Jeanne Murray Walker PROTESTANT ICON Watching him, she feels love unzip her from her chest bone to her instep. His red hair God-struck to fire on Sunday mornings, his rant unrolling like Greek catastrophe, his rabbit's pleading eyes, his arms flapping as though he might take off. Poor Catholic girls, she thinks, with their plaster Virgin Mary, their nuns yawning under cowls, gold trinkets and such spectacles of power! Everyone she knows, muttering how, when the last Pope died, the undertaker came before he was called. Even after they fire Rev. Lindgren, she dogs on, pitying her Catholic friends, still seeing that red hair, that taut body with arms outstretched like Jesus, still looking for a place to put her eyes while she thinks of God. Copyright © 2004 by Jeanne Walker Murray. All rights reserved. "Protestant Icon" was previously published in The Cortland Review