in seminary, either.”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”
—As circumstances warrant, through her Turquoise Pen column Noël R. King, Scottsville, Virginia, reports on strange and wonderful or worrisome things, including a flock of persons growing from one Maximum.