He stares at me, through me, beyond me. A skeletal office over an alley in a slum in Kampala. Uganda. Between us his Bible, annotated in color. He is concerned with witches. Sometimes he calls them sorcerers. His accent is strong. English is second. And even before his own tongue, there’s scripture. Thanks be to God. Scripture defends him. It has. It will. He hopes. “I am destined to die,” he says.

I say, “Aren’t we all?”

He stares. Repeats himself: “I am destined to die.” He has been cursed. Powerful witches. In his own church. “My own church,” he says again, patting the margins. “My own church.”

“Do not give them my name,” he says. By “them” he means you. Reading. What would you do with it? What will you do with these words? “They could do anything,” he says. Because these words are not fixed. You can bend them, rearrange them, make them your own, use them against him.

Only scripture is unchanging, all his red ink in the margins nothing more than breath against stone. Breath, not blood. “My words leave no stain.”

He had been an assistant pastor, his church had been large, there had been many assistant pastors. The bishop they’d served had grown wary of their dreams. The bishop preached a prophecy: “One of you will die, for being rebellious. The churches should be warned that rebellion is very bad. A big mistake! God will kill somebody.”

He’d fled. The prophecy had followed. “But,” he says, pushing his Bible aside, planting his finger on the table, “the week I was to die, the bishop, he disappeared!”

The bishop disappeared; scripture remains. Breath against stone.