Daring move. The school is old, made of wood: one match would torch it to ground before lunch. Who’d save the children? Even now, old snow still shrinks their schoolyard. Splinters fester inside their pine desks. Each groaning stair, saddle-bowed. Still, God shoulders in – grade four, the last tractable age.
He sneaks in through catechism’s call and response:
Who is God?
God is love.
How long is eternity?
However long it takes a dove’s wing to wear away the marble-hard world.
God slips in at 2:30, brushing past the folds of Sister Zita’s grey gown. His beard swirling dust. Through the Stations of the Cross, through His Son, He enters their stories, their grade-four adventures. The man’s terrible gore, his thorn-tangled hair. Father and child, sufferings and wrongs.
Once a month, Sister Zita fire-drills a bucket of flames on the unsafe escape. God tends the flames. Day by day, He replaces black snow-melt with spring. The wolves at the chain links are flame-eyed with want.