Maryann sautés onions, celery and carrots, adds some wine or something that brings it to a flame. She picks up Daphne's heart and massages it, blood dripping. She's wearing Gran's dress and that mole that's always so prominent when she's wearing Gran's dress and dickie. She cuts the heart into chunks, spongy and terrible, singing to herself, blood everywhere, fresh spices from the garden. They go into the veggies on the stovetop, her hands covered in blood. They sizzle.

Eric sizzles, bound in silver, groaning on the altar. "You see? Just as our Lord our savior was betrayed for thirty pieces of silver, a few ounces of silver can betray a child of Satan to the world!" Sookie screams, exasperated, that this doesn't even make sense, and asks how any of them can listen to him. She's always been strange, she's always lived in the strangest world: how can she possibly understand how afraid they are? How afraid they've been, for two years, watching the world stop making sense around them. Death and life, inverted. Murder and sex twisted into beauty, in a world that already terrified them.

Any other week I maybe wouldn't feel so compassionate, toward the Fellowship, but I just spent the last 36 hours watching people driven mad, murderously mad, by their own racist, crazy stuff, whipped into a frenzy by powers that don't care about them, and know they're past caring if they even understand what's behind the fear. Health care is the new gay marriage. In some ways it's stupider -- mostly it's less stupid, because nothing is stupider than fighting about gay marriage -- but all of it acts on nothing approaching facts or common sense. The birthers, the deathers, they scream the most appalling imaginary things, and none of them can tell you why they're so angry: just that something precious is being taken away from them. And something is. I'm not denying that. Something precious is being taken away from these people, whether or not I agree with it. And that's sad; it makes me sad to think of what that must be like. It's super fucked up, but mostly it's scary and sad.