The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God. Timothy Schaffert

blooming just beneath his eye from the scratch of the tip of an angel’s stone wing, “we’re told, ‘A tranquil heart is life to the body, but passion is rottenness to the bones.’”

      “Rotten bones,” Ozzie mumbled. He turned and walked away with the cardboard box of Charlotte’s things.

      Ozzie took from his pocket what Junior had put in: a picture of Christ, a very contemporary representation of him as pretty as a blue-eyed young girl with his long hair partly braided. He was entirely nude and nailed to the cross, blood flowing along the sinewy muscle of his arms, his godly schlong mostly hidden by shadow. His Pain, Your Gain was written at the bottom of the card. Ozzie wondered where the boy had even come across such a picture; perhaps priests handed them out in the street to seduce young people into church.

      Charlotte sat in the truck, waiting, reading a tiny green Gideon’s Bible with a magnifying glass. Ozzie got in with the box, then drove away without closing the tailgate. He ignored the light thumping of the peaches as they spilled and rolled across the truck bed.

      At a stop sign, he leaned toward Charlotte and smelled something sugary on her breath. Didn’t they used to say that if a baby’s breath smelled sweet, it portended a terrible sickness? As new parents, Ozzie and Jenny had been forewarned of all sorts of infanticides. When Charlotte was first born, Jenny banished Simp, the old tom, to the studio out back. Ozzie had never heard of a cat’s attraction to a sleeping child’s breath, but Jenny had been warned by all the old ladies up and down the street of the danger of such suffocation.

      “Did you know,” Charlotte said, barely looking up from her little green book, “that you can break a snake’s back if you don’t handle it correctly? And there are whole churches of people who mix themselves strychnine drinks because the Bible says, ‘Drink poison and ye shall live.’ They call it a salvation cocktail.” Lightly, she delivered this information, this hint at how deeply a religious fervor had infected her.

      “On my way back to the truck just now,” Ozzie said, “I remembered that afternoon we found that bat in the house. The one we had in the attic. Remember that? Your mom made me catch it in a coffee can so we could let it out in the country. So the three of us drove a few miles down a road . . . the bat crying all the way.”

      Charlotte, clearly bored by the fact that he didn’t make more of her mention of snake handling and poison drinking, rolled her eyes and returned to the New Testament.

      Ozzie saw that Charlotte’s lips and fingertips were berry-stained, skeletons of dry leaves caught in her hair. Her scent of sweetness had dissolved into the smell of smoke, but not cigarette smoke, smoke like from twigs and bark. She seemed weakened by her thinking about the night. Keep a tranquil heart, he wanted to warn her. Passion is rottenness to the bones.

      On the corner of Elm and Oak sat one of the older churches in town, a squat, homely thing of gray stone, but with a few majestic windows depicting intricate biblical scenes. Ozzie had long wanted to get his hands on the glass of Grace Lutheran—the windows looked to have been shoddily repaired in the past, and poorly maintained, with some of the lighter-colored pieces—like the opalescent skirts of an angel—having grown dim with years of dust. And if he wasn’t mistaken, the belly of the whale was made of what looked to be rotten ruby—a rare antique red.

      Ozzie pulled around the corner and stopped the truck a fair distance from the church. He opened the truck door, then picked up a library copy of Franny and Zooey from the box. He dropped the book into Charlotte’s lap.

      “I’ve read this,” she said, pushing the book aside.

      “And you love it,” he shouted, seethed, really. “Read it again.” He then took from the box the paper-thin plastic Halloween mask Charlotte had worn three years before, when she’d trick-or-treated as Spider-Man. That fall, the first after Jenny’s death, he’d put together an elaborate Rapunzel costume for her for a junior high party—gold and silver thread stitched into a blue velvet cloak, a blond wig with a thick braid that wrapped around her waist and fell to her feet. But at the last minute Charlotte refused the Rapunzel costume, and Ozzie took her to the grocery store, where she bought the Spider-Man mask with matching plastic smock, the only costume left on the shelf, and went off to the party looking like some hopeless urchin.

      Walking back to the church, keeping close to the row of trees that lined the street, Ozzie put the mask over his face, pulling the little string of elastic over his head. With his other hand, he picked up a pumpkin from the edge of someone’s yard and carried it by its stem. His heavy breaths were noisy against the flimsy mask. He squinted to see through the slim eyeholes.

      The damage he intended to do wouldn’t be serious, he told himself. And it would cost the church nothing—Ozzie had every intention of volunteering his services for the repairs, and footing the bill for any replacement glass. The church would chalk it all up to vandals, and Ozzie could finally drive by the old place with a sense of peace. He’d no longer have to see all that sunlight muddied by dirt trapped in the glass, or see how the window sagged and chipped from its own weight.

      Crouching in a deep shadow, Ozzie lifted the pumpkin above his head and aimed for a warped sash in order to do minimal harm. The pumpkin crashed against the window, shattering just enough of the glass to require careful repair, and Ozzie bolted from the site before the broken rind and guts of the pumpkin even hit the ground.

      Once back inside the truck, he pushed the mask up off his face to rest atop his head. As he drove off, Charlotte, who had seen none of her father’s destruction, reached into the box and picked up some x-ray specs. “You know Mrs. diFanta from down the street?” she said, putting on the glasses. “She witnessed a sun miracle. That’s when you look in the sky and see the sun dancing. That’s how she went blind.” She wiggled her hands in front of her face, as if she could see through her skin.

      Ozzie looked straight ahead but watched his daughter in the rearview mirror. For years Ozzie had been looking at Charlotte, studying her, certain there’d come a time when he’d never see her again. Her absence from his life had always seemed just seconds away. And now it was as if he couldn’t see her at all, not even when looking right at her. Instead, he saw her clearly, so clearly, at thirteen years old, in the moments just before he told her that her mother had died. He had waited for her in front of the house and, with both dread and relief, watched her approach. It had begun to rain, and Charlotte struggled and rushed down the street on her roller skates, her open umbrella flailing about as she tried to keep her balance.