Scripture: Ephesians 6:12 — “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood…”

Scene 1 — The Sickness Spreads

Morning came in heavy. The heat made the blinds stick and shirts cling. The bell over New Jordan’s square rang out of habit more than necessity — one leathery clang, then another, hanging over Mae’s Kitchen, Whitcomb’s Hardware, Della’s Cuts, and the slow river breath hiding round a bend like it was tired of being looked at.

Thomas Gray did the pastor’s circuit with a grocery bag in one hand and a pocket full of simple prayers. Bread, eggs, chicken broth. And that other thing: the practiced smile that says, “I’m here,” without promising you’ll fix what you can’t.

Sister Evans opened the door wearing a robe that had seen more sunrises than the county. “Pastor,” she whispered, careful like joy might wake the fever. “You’re a sight.”

He was. A sweaty, under-caffeinated sight.

He set the bag on her counter and grew two extra ears. Air conditioner rattling. The cough from the back bedroom, heavy and wet like boots stuck in mud. A radio preacher fading in and out — “call this number right now” — then a burst of static, then a hymn.

“Rest,” he told Sister Evans. “Drink. Let the church feed you this week.” He wanted to say more than he could promise. He wanted to write a check on a bank called Miracle and have it clear by noon.

He prayed, the way you pray when the fever isn’t theatrical but honest. No show. Just a pleading that God remember this house’s address and find it again today.

Three doors down, Deacon Rawls met him on the porch before he could knock. Rawls held his belly like it might fall. “My Ruth’s laid up too,” he said, voice sandpapered. “Started after them bells.”

“The bells?” Thomas rubbed his temple. Tinnitus in a town without traffic.

“You know,” Rawls said, glancing past Thomas’s shoulder like something stood behind him. “Them bells you keep hearing.”

Thomas wore a smile that looked like consent if you didn’t look close. “We’ll bring soup by tonight.”

“Bring ginger,” Rawls said, then wiped his eyes like sweat, even though sweat doesn’t sting with that kind of grief.

By noon he had a list: Evans, Rawls, the Daniels boy again, Sister Clay with the delicate lungs, old Mr. Whitcomb who insisted he was “just resting his eyes” whenever the cough took him. It wasn’t panic. It was that slow, creeping tide that pretends it’s not rising until your ankles are wet.

At Sister Clay’s, the house smelled like vapor rub and lemon. A box fan did its best against a heat that had already made up its mind. Photos overlapped on the mantle — graduations, three Easter Sundays, one funeral where everyone looked like the color had been washed out the night before. Thomas refilled the humidifier, listened to the rasp in her laughter when she said, “I ain’t going nowhere, Pastor. I still owe God two more alto runs on ‘Blessed Assurance.’”

“That a contract?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” she said. “And He don’t let me default.”

At Whitcomb’s Hardware, the bell over the door made a sound like a spoon in a jar. Mr. Whitcomb sat on a stool by the register, legs crossed at the ankle, head bowed, not in prayer but in a surrender you only see in men who have always lifted more than they should. “Just resting my eyes,” he said without opening them. “Customers can holler.”

“I’ll holler for you,” Thomas said. He stood with him for a minute, both of them facing the aisle of nails and hinges like it was a view.

“Pastor,” Whitcomb finally said, “didn’t them old folks used to say you can tell a town’s health by how the bell sounds on Sunday?”

“They did,” Thomas said.

“You hear anything lately?”

“I hear more than I like,” Thomas said, and Whitcomb nodded like he was somewhere very far and very near.

On the way back to the parsonage, he let the car idle under a crooked pecan and listened to the town be the town — a kid on a bike skidding gravel; someone’s screen door; an engine that needed prayer and a carburetor. That’s when he heard it — faint, far, like it had to hike from the next county to get here.

Bells.

Not the square bell, not the tin clatter of wind against a porch chime. Church bells that shouldn’t exist here, tolling once, then twice, then gone. He checked the rearview like he might catch a sound sneaking up on him.

“Okay,” he told nobody. “We’re not doing this today.”

The dashboard clock clicked forward just to spite him. He put the car in drive and let the pecan watch him leave.

He didn’t make it home first. He cut down River Street, past Mae’s back door where grease always smelled like mercy, and stopped when he saw Miss Durant hustling her grandson from a car, his head heavy on her shoulder, a plastic bag of pharmacy rations swinging from her wrist.

“Need a hand?” he asked, already taking the bag.

“No,” she said, then, “Yes, actually. Proud takes too much oxygen.”

Inside, the boy’s forehead felt like an argument. They arranged pillows like bunkers. Miss Durant had her Bible open to a psalm that had walked through more nights than the town could count. “I’ll read,” she said, “you pray.”

They did both.

When he stepped back into the afternoon, the cicadas were working overtime and the river air carried something metal. Not blood. Not rust. Something like struck coins. Bells hiding their echo in the humidity.

He drove to the parsonage then, finally, and sat in the car a full minute with his hands on the wheel. “I’ll make the list,” he told the windshield. “I’ll make the calls. I’ll do the rounds. And if anything else wants a word, it can take a number.”

The windshield, trained by years of ministry, did not laugh.

He went inside and put broth in the freezer, wrote names on the little whiteboard by the phone, and set out two stacks of to-go containers: one for chicken noodle, one for whatever hope tastes like in a paper cup.

The phone vibrated. Alisha: How bad?
Thomas: Bad enough.
Alisha: Come by. We’re low on Gatorade. And I got a question you’re not gonna answer right.

He stared at that a second, smiled despite himself, and grabbed his keys. The bells — if they were bells — stayed wherever they were. For now.

Scene 2 — The Confession

Afternoons at the Community Center were a study in small salvations: air, fans, crayons; kids who needed both snacks and quiet words; a bulletin board where job flyers and revival posters took turns being hopeful. Alisha ran it like she was playing chords you couldn’t hear — light touch, strong rhythm.

Thomas showed up with a case of Gatorade and a grin he hadn’t earned. She clocked the sweat and slid a cold bottle across to him without commentary.

“Half the choir’s sick,” she said. “Sister Evans, two altos, Brother Joe’s cough could move chairs. Miss Durant called — her grandson’s down with a fever.”

“Okay,” he said, making the sound adults make when they have no new idea.

She watched him like he was a verse she knew but couldn’t place. “Do you hear bells?”

He blinked. “You too?”

“I hear them near you.” She said it as if she were admitting to smelling rain where there was no cloud. “Sometimes when you walk in. Sometimes when you say certain words. Not always.”

He chuckled in that way that hopes laughter can cancel a revelation. “Let’s say it’s my cologne.”

“Don’t do that.” She leaned on the counter, steady as a lighthouse. “I’ve been dreaming about that thing.”

He didn’t ask which thing. They both knew. The figure behind her in church last Sunday — soaking rag clothes, a smile that was all broken glass. He had seen it and his bones had remembered what terror cost.

“In the dream it has no face,” she continued. “Or it has every face, I can’t tell. I wake up whispering Scripture like my mouth remembers before my head does. Ephesians. The warfare one.”

“Six twelve,” he said automatically. “Not flesh and blood.”

She nodded. “I keep thinking about that boy’s house. The cold. The rocking chair. It’s not just sickness.”

“We’re not making a doctrine out of a draft,” he said, then winced at how that sounded. He had trained his tongue to build fences when what she wanted was a bridge.

“Thomas.” She kept his name soft, not a rebuke exactly. “I don’t need you to prove anything. I need to know you see it.”

“I see it,” he said. The words cost something to say out loud. He paid anyway.

A kid ran up with a crayon masterpiece — a wide blue river and two stick figures on opposite banks. “Miss Alisha, look!”

“Beautiful,” she said, then to Thomas, “We’re going to the same place. We just keep pretending we’re not.”

He swallowed. “I’ll check on Rawls again at four. You want to ride with?”

“Later,” she said. “Marcus is coming by.”

There it was — the other chord in his week. He nodded like a man who didn’t care and drank Gatorade like a man who did.

Scene 3 — The Rival’s Warning

Marcus arrived like he’d been here longer than Thomas and might be here after. City-sharp but with dust on his shoes, he moved through the Center with a pastoral ease that made people straighten in their chairs.

“How’s your aunt?” Alisha asked.

“Fever broke,” he said. “Praise God and aspirin.” Then, to Thomas: “You’re making rounds.”

“I am,” Thomas replied. “The Delta appreciates a man with clean tires.”

Marcus smiled but didn’t give him the courtesy of a laugh. “You’re in something. You know that.”

Thomas crossed his arms. “I am in many somethings.”

“This isn’t your television set,” Marcus said, no malice in it, just truth that had fought its way through. “This town has old agreements. Old hurts. Doors somebody propped open and never closed. You stepped into a hallway that doesn’t belong to you.”

“You say that like I broke into it.” Thomas’s voice put on its humor coat but didn’t button it.

“I say it like I’ve seen this before.” Marcus glanced at Alisha, his look part concern, part claim. “She needs to get out for a bit. Come guest with us in the city. Sabbatical. Two weeks. I’ll cover your teaching here. Let the storm pass.”

Alisha’s eyebrows arched up enough to write a sermon. “This my story or yours?”

Marcus didn’t flinch. “Yours. Which is why I’m saying it before something else starts speaking through you.”

Thomas felt that like a hand finding the tender place under a bruise. “Explain that,” he said, too even to be calm.

Marcus turned back to him. “When the pressure’s high, people start speaking in tongues that aren’t theirs. Sometimes it’s God. Sometimes it isn’t. Don’t romanticize either one.”

Silence pooled. Children’s laughter from the far room cut like little bells.

“I’m not leaving,” Alisha said, clear. “This is my town. This is my work.”

“Then be careful what you let sing through you,” Marcus replied, a pastor’s warning dressed in a friend’s voice. He put a palm on her shoulder — too long, too familiar — and Thomas felt a heat he could justify as theological.

“Appreciate the concern,” Thomas said, which is what men say when they’re done.

Marcus nodded, that maddeningly sane nod, and left.

Alisha stood there too still. Thomas wanted to make a joke about men and rescue fantasies and the Lord who didn’t need either. He didn’t. He said, “You hungry?”

“Always,” she said, because mercy.

They ate staff-meeting sandwiches at the Center desk, the way people do when they decide to keep working regardless of storms.

Scene 4 — Miller’s Roadhouse

Miller’s felt like a Wednesday prayer meeting that had fallen in love with neon: fryers hissing their own psalms, guitars tuning confessions, the bar back rinsing glasses like a liturgy. The crowd was thinner, clustered into small knots like folks at a graveside finding the words they think they should say.

The open sign flickered like it had its own cough. Lanelle, who could carry three plates and a rumor without spilling either, slid by with a tray of catfish and hushpuppies, then paused beside Thomas. “You gone sing the fever off us, Rev?” she asked, half teasing, half pleading in a way that made him want to lie convincingly.

“I’m thinking of negotiating with it,” he said.

At the end of the bar, a man everyone called Boots tuned a borrowed Telecaster, playing a run that stalled mid-lick like his fingers remembered something his heart didn’t. He nodded at Thomas. “Key of E if you want a friend.”

“I’ll find you,” Thomas said.

Miller gave Thomas the chin tilt. Not a question, not a command. Just, Go on then. Do what you do.

On the way to the stage he passed Alisha at a corner table, alone for once, head bent over a notebook. She looked up, met his eyes, and the world got honest for a whole second. He could almost hear what she might have said if they were the kind of people who bankrupt their own secrets.

He strapped his guitar and picked the first chord like it had dust on it. “People Get Ready,” he said, quiet, like he was practicing for the sermon without meaning to.

No train rolled in; he didn’t pretend one would. He sang it slower than Curtis, with a Delta drag that let the words breathe like they had asthma but refused to sit down. He let the phrases lean against the bar, stumble a step, then catch themselves. “You don’t need no ticket,” he sang — just those few words — and the room’s coughs found a rhythm that haunted the lyric. “You just thank the Lord,” he murmured, letting the consonants fall like coins into a jar.

Boots heard where he was going and found a harmony line on the guitar, soft, tasteful, the way men talk when the children are asleep in the next room. The fryers hissed on the backbeat. The neon’s buzz tried to be a tambourine.

Halfway through, the bells came back — so soft he could have denied them if denial were still a thing available for purchase. Not the square’s bell. Not wind in the glass. Church bells. Tolling steady behind the chord progression like a metronome somebody else set.

He closed his eyes like he could teach his ears not to be ears. When he opened them, Alisha was standing now, eyes closed, lips moving. He could tell when somebody was praying and when somebody was praying through — this was neither and both. The hair on his arms did the math faster than his doctrine.

A man at the far table bowed his head like the ticket line had already formed. Lanelle leaned against the service station door, arms crossed, eyes glossy. Miller looked up at the ceiling, as if checking for loose rafters or angels, not sure which would be more expensive.

Thomas took one chorus with no words at all — just the guitar telling the story you tell when language fails. Boots followed him down a minor turn that wasn’t in the original, and the coughs, God help them, found that new rhythm, too.

He finished the last line — the small one, the promise you only whisper when you need it — and let the chord hang like laundry between storms. The room clapped like they were in church even though they all agreed this wasn’t church and they liked it that way.

Miller met him at the foot of the steps with a glass of water and a question in his eyes he didn’t ask. Thomas shrugged a thanks and found air outside.

The night smelled like old rain and hot wires. He leaned against the rail, felt the wood’s stubbornness under his palm, and listened to his breath act like it belonged to someone else. Behind him, the room resumed — chairs scraping, glasses finding lips, Boots playing a scale that sounded a lot like a prayer he didn’t want to admit to.

Alisha’s footsteps were quiet in a way that said she didn’t want to startle him and knew she would anyway.

“You sang that like a warning,” she said.

“I sang it like a man who wishes trains took petitions.” He took a swallow and immediately wished he hadn’t said that out loud.

“What was I saying?” Her voice was careful.

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know.” Her hands did a restless duet. “It comes over me. Not like a possession. Don’t look at me like that. More like… like when a hymn you learned as a kid sneaks up and your mouth remembers before your brain.”

“Like muscle memory for the soul.”

“Something like that.” She hesitated. “Sometimes it’s Scripture. Sometimes it’s sounds. I don’t recognize the language. I don’t know if there is a language.”

“You ever write it down?”

She pulled a folded paper from her pocket, lines of jagged phonetics like a heart monitor: syllables that leaned toward Hebrew, toppled into Greek, then ran into a field and called themselves none of the above. He read a line and felt stupid for trying to read a thing that didn’t ask to be read.

“I don’t want to scare you,” she said.

“Too late for that,” he admitted, and they both smiled at the relief of honesty.

“You going to preach Ephesians?” she asked.

“I might,” he said. “Feels on brand.”

“Warfare,” she said. “Not just germs.”

He nodded. “Not less than germs. But not just.”

The roadhouse door opened and let a coil of sound and grease into the night. A couple drifted past them, the woman’s laugh already apologizing for itself. The bells — because apparently they had unions and breaks and knew how to file grievances — tolled once in the distance, not loud enough to file a complaint, not soft enough to ignore.

Her phone buzzed. She glanced down. “Miss Durant. Her grandson took a turn. I need to run.”

“I’ll ride,” he said, and this time the bells — because they could — tolled once in agreement.

Scene 5 — The Debate

Night leaned on the roadhouse roof, the kind of heavy darkness that makes cicadas get competitive. The neon from the sign did its best imitation of daylight and failed charmingly.

They crossed the gravel lot toward his car, the stones speaking in small crunches underfoot. “You sang,” she said, “like you were trying to outrun something that can walk through walls.”

“Good cardio,” he said.

“Bad theology,” she replied, but there was a smile in it, the kind that lets you keep breathing.

He unlocked the passenger door. She didn’t get in. “You think Marcus is right?” she asked. “About doors being open?”

“I think doors are like people,” he said. “Some of them swing when you barely touch them. Some you can kick all day and they won’t move.”

“Poetic,” she said. “Noncommittal.”

“Occupational hazard.”

She unfolded the paper again, let him see the jagged syllables in the porch light’s spray. He didn’t try to read it this time. He let the mystery be a mystery, which for him was either growth or exhaustion.

They drove in a silence that wasn’t empty. The road took its time. Houses slid by like tired boats. Somewhere a dog rehearsed the same argument with the moon he’d made the night before. Miss Durant’s porch light cut a square out of the dark ahead.

Scene 6 — The Sermon

Sunday morning came with a tired light that made even the stained glass look like it had flu. The ushers put boxes of tissues at the end of each pew like communion for noses. The choir loft had gaps — the 2nd alto part looked like a smile with missing teeth.

Thomas stood in the narthex and watched his people drift in. Sickness makes you honest in your gait. You stop walking like you’re being watched and start walking like things weigh what they weigh.

Sister Clay arrived slow, a hand on the rail, but she arrived, and that counted as a hymn all by itself. Brother Whitcomb took his seat two in from the aisle, hat in his lap, mouth set in that determined line men wear when they make war with air. The Daniels boy slid into the far back with his parents, shoulders up, eyes down, listening for sounds other people couldn’t hear or wouldn’t admit to.

The organist played soft, the way you play when you respect a room’s blood pressure. A child’s toy car escaped under a pew and made a quiet circuit around people’s feet until a deacon stopped it with a shoe and a smile. Fans clicked on, then off, then on again — electricity is a mood in small churches, not a fact.

Brother Levi arrived in a clean hat with the kind of slow that says, “I have known worse storms.” He tipped it. Thomas tipped back. Truce. Lesson. A thousand sermons in one gesture.

The prelude wasn’t on the program, but the congregation hummed one anyway: muffled coughs, whispers of “bless you,” the paper rattle of a cough drop finding its home, the soft rustle of tissue leaving a box. Thomas listened to it all like a conductor eavesdropping on his orchestra’s private lives.

At the pulpit, Thomas placed his Bible gently, like the wood might bruise. He didn’t open with banter. He didn’t warm up the room. He let Ephesians 6:12 draw its own breath.

“We wrestle not against flesh and blood,” he read, and the consonants came out like he’d sharpened them on a stone.

He glanced up. “Before we talk about wrestling, let me say this plainly so nobody walks out of here and misquotes me at Sunday dinner: take your medicine. Keep your appointments. Thank God for nurses and doctors and the folks that invent the little thermometer that scares your children. This is not a conspiracy sermon. This is a clarity sermon.”

A hum rose — church agreement, not quite shout. He could almost see the room sit up straighter.

“I am not here to sell you a villain you can touch,” he said. “You already know those. Bills. Sickness. The way grief sits down at your table and asks for seconds. I am here to remind you there’s a fight under the fight. And if you only throw punches at air, you’ll wear yourself out and call it faith.”

He paced without pacing, hand skimming the pulpit edge. “Sometimes the sickness in your house is an infection, and sometimes it is a suggestion. Sometimes your fever is bacteria, and sometimes it is a memory that refuses to die. Sometimes the cough is in your lungs, and sometimes it’s in your town.”

He let that sit. The choir nodded like they’d rehearsed it. They hadn’t.

“We have old agreements here,” he continued. “Lines drawn so long ago our grandparents’ grandparents forgot who drew them. Church folk this side. Roadhouse folk that. Saints over here. Sinners over there. We put up our signs. We stay in our corners. And I keep hearing bells that aren’t strung to anything, and I keep seeing people get sicker when we stop talking to each other.”

He felt the key change before he chose it. The voice in him that performs got quiet; the one that confesses cleared its throat.

“You can sanitize your hands and let your soul rot,” he said, a little harsher than planned. “Or you can take up the armor God gives — truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, the Word — and stand.”

He didn’t give them a list; he gave them pictures.

“Truth,” he said, “is when you stop lying to yourself about how afraid you are. Righteousness is not your perfect attendance pin — it’s how you treat the clerk when your prescription is late. The gospel of peace is you showing up with soup to the house you’ve been gossiping about. Faith is a shield, yes, but it’s not a wall; it’s a thing you hold together when arrows fly. Salvation is not an aisle you walked once — it’s a gate you keep walking through when shame says you’ve lost the right. And the Word of God…” He tapped the Bible, then his chest. “It’s not a weapon to win arguments. It’s a breath in your lungs when your own breath is failing.”

A cough broke into a “yes,” and a “yes” found a “mm-hmm,” and the “mm-hmm” found its cousin the “that’s right.” He didn’t manufacture it; he rode it like a river you don’t pretend to own.

He leaned closer over the pulpit, softer now. “Not flesh and blood,” he repeated. “Not each other. Not him, not her, not them. Your enemy isn’t your neighbor. Your enemy isn’t the woman who sings at the roadhouse and prays in the pew. Your enemy is the whisper that says we are separate.”

He saw faces he knew and faces he only knew by pew location: the man who sits third from the back on the left because he likes an exit; the lady who could run the whole county from a folding chair if someone would hand her a pen. He watched that whisper loosen its grip a hair. Not gone. Loosened.

“Some of you are fighting your bodies,” he went on. “I bless you for that fight. Some of you are fighting your minds. I bless you for that fight, too. But some of you are fighting the wrong person and calling it righteous. Put your hands down. Lift them up. Not to hit — to hold.”

He let the quiet hold for three breaths. He could feel the moment do that thing moments do: put on weight.

He glanced toward the open side door. The graveyard beyond was a rumor in the light — stones like teeth, grass doing the kind of worship grass knows how to do. A fly traced a lazy figure eight near the sill. From somewhere outside came the distant sound of somebody’s screen door losing an argument with its spring. Ordinary things, all of them, but they lined up like ushers at the center aisle, facing inward, waiting.

“And if we wrestle,” he said, “then wrestle together.”

The organist laid a palm across the keys and let a low chord breathe. It wasn’t in the bulletin. It was in the room.

For a heartbeat he saw it the way you see a thing before it happens — the sanctuary and Miller’s under one roof, a chorus built on a blues riff, the bells ringing in time. He shook it off like a dog shakes off river water. Not yet.

He reached for his final cadence — that slow, descending ladder that lets a congregation land without breaking. He chose his words with care, put the first one on his tongue like a note on a staff.

That’s exactly when it shifted.

The ceiling fans didn’t slow; they felt like they had decided to. The air thinned in that paradoxical way where it held more of itself. A draft found the aisle and tried on the role of procession. Somewhere a baby sighed the kind of sigh that makes a room look toward its mother, who already had things in hand and gave the room a look back that said, Worry about your own pew.

Thomas’s fingers tightened on the pulpit’s worn edge. He didn’t hear the bells. He anticipated them, the way a dog perks its ears at thunder it knows is four fields away. The world paused between inhale and exhale. He knew that pause. He’d preached that pause into existence before. This one didn’t ask his permission.

He lowered his eyes to the text and found the line he’d already read staring back with new handwriting, as if someone had traced it darker: We wrestle not against flesh and blood… The dots after blood felt like a hallway in a dream he did not want to walk.

He raised his head.

Scene 7 — The Cliffhanger

The air changed first — not colder, not hotter, but aware of itself. The kind of shift you feel when a storm hasn’t yet decided whether it likes you.

Heads turned toward the side door where the light from the graveyard makes a rectangle on the floorboards. Alisha stood there, just inside the frame, eyes closed.

Thomas felt the bell before he heard it — a vibration in his teeth, a pressure behind the ears, a sound that belonged to a distance in a room that had no more distance to give. One toll. Then another. He could swear the church hadn’t got any louder and yet the sound increased.

Alisha’s lips moved. Not in prayer’s grammar. Not in the glossolalia that gets people arguing on the internet. Something older than both. A whisper that sounded like crushed leaves and running water and the tail end of a choir rehearsal when everyone’s tired but the harmony lands anyway.

Folks shifted in the pews like animals at the edge of a field. Some bowed heads; some raised them. One boy straight-up stood on the seat for a better look, his mama tugging him back down with a prayer and a side-eye.

Thomas gripped the pulpit until the wood became his anchor. He could feel in his knees the terrifying calculus of whether this was holy or its counterfeit. He had learned to make peace with ambiguity; right now ambiguity had come to church and sat in the doorway.

Alisha’s eyes opened.

They were black.

Not the natural kind you write poetry about. Not pupils wide from light. Black like the absence of color. Black like a veil that had forgotten it was supposed to be sheer. For an instant the pupils swallowed the iris, and the whites receded like tide. She stood very still, and in that stillness the whisper poured through her.

Sister Evans gasped herself into another cough. Brother Rawls said, “Lord,” and didn’t make it a sentence. Marcus — impossibly, he was there at the back, Thomas hadn’t seen him come in — took a step forward and froze like he thought motion might break something fragile and important.

Thomas’s voice left him. He had trained that voice to do what it’s told; it had unionized and walked out.

The bells tolled once more.

Alisha’s mouth stopped moving. The blackness in her eyes softened, like the tide remembered its manners, like color decided to return.

She looked at Thomas. Not through him. At him. Like you look at a person whose hand you might take if you don’t both flinch.

The sanctuary waited for someone to name the moment, put it in a sermon, tack a Scripture on it so it would stop shifting like a thing alive.

Thomas stood there, two words in his chest that could not figure out which one wanted to be the first: Jesus and Alisha.

He chose neither.

He held the pulpit tighter, because sometimes the only prayer you have left is to keep standing