The Returned. Jason Mott

      “Won’t be no exits in hell!” Helen added.

      Pastor Peters only smiled and reached over the pew to shake her hand. “And how’s this young fellow?” he said, aiming a bright smile at Jacob.

      “I’m fine.”

      Lucille tapped him on the leg.

      “I’m fine, sir,” he corrected.

      “What do you make of all this?” the pastor asked, chuckling. Beads of sweat glistened on his brow. “What are we going to do with all these people, Jacob?”

      The boy shrugged and received another tap on the thigh.

      “I don’t know, sir.”

      “Maybe we could send them all home? Or maybe we could just get a water hose and hose them all down.”

      Jacob smiled. “A preacher can’t do stuff like that.”

      “Says who?”

      “The Bible.”

      “The Bible? Are you sure?”

      Jacob nodded. “Want to hear a joke? Daddy teaches me the best jokes.”

      “Does he?”

      “Mmm-hmm.”

      Pastor Peters kneeled, much to Lucille’s embarrassment. She hated the notion of the pastor dirtying his suit on account of some two-bit joke that Harold had taught Jacob. Lord knows Harold knew some jokes that weren’t meant for the light of holiness.

      She held her breath.

      “What did the math book tell the pencil?”

      “Hmm.” Pastor Peters rubbed his hairless chin, looking very deep in thought. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “What did the math book tell the pencil?”

      “I’ve got a lot of problems,” Jacob said. Then he laughed. To some, it was only the sound of a child laughing. Others, knowing that this boy had been dead only a few weeks prior, did not know how to feel.

      The pastor laughed with the boy. Lucille, too—thanking God that the joke hadn’t been the one about the pencil and the beaver.

      Pastor Peters reached into the breast pocket of his coat and, with considerable flourish, conjured a small piece of foil-wrapped candy. “You like cinnamon?”

      “Yes, sir! Thank you!”

      “He’s so well mannered,” Helen Hayes added. She shifted in her seat, her eyes following the pastor’s frail wife, whose name Helen could not remember for the life of her.

      “Anyone as well mannered as him deserves some candy,” the pastor’s wife said. She stood behind her husband, gently patting the center of his back—even that seemed a great feat for her, with him being so large and her being so small. “It’s hard to find well-behaved children these days, what with things being the way they are.” She paused to dab her brow. She folded her handkerchief and covered her mouth and coughed into it mouselike. “Oh, my.”

      “You’re just about the sickest thing I’ve ever seen,” Helen said.

      The pastor’s wife smiled and politely said, “Yes, ma’am.”

      Pastor Peters patted Jacob’s head. Then he whispered to Lucille, “Whatever they say, don’t let it bother him...or you. Okay?”

      “Yes, Pastor,” Lucille said.

      “Yes, sir,” Jacob said.

      “Remember,” the pastor said to the boy, “you’re a miracle. All life is a miracle.”

      Angela Johnson

      The floors of the guest bedroom in which she had been locked for the past three days were hardwood and beautiful. When they brought her meals, she tried not to spill anything, not wanting to ruin the floor and compound her punishment for whatever she had done wrong. Sometimes, just to be safe, she would eat her meals in the bathtub of the adjoining bathroom, listening to her parents speaking in the bedroom on the other side of the wall.

      “Why haven’t they come to take it back yet?” her father said.

      “We never should have let them bring her...it to begin with,” her mother replied. “That was your idea. What if the neighbors find out?”

      “I think Tim already knows.”

      “How could he? It was so late when they brought it. He couldn’t have been awake at that time of night, could he?”

      A moment of silence came between them.

      “Imagine what will happen if the firm finds out. This is your fault.”

      “I just had to know,” he said, his voice softening. “It looks so much like h—”

      “No. Don’t start that again, Mitchell. Not again! I’m calling them again. They need to come and take it away tonight!”

      She sat in the corner with her knees pulled to her chest, crying just a little, sorry for whatever she had done, not understanding any of this.

      She wondered where they had taken her dresser, her clothes, the posters she had plastered around the room over the years. The walls were painted a soft pastel—something all at once red and pink. The holes left by pushpins, the marks left by tape, the pencil marks on the door frame indicating each year of growth...all of them were gone. Simply painted over.

      Four

      WHEN THERE WERE so many people and so little air in the room that everyone began to consider the likelihood of tragedy, the noise of the crowd began to grow silent. The silence began at the front doors of the church and marched through the crowd like a virus.

      Pastor Peters stood erect—looking as tall and wide as Mount Sinai, Lucille thought—and folded both hands meekly at his waist and waited, with his wife huddled in the shelter of his shadow. Lucille craned her neck to see what was happening. Maybe the devil had finally grown tired of waiting.

      “Hello. Hello. Pardon me. Excuse me. Hello. How are you? Excuse me. Pardon me.”

      It came like an incantation through the crowd, each word driving back the masses.

      “Excuse me. Hello. How are you? Excuse me. Hello...” It was a smooth, dark voice, full of manners and implication. The voice grew louder—or perhaps the silence grew—until there was only the rhythm of the words moving over everything, like a mantra. “Excuse me. Hi, how are you? Pardon me. Hello...”

      Without a doubt, it was the well-practiced voice of a government man.

      “Good evening, Pastor,” Agent Bellamy said gently, finally breaching the ocean of people.

      Lucille sighed, letting go of a breath she did not know she had been holding.

      “Ma’am?”

      He wore a dark, well-cut gray suit very similar to the one he was wearing on the day he came with Jacob. It wasn’t the kind of suit you see many government men wearing. It was a suit worthy of Hollywood and talk shows and other glamorous things, Lucille mused. “And how’s our boy?” he asked, nodding at Jacob, his smile still as even and square as fresh-cut marble.

      “I’m fine, sir,” Jacob said, candy clicking against his teeth.

      “That’s good to hear.” He straightened his tie, though it had not been crooked. “That’s very good to hear.”

      The soldiers were there then. A pair of boys so young they seemed to be only playing at soldiering. At any moment Lucille expected them to start chasing each other around the pulpit, the way Jacob and the Thompson boy had once done. But the guns asleep at their hips were not toys.

      “Thank you for coming,” Pastor Peters said, shaking Agent Bellamy’s