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tarp across plastic pipes to try to stay dry, started a tiny fire that writhed in a trash can lid. Two people joined her, beckoned others to join them, until there were eight of them standing in a semicircle, just out of the rain. Hands extended and open over the heat. The woman who started the fire giving everyone a faint smile, hesitant greetings. Looking for what is good in us.
    “Do I know you?” a man in a top hat said to Sunny Jim.
    “I don’t think so. I’m not from here.”
    “No, no, I think I know you.”
    “I’m sorry,” Sunny Jim said, “but I don’t recognize you.”
    The man in the top hat peered at Sunny Jim, as if waiting for him to say something. He was a con artist, a professional, thought he read something in Sunny Jim’s face. A vulnerability. A fragile man, he thought, who had much and was unaccustomed to losing. Pegging Sunny Jim all wrong.
    “Then it’s my turn to apologize,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.”
    He was, Reverend Bauxite thought, not so long ago. A man tied to the planet by a thread of happiness and rage, his wife and child his only anchor. Now both were far away, beyond his sight, and his belief in them was all that was keeping him here. Reverend Bauxite began a small prayer, that his friend have the strength, the forbearance, not to lose his faith. Be granted a sign, a small thing, to tell him to hang on. He thought again of Talia, in the days before the war started. Picking at a hangnail in the pink wingback chair in his office, lips drawn tight with the concentration of it.
    “You know,” she had said, “I believe we are all given at least one moment in our lives when the world reveals itself to us, in all its workings. We comprehend everything at once, and then forget almost all of it a second later, because none of us could hold it all in our heads. But we are changed afterward,” shaking her head, “in a most profound way.”
    “Has this ever happened to you?” Reverend Bauxite had said.
    “Oh, yes.” Eyes sliding upward to meet his. “Hundreds of times.”
    For Reverend Bauxite, it had happened only once, not long after the death of his father, though he could not say that was what had caused it. Nothing he could see or comprehend had caused it. He was in the backyard of the house he had rented, and the yard ended at a line of trees, the fringe of a thick wood. The clouds above an exercise in stillness against a deep blue. Then the sunlight changed, and the clouds began to move, twisting against a graying sky. The wind made him look up, and he saw, for an instant, a movement among the trees. They were parting, in concert, as though they were a door opening, and though there was darkness beyond, he knew something was stepping through. Then the door closed, and the trees thrashed in the gathering wind as trees do, and it began to rain. He did not understand what he had seen, but he stopped being a bricklayer and instead became a priest. Read for orders under an Episcopalian minister with a shock of curly white hair, uneven glasses. Was ordained by the bishop in a ceremony by the Susquehanna’s shores, with no walls to protect him. As if to warn him that he would have to build his church like that, wherever he went.
    He had such conviction in his first years of ministry. Spoke as if through a golden horn, his voice wide and strong, enough to fill the old church he took up in Harrisburg. He had found it half-abandoned, stripped of all that was not stone. He hauled in metal chairs, a card table for an altar. His confidence his pulpit. Put out a sign on the church step for services every morning. Attracted first just the curious, but soon the devout. People who swayed when they sang. Eyes closed or lifted to the roof. Hands out, raised, clapping. His first extended families, the withering elders sitting on the aisle, the married ones standing without shifting from foot to foot. Backs straight when they knelt. The younger ones chasing the kids along