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a small and unexpected prayer, a strange silent prayer, asking the Lord for his help and good guidance. He cups his hands together as if he were holding a scoop of river water, and blows lightly into his palms; this is his prayer. He tosses this prayer out into the wide space in front of him, beyond the microphone, off the stage, and into the sea of people. It’s a gesture charged with an almost innocent significance, a naive grace. The audience is taken with this slow movement, reading in it all kinds of story. Some see Noah toss a dove above the tops of flood-buried trees, and others catch sight of John the Baptist, hands upturned, offering a life-giving dunk. Josiah sees only his own small hands, and then unexpectedly, and maybe not accidentally at all (because maybe this is, in fact, how prayers are answered), his mother’s face in the void between his separating fingers.
    Josiah turns slowly to his left, and then slowly to his right, like Kizowski does, both good moves to buy time. Then he turns back to his mother.
    The boy says into the microphone: “Knock, knock.”
    Is this a joke? Is Josiah telling a joke? Issy can’t look away. Havi is not paying attention, but something is going to happen, Issy knows it.
    Josiah looks slowly from side to side, scanning the audience. And now Josiah is staring. Issy tries to see who he’s looking at because the boy has stopped, is looking out straight ahead. At his family? Or maybe he’s just scared shitless—if Carlo Senior caught Issy just thinking a word like “shitless,” he’d definitely get smacked on the back of his head. Josiah’s scared, and Issy sees it, but something is now on the verge. Issy senses it, even though he doesn’t have the words, something like great years of light are coming from the boy onstage. Not real rays but something like a vision of what great light waits for Josiah. This is what a good future looks like, a mother, a father, and probably college, girlfriends and money and blessings from God because not everyone can be special. He knows Havi is jealous, always jealous of anyone who has more than him. But Issy is happy to not be jealous. So, again, he waves to his friend at church.
    Hey, Josiah, look over here.
    And the two boys have their moment. It’s quick and definitive, like two cars passing, a flash of recognition. Or maybe like that ribbon flash of a setting sun that erases every last bit of foreground, like when your eyes adjust and the sun becomes a backlight, and the world is made knowable, and real— this is how Josiah comes to see his friend Issy, and how he comes to see the great crowd. Where’s Issy’s girlfriend in the yellow dress? His mother? There she is, and she beams like a momentary flash, a beacon. No more a color mass of pinks, and browns, yellows, and reds, and every fleshy color there is. No more a haze of many faces. This is how he sees Issy—and Issy’s waving?
    For a few stretched seconds Josiah is filled with a rushing desire to run, to run with Issy and all the other boys, off to who knows where. He rubs the toy figure in his pocket, and suddenly he is no longer hungry, like he’ll never be hungry again. His mind settles. It slows. And he sees out there, all the faces, each one, every face, everyone a guest in His great house. He fills up inside with heat and with light. Puts a hand to his ear, miming to the crowd, and he actually says: “I can’t hear you. I said, Knock, knock.”
    Feels pretty good, turns out.
    Issy shouts back: “Who’s there?”
    Hilda lets it slide.
    The boy is now abandoning his script: he has become an inspired riff, divinely played, and off the top of his head comes a loud and prophetic voice—because of growing talk among the Brothers and Wives in the Lord, his father sometimes talking on the phone. The talk between his parents just this morning —there’s been a whisper, slow-spreading like a fever, feels like all summer long. He hears the brothers talking here and there.