I could go back home, maybe talk it over with my mother again when she returned from her assignment, when she would be a little tired, heat-beaten to a sweetness and willing to agree to anything to stop my badgering. We weren’t to disrupt him unless it was an emergency, and now here, the confidence I had felt on my walk over faltered. Vern was always here throughout the week, preparing sermons in his small office in the loft like a full-time job, sometimes rehearsing them on the stage, I’d been told, but had never seen myself. Vern wanted us to be reminded that our sin hurt our pastor in the same way it had hurt Jesus and God-likely more. Next to it was a portrait of Vern in imitation of Jesus, his own face woeful, smeared with what I assumed was fake blood and makeup, but it looked so real I didn’t know for sure. The light filtered orange through the stained glass and below it, on the wall, hung a portrait of Jesus with a bloody and beaten face, a reminder of the horrors He’d gone through. The ceiling was high with rafters surrounding it, and a single stained-glass window loomed behind the pulpit, featuring a pack of fearful flying cherubs. The pews were built by the hands of men when Vern’s father was a young pastor. There was a fine layer of God glitter permanently on it like a varnish for there was no need to sweep away a physical wonder of the spirit. In the center of the groaning floor the tired wood drooped and made the church a shallow bowl. By some impossible magic the whole Body fit here every Sunday. In the emptiness, the space seemed smaller. If God brought the heat we were meant to be hot.

There had never been air-conditioning, never even a swamp cooler.

The pad in my briefs felt heavy and I wanted it off.

Photo: Uwa Scholz / EyeEm/Getty Images/EyeEmīy the time I arrived at Gifts of the Spirit, my mother’s dress was wet against my back.

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