Scripture: John 10:27 — “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”
Scene 1 – Passing Through Town
Morning gathered itself over New Jordan, slow and warm, the kind of light that took its time climbing porches and coaxing screen doors open. Main Street wore last year’s paint, and the brick fronts kept their secrets under hand-painted signs: Mae’s Kitchen, Whitcomb’s Hardware, Della’s Cuts. The river breathed from somewhere just out of sight, a low hush beneath the town’s small noises.
The Community Center sat at the bend like a pocketknife—useful, familiar, always within reach. The front doors were propped with a milk crate, and a plywood ramp ran down to the sidewalk, edges scuffed pale. A pickup backed to the curb with its tailgate down; the bed held a neat disorder of boxes marked RICE, BEANS, and CARE. Volunteers moved in a loose rhythm: lift, step, pass, and the occasional grunt that turned into a laugh.
Alisha Freeman worked from the middle like she’d always been there. Clipboard tucked to her side, pen behind her ear, sleeves rolled to the elbow, she pointed with the flat of her hand rather than a finger—polite even in a hurry. “Riverside gets three,” she said. “Whitaker’s two. Put Mrs. Elgin’s on the porch and knock twice—she’s got that old doorbell that buzzes like a hornet.”
A small boy tried to take a box that outweighed him by a factor of three. Alisha bent, slid her hands under, and made a show of letting him “help” while she carried most of it. He walked backwards in front of her, eyes lit with his own strength, the way small boys do when someone lets them believe in their arms.
Across the street, Thomas Gray cut the corner toward the church, jacket slung over his shoulder, steps easy, posture careful. He paused at the Center steps, letting the jacket slip to one hand, the other lifted in a half wave.
“Pastor Gray,” Alisha called. She didn’t stop moving; the box needed to make it to the table. “Looking for a sermon? Or a strong back?”
“Which one gets me lunch at Mae’s?” he said.
“Both, if you don’t complain while you do it.”
He took the next box in the chain, the weight shifting from a teenager’s arms to his. He passed it down. The motion put him closer to Alisha than he might have planned, and for a moment she was just there—ink smudge on her thumb, curl slipping low at her neck, the smell of powdered dish soap and coffee on her sleeves. Her eyes flicked up, not a flirt, just a share—this is the work; good to see you in it.
“I’m making rounds after lunch,” she said, checking a list. “Berniece. Maybe Levi if he’s in a mood I can manage. You free?”
He opened his mouth, and something brushed the air—bells, low and unhurried, like someone had put time itself on a metronome and set it to “steady.” Not loud; no one flinched. The sound was more weight than volume, a pressure on the edge of hearing, a presence almost like a temperature.
He glanced toward the empty church tower. The stenciled number on the nearest box swam into focus again. He realized his answer had been waiting on his tongue long enough to be noticed.
“You okay?” Alisha asked without looking up, pen ticking down a column.
“Yeah.” He shifted the box to the table. “I’ll meet you at one.”
“Bring your pastoral voice,” she said. “And those shoulders.”
He tipped two fingers. A volunteer brushed past, announcing to no one: “These cans got dents. Don’t cut your hands.” Somewhere, a screen door gave its quiet complaint and closed again. The morning kept its own pulse. Alisha paused long enough to look toward the street for no reason at all, then back to her page as if she had remembered where the next line belonged.
A flyer came loose from the bulletin board and skittered faceup along the concrete: COMMUNITY DINNER SATURDAY. Someone stepped over it without reading.
Scene 2 – Pastoral Rounds & the Song
Sister Berniece presided from a recliner that had molded itself to her shape, quilt folded neat across the back. The TV glowed with a game show, volume just shy of audible. A pan of cornbread cooled on the stove, the kitchen carrying its warmth into the front of the house like a promise. The place smelled like eucalyptus rub, lemon cleaner, and whatever thread of perfume lingers on a Bible that’s been in the same lap for forty years.
“They got too much running in gospel now,” she said, scratching one ankle with the other foot. “All them notes like they afraid to stand on one. Give me a good root and I’ll call it a day. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” Alisha said, grin tucked in the corner of her mouth. Thomas gave the pastoral nod that says this is not the mountain I will die on today.
They covered the proper topics—weather (hotter than last year, but when is it not), knees (stiff, but not the end of the world), and the choir (could stand to learn their parts without letting Sister Clay do all the remembering). Neighborhood names drifted like boats on a slow current. Here and there a past kindness surfaced and was acknowledged without ceremony—who took who to the doctor, who left soup on which porch, who mowed a yard when the son was out of town and the daughter too proud to ask.
Near the end, Berniece’s eyes slid past the two of them, toward the window that showed nothing but her own curtain. The TV threw a bright round of applause into the silent room.
“You keep your ears open,” she said.
Alisha’s fingers loosened on her notebook. Thomas didn’t breathe differently, but the air noticed anyway.
“They been tollin’ again,” Berniece went on. “Before. You know.” She waved a hand, unwilling to give shape to anything that could keep it.
No one asked “what.” No one needed to. Alisha glanced at Thomas as if they shared a hallway in a house full of doors, each one marked with a word neither wanted to read out loud.
On the porch, Berniece pressed two jars of green beans into Alisha’s hands. “Don’t let ‘em sit,” she said. “They’ll go soft on you.” Then, with a wink only half a joke: “And don’t stand on my steps and talk about me. My neighbors got ears.”
They made it down the steps with the beans and the caution. On the sidewalk, heat pushed up from the concrete. Down the block, a screen door slammed and someone said “Lord, help” in a tone that meant my hands are full, but I’m not asking you to put anything down.
“You thinking about Miller’s?” Alisha asked, unlocking the car.
“If there’s a reason,” Thomas said, setting the jars carefully on the back seat.
“Sing something, and I’ll call it a reason.”
He leaned his hip against the roof and let a breath find its own level. When he sang, it came low enough to ask you to lean closer—“Do You Hear What I Hear” pulled through a darker weather, edges softened, notes pressed together where the paper left space. He didn’t rush the phrases. He let the vowels carry like they were covering distance.
On “hear,” Alisha slid a third above him without looking for permission, then dipped under on the next line, steady enough to hold the chord when his melody bent sideways. She didn’t overdecorate. She left room for the air. A man walking by with a sack of feed slowed, eyes forward, ears turned. A child pulling a wagon stopped dead, plastic wheels lifting a little divot of gravel and holding it.
They landed the last word together, the sound hanging a beat longer than habit would have allowed. No one commented. Traffic moved again like a hand taken off a pulse.
“That,” Thomas said, watching the wagon boy blink, “would stop Miller’s in its tracks.”
Alisha smiled, seatbelt already sliding, the smallest apology at the corners. “Another time,” she said. “I’ve got plans tonight.”
The sentence sat in the air between them. It wasn’t heavy. It did not apologize for itself. If a name rode in it, the name kept its own counsel.
On the road to Brother Levi’s, the ditch ran low, the herons took off like gray paper cutouts, and somewhere without a source the tolling brushed past twice, separated by more breath than logic. Alisha kept her hands at ten and two. She didn’t mention anything. Thomas watched fence posts blur into arithmetic. The beans knocked softly in their jars with each turn.
Levi wasn’t home. A cat watched them from his porch rail with the disinterest of a landlord. A beer can on the steps told a story without sentences. They left a note under the stone ashtray—Alisha’s handwriting neat and unafraid: Stopped by. Call if you need anything. On the way back, they drove in a quiet that registered as peaceful to anyone looking, charged to anyone listening too close.
They didn’t overwork the silence. They let it ride.
Scene 3 – Afternoon at the Community Center
When they came back through the Community Center doors, afternoon had tilted a few degrees toward evening. The multipurpose room carried paint fumes and children in equal measure. A mural tried to become the river by way of blue tempera; the word COMMUNITY stretched across butcher paper like it was still deciding what kind of letters it wanted to wear.
Alisha stepped into the room and was immediately requisitioned by three small people who believed she could solve both the problem of a dried-out marker and the crisis of a misspelled name. She knelt, anchoring a boy’s wrist with two fingers while he made his R less like thunder and more like a road.
Near the lobby table, a tall man in a gray suit stood with a clipboard. The shoes said city. The smile said I know how to be here without taking the air from anyone else. He took in the room like someone reading a well-loved hymn in a different key.
Alisha looked up, catching Thomas in the doorway. “Come meet someone,” she called, hand lifted in a half‑wave. She wiped a green streak from her wrist with a napkin and led him over. “Pastor Marcus Hale.”
Marcus turned. The smile shifted from welcome to recognition without losing its temperature. “Memphis,” he said, no question mark. “Pastors’ conference. You preached on Elijah.” He let the next line land softer. “We prayed for you. And your family.”
Thomas set a stack of tired hymnals on the table. The edges had been turned by hands that learned the same songs before there were pages to hold them. He gave the polite nod that holds gratitude and no further questions in the same thin space. “I appreciate that.”
Marcus didn’t crowd the pause. “You were in Memphis,” he said, conversational, not fishing. “Why the Delta?”
Thomas smoothed the top hymnal with his palm, a habit more than a necessity. “I’m pastoring here,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.” He lifted his eyes. “What about you? Why are you here?”
Marcus looked past Thomas to where Alisha crouched by the mural, hair escaping its tie, laugh catching the room and tilting it. A toddler bumped her knee with a small truck, and she made the proper dramatic sound of injury to earn him a grin. Marcus’s thumb tapped the clipboard once.
“Her,” he said.
There was no flinch in the word. No apology either. Just a man stating a fact he had already considered from more than one angle.
A sound skimmed the edge of the room, low and regular—like a clock in an unfamiliar house, one you only hear when the conversation drops. Thomas’s eyes ticked up. Marcus’s head tilted a degree, as if a train had gone by two towns over and he’d registered the way it thought. Neither chased it. A volunteer came in with a box. The door made a soft thud. The room resumed its own ordinary weather.
Marcus extended his hand. Thomas took it. The grip was plain. It neither pressed nor retreated. Both men filed small details into drawers with accurate labels. Later, they would be able to find them in the dark.
“Good to meet you,” Marcus said.
“Welcome to New Jordan,” Thomas replied.
Marcus nodded once and glanced back at the river of blue letters on paper, at the child with the truck, at Alisha, whose attention moved across the room like a quiet tide.
“Looks like you’ve already found the center,” Thomas said, following his look.
Marcus’s mouth turned at one corner. “Seems so.”
Scene 4 – Miller’s Roadhouse
By the time the sun let go of the day, Miller’s Roadhouse had taken on its evening shape—lights low enough to make secrets gentle, fans turning with an old song’s patience. The air carried fried catfish, spilled beer, and a little history. People came here to talk about everything and nothing, sometimes both at once.
Miller glanced up from the register and lifted his chin toward the corner stage: You in? The house band held the end of a shuffle between fingers, waiting to see which way the night would tilt. Thomas gave the small nod men use when they don’t want to make a parade out of a decision.
He stepped up, no announcement. The guitarist leaned in, the drummer set the brushes against the snare like a promise, the bass player rolled a single note under his breath to find the room’s floor.
The first chord of “Do You Hear What I Hear” landed like a coin dropped into deep water. The song had traveled—through seasons, through somebody’s living room where vinyl hissed under a needle, through a church basement where coffee left rings on folding tables. Now it stood in Miller’s and wore a different coat. The melody leaned, not to show off, but as if it remembered a road with ruts and chose to walk it anyway.
Early talk dimmed. The corner table with four men in work shirts went still, only a thumb rubbing a label back and forth. The waitress on a pivot held her tray an inch too long in the air, then completed the turn with the kind of grace that says I used to dance when I was sixteen and I remember how. Two teenagers crowded around the arcade machine forgot to pretend they didn’t care. At the bar, a woman’s hand found her husband’s and stayed there, nobody making a note of it.
On the chorus, Thomas pulled a word a shade longer than the chart likes. The band left space around it like allowing a pitcher to settle on the mound. In that small stretch, the room leaned—not forward exactly, but inward, like an ear does when it catches its name under other voices.
No one named what happened. No one had to. It was the kind of quiet a song earns after it has told the truth without raising its voice.
The last note took its time getting gone. There was a heartbeat where clapping would have been the wrong kind of answer. Then somebody in the back started it, once, and the rest joined, and the sound became a release rather than a verdict.
Miller slid a glass of water down the bar without looking. Thomas caught it and took the end stool. He didn’t look toward the door. He didn’t try to see into the corners. He let the room be a room and the song be a song and the night be whatever it had already decided to be before he walked in.
He stayed through two more numbers by the band, tipping his chin toward the drummer on a good fill and toward the guitarist on a line that almost broke and then didn’t. He left before he could be asked to stay and explain something he didn’t have words for. The door gave its soft pushback, then settled. Outside, the air had cooled half a step.
Scene 5 – The Cemetery Encounter
The path home cut across the churchyard because habit is a narrow river and feet know its banks. Fog had come in at shin height and arranged itself neatly among the stones, the names rising and falling as you walked like fishermen’s floats in shallow water. Grass darkened his shoes where it met the dew’s first insistence.
A toll came—measured, patient, the length of a man’s hand laid flat. Thomas stopped. He’d stopped pretending he didn’t hear it. A lie about your own ears is a tax you pay later with interest.
Between two markers—one leaned, one kept its line—a figure stood. Coat dark. Posture still. The shape of a head inclined, maybe in prayer, maybe in the study of nothing. Fog edited the details and gave back a different kind of attention.
“Evening,” Thomas said. He kept his voice in the register you use with people you don’t want to startle.
Nothing. Not even a shift of weight.
He took two steps on worn ground. The earth had settled under decades of funerals; it felt tamped, reliable. A moth tapped the sanctuary window and tapped again. His toes found the edge of a curb that framed a plot. He blinked.
The space was empty.
He hadn’t missed a footfall. He hadn’t missed the hinge complaint of the gate. He simply occupied a square of air that had rearranged itself when he wasn’t looking. The tolling gave two more careful notes and then let the crickets resume their work. Far off, a truck downshifted. The sound slipped away the way water slips off a pane—leaving no mark but making you aware of glass.
He stood still long enough for his own breath to find him. He looked at the stones as if they might supply an answer or at least a posture. The names didn’t move. He walked on. The fog accepted his ankles and released them without argument.
At the street, he glanced back. The yard looked like it always did at this time of night—regular, patient, nothing to discuss. In the parsonage window, a lamp burned where someone had forgotten to turn it off. He crossed the road and aimed his key for the lock with a steadier hand than the night deserved.
Scene 6 – Alisha’s Concern
Morning made a small rectangle on the church office floor, the kind of light that tells you the hour even if you never owned a clock. The room smelled like lemon oil and old paper, with a thread of coffee from somewhere down the hall. The bulletin sat under Thomas’s palm, half-drafted and stubborn about its own margins. He wrote two words and erased three. The pencil made a fine grating sound that could have been surf in the world’s smallest ocean.
A soft knock at the doorframe. Alisha leaned there, one hand on the wood as if asking the room’s permission.
“You got a second?” she said.
“Always,” he said, which is what pastors say when they mean I’ll make one.
She took the chair but didn’t relax into it. She sat forward, hands linked, elbows on her knees in the posture of a person who knows how to ask for help without making a scene. For a moment she looked at his hands, then at the books on the shelf, then toward the window. She let the silence choose its own length.
“I’ve been having dreams,” she said. She gave the words a soft landing like they might break if they hit too hard. “For a while now. Before you came. Not… pictures, exactly. Just bells. Low. Slow. Then things go sideways. Not the same way every time. Just… bells first.”
She let her eyes return to his face to see whether he was with her or ready to step off at the next stop.
“Do you think—” she began, then checked the edge on her own question, sanded it with a breath, tried again. “Do you think maybe that’s God trying to warn me?”
The pencil under Thomas’s hand stopped moving. He didn’t look down. He swallowed once, a small thing, visible if you were watching and invisible if you weren’t. He had a way of moving his mouth when he was measuring words before he spent them; the habit came out now.
“God…” he started, and the word seemed to carry a weight he hadn’t accounted for when he picked it up. He adjusted the sentence midair. “God uses a lot of things.” He found a corner of a smile to make the idea easier to hold. “Hard to say for sure.”
Alisha didn’t drop her gaze. “That’s not really an answer,” she said. No sting on it, just the clean honesty of a person who knows the difference between a door and a curtain.
“It’s the one I’ve got today,” he said. It sat in the air, neither defensive nor yielding.
They let the room make its own noise for a few seconds: the tick of the little clock on the credenza, the distant hallway laugh that got shushed and then laughed again, the faint engine sound from the street that threaded itself through older wood.
She stood. “Okay,” she said. Not convinced. Not upset. Filed in a drawer with a label she’d know how to read later. “We’ll keep our ears open.”
“We will,” he said.
At the doorway, she paused. “You sounded good,” she said, looking at the window instead of him. “In the parking lot with that song. Haven’t heard it like that.”
He nodded once. “Me either.”
She left. The room kept its lemon and paper and ordinary. The bulletin waited in the same shape as before. Thomas touched the Bible on his desk, not opening it, just letting his hand rest there the way you do with something that has been steady longer than you have.
He put the pencil to the paper and wrote John 10:27 in the corner. He didn’t need it. He wrote it anyway.
Scene 7 – Sunday Service & Sermon
Sunday gathered slowly, like people arriving early to a picnic and pretending they were late. Fans blossomed in palms up and down the pews, turning at different speeds like a field of windflowers finding their own breeze. Children practiced whispers with the volume wrong. Sister Clay tested the organ stops and declared one too bright with a small frown. The stained glass laid strips of color like quiet flags across the aisle.
Altar flowers leaned toward the light. Programs shuffled from the ushers’ hands into familiar fingers. The ushers wore the look of men who’d been given authority over small things and intended to honor the charge.
Thomas stood at the pulpit with his Bible open and his index finger holding a place he didn’t need to hold. You could watch the breath leave him and return, slow, as if checking barometric pressure. He looked down the center aisle. He looked left and right at the faces—Berniece adjusting her shawl, Whitcomb gripping his cane like it was part of him, a young couple who hadn’t been here last month and now were, a child in bow barrettes swinging her feet against the pew and stopping only when her mother set two fingers gently on her knee.
He read without hurry. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”
He didn’t aim for thunder. He aimed for the plank you put your foot on when the river rises. He said sometimes a call sounds like a thing you were taught to ignore—a nudge you can’t prove, a line in a song that won’t leave you, a neighbor knocking too late with nothing important to say and everything important to mean. He said following doesn’t always look like moving; sometimes it looks like staying upright. He said the promise in the sentence isn’t that the weather changes. It’s that Someone does not forget your name when the wind does what it always does.
Nods traveled the room in quiet waves. A “Yes, Lord” came from somewhere that didn’t need to identify itself. Alisha, front row, hands loosely folded, watched him as if the words were moving across her skin, not just through the air. In the third pew, a boy tried to slide a peppermint from his grandmother’s purse; she let him have it without looking at him.
Thomas took a breath for the next line.
The bells moved first.
They didn’t burst. They arrived. The sound filled the sanctuary from behind and above and within, steady and measured, each toll long enough to settle over a ribcage and wait there. The choir loft took it first—someone’s shoulders hunched and then smoothed. In the center pews, hymnals nudged in their racks—soft, irritated taps like small animals shifting in sleep. Two teenagers on the back row forgot their gum and swallowed.
Heads turned—not all at once, but as if the room remembered together. Eyes went up to the empty tower—habit, muscle memory—and then back to the aisle. A whisper started on the right, passed over three pews, lost itself, then found new life on the left in a different voice. The music wasn’t from the organ. Sister Clay’s hands had left the keys on their own, resting on her lap, thumbs touching. Her eyes were open wider than the song required.
Thomas’s mouth continued; the words kept their shape, riding the sound rather than racing it. He didn’t grip the pulpit. He didn’t step back. He kept the cadence he’d chosen, a man deciding to breathe where he’d planned to breathe even though the air had changed texture.
Halfway down the aisle, something stretched along the floor. It was darkness, but not the kind made by the failure of lights. It had edges like oil finds when it escapes a jar—soft, certain, indifferent to your carpet. No figure threw it. No window accounted for its angle. It moved with patience, the way evening crosses a room one inch at a time, steady enough that the mind tries to measure, precise enough that the stomach declines.
It reached the first step and set a fingertip on the wood. It did not hurry.
On the far right, Berniece’s hand found the air between her and the next person and stayed there a second before she let it drop to her lap. In the second row, a woman put her palm flat against her chest as if checking whether something still worked. A child on the aisle slid closer to his grandmother without moving his feet; the slide was all shoulders and hope. Whitcomb leaned forward on his cane, his eyes sharp as if the dark might change if you looked at it right.
The bells gave another long note—deep enough to lean on if a sound can be leaned on. A man who had not prayed in company in twenty years said a name under his breath. Someone else said a different name. A third person chose not to say any name at all because the mouth would steal something from what the chest understood.
The sound paused as if it had counted to a number only it knew. The shadow did not retreat. It held its line.
Thomas looked down and the verse remained where it had always been. He lifted his voice one notch, not so people could hear over anything, but so the sentence could carry the weight it had been handed without breaking. “My sheep hear my voice,” he said again, voice steady, “and I know them, and they follow me.”
From the front pew, Alisha stood without the thought of it and turned toward the aisle. She lifted one hand a few inches, not to command, not to hush, just to answer. The gesture was old, older than the town, older than the church, older than the glass in the windows: I see; I’m here; I’m listening.
Someone in the back sniffed hard, like holding onto themselves by the nose. Another person laughed once, that quick broken laugh that leaks out when pressure and fear meet in a body and neither will leave.
The bells didn’t come again. The quiet that followed wasn’t silence; it was attention. The shadow waited with the patience of a thing that did not expect to be moved by arguments. It put its next inch of fingertip on the next inch of wood. The room did not blink.
Thomas stood where he stood. The words ran out because words do that. He set his palms flat and let the room rest on the fact that sometimes following looks like not running.
The hymn number board at the front listed a song they had not planned to sing. No one looked at it. A breeze that had no business being indoors touched the edges of the bulletins and set them whispering against thighs.
The bells had gone. The shadow had not. The congregation held itself like a breath under a heavy blanket.
The little girl in bow barrettes began to cry, a thin sound, honest and unembarrassed. Her grandmother gathered her into a side hold, rubbed circles between her shoulder blades, and hummed a line that might have been from a hymn or might have been from a memory older than that. On the front row, Alisha didn’t sit. She watched the aisle with her hand still half-lifted, as if waiting for a note only she could hear to finish telling her what to do next.
Thomas opened his mouth and closed it. He did not declare. He did not explain. He stood in a room that had decided to be something else for a while and let his own heartbeat count off time no clock had sanctioned.
Outside, the day held. Inside, the sound of listening became louder than any instrument.
And then the minute turned.
—END OF EPISODE 2—
