He regards the writhing lights of sunset as a miracle he will never again witness. A bruised horizon, smoke of burning leaves, metallic peal of the gate's latch -- he hovers beneath a rotting dogwood at the cemetery's farthest corner, "Like a ghost," Sybil whispers -- his fingers tangled in the fence's mesh of climbing evergreen as she and Rachel, no older than seventeen themselves, crouch damp and shivering at his ankles. They wait. When the young priest's shadow subsides behind the slope of hill, his black boots upsetting the dust of the gravel path, they listen for the slam of his car door and the rev of engine. Next, the jarring burst of headlights, and then darkness, and finally silence.

A handsome priest, he thought, remembering his father's brother, the bishop, buried outside Fargo. His uncle had been ugly.

Ignazio was not ugly. He towered six foot-four by age fourteen, boasted two hundred pounds of ferocious muscle. Classmates squirmed like beetles under his shadow. That year the composition of his face shifted into its destined maturity with the first sheath of beard flourishing across his chin and jaws, then his hands expanded to grasp basketballs like grapes, his shoulders swelling to consume entire rooms. When he left home last Christmas -- ran away -- self-defense against potential assailants was his least concern. The human race lurked beneath him as if in a separate stratosphere. It occurred to him, sneaking oranges one morning into his backpack at a crowded outdoor market, that he was qualified to cross over, to assume the role of victimizer and villain although he'd no desire to do so. Strangers would simply behold his size and speculate the worst.

His uncle the bishop had willed to him in writing his good-conditioned '95 Taurus. The morning of the funeral, when his parents and older brothers departed after breakfast for the cathedral, Ignazio dumped his luggage into the trunk then met them in the near-blizzard tumult of the church parking lot. Before the end of the burial ceremony he'd crept off undetected, slunk with keys poised through the snow past throngs of black-clad mourners and upon reaching the bus station, abandoning the car along the curb in a red zone, he realized he'd neglected to leave his family a note. No matter. They'd notice the absence of his essentials and question by telephone the boy they knew he'd been sleeping with. Ironic, he thought, purchasing a ticket to Seattle -- now his family must condescend to acknowledge the reprobate.

It had been two days after Christmas.

"You never told us your uncle was a bishop," Rachel croons. She peels with her pocketknife the skin of a green apple and flicks its shavings onto the weed-choked grave of Eleanor Larkin. "That's like, Catholic royalty. How does someone become a bishop, anyway?"

"He was appointed by Christ," Ignazio says, struggling as always to subdue his accent. "Preordained before the beginning of time, his name etched in gilded flames across the tongue of God."

"'You formed my inmost being;'" quotes Sybil, "'you knit me in my mother's womb. Your eyes foresaw my actions; in your book all are written down; my days were shaped before one came to be.'"

"Stop it," Rachel taps Sybil's hip with the heel of her boot.

"Why?"

"Stop it." She taps her again, harder.

"Screw this," Ignazio barks, bolting to his feet. "Get your stuff -- let's get inside before the mosquitoes carry us away." He leads them backpack-clad through the graveyard gnawing a wildflower's stem between his front teeth, marveling over the multitude of plastic floral bouquets that adorn nearly all the tombs. He kicks one aside. "So fucking ugly."

They ascend the cement stairs. Sybil inserts her finger into a weathered gash in the palm of an Archangel Gabriel statue at the top landing, wiggles it to upset chipped shards of plaster that she collects in her other hand. The final gush of sunset light dissolves over the mountains, now hulking black mammoths against the western glow, and as the girls continue to molest the statue Ignazio jiggles the locked brass handles of the front double-doors, sighs, then jimmies the bolt with Rachel's knife.

The outer-sanctum, candle-lit, is awash in cool air scented of wood and wax. They strip off their backpacks. "Bathroom," Sybil cries, hurrying into the darkness of the stained-glass corridor. The church's layout is loosely hexagonal with the outer-sanctum hugging the central chapel in weak angles, and Ignazio watches Sybil disappear through the open door of the sacristy at the end of the hall, the pulse of her footsteps diminishing into silence.

"Check the Mass schedule," he says to Rachel. "We have to be out of here before tomorrow's first service."

Rachel leans over a stack of church bulletins positioned atop a white marble table, tips the flame of a candle over the topmost page. "6:30," she says. "But tomorrow is a holy day of obligation -- the Assumption."

"Dammit."

"Don't worry," she says, replacing the candle. "Let's find some food."

He smacks the light-switch beside the doorframe of the sacristy. A row of armoire-style cabinets spans the length of one wall, along the other, empty shelves and doorways to the confessionals. Thin green carpet, clean yet trampled, stretches into the darkness of the opposite entrance, where twilight dazzles the windows of a small foyer and a marble font of holy water.

Rachel begins inspecting the shelves, foraging through the drawers, disarranging irreverently stacks of books and papers. "Nothing," she mutters. They round the corner, press through the door into the darkened chamber where Sybil had fled and find the entrances to the restrooms, portrait-cluttered walls lined with benches and locked doors, fingerprint-smeared windows that admitted against their skin the last shreds of sunlight.

"Look at us," Rachel moans, lifting mid-air her bare arm. "We're glowing." Within seconds, Ignazio's eyes adjust to the darkness. He hears the flushing of a toilet, turns, recoils to find Rachel's face burning inches from his own.

He steps back. Sybil emerges from the restroom knotting her hair backward into a pony-tail. "Did you find food?"

"Not yet."

"Anything we can steal and sell?"

"Not yet." Ignazio guides them out of the chamber, past the green-carpeted stairs leading up to the choir pit and into the silence of the main hall where they collapse into the first pew, stomachs growling, visions blurred against the candle-lit effulgence of the altar. He stretches his legs and slumps backward, cradling his head against the wooden crook of the pew's edge and warns himself not to fall asleep. He hears the girls whispering to each other. As their tones rise, the emptiness of the sanctuary strangles their voices and he comprehends nothing, only a confusion of echoes, and he closes his eyes.

"It's in my bag," Rachel says, and he senses the shift of weight on the pew, senses their absence and unleashes a sigh of relief as their footsteps diminish down the ambulatory, engulfed by the shrieking of the double-doors into the outer sanctum.

He opens his eyes. Beneath the crucifix -- a resurrected Christ, not a corpse -- the tabernacle sits centered atop a marble table, beaming in gaudy gold sequins and artificial gems. He forgets if the Eucharist is permanently stationed inside the tabernacle or removed and relocated after Mass. As a child he'd believed in many miracles, chiefly the miracle of transubstantiation, and with the obedience of a cloistered saint he'd prepared himself as a vessel to admit the whole of Christ, flesh and blood, descending each week the Cathedral's stone staircase perceptive of some change, a shift of his inner tectonics, an accumulating transformation that would warrant him eventual perfection. He'd believed in hell, too.

The consecration of the Eucharist had always been his favorite part of Mass. His uncle, the bishop, explained that prayers are strongest at this moment -- the raising of the host, the chiming of the bells, and then silence. "God hears and answers every prayer," his uncle explained -- Ignazio had at one time believed this. He deposited himself dirty and bruised against the back porch stairs stifling a cry as his uncle, hulking and unfamiliar in polo shirt and khakis, patted Ignazio's back and rinsed his raw knuckles with a damp dishrag. Three weeks passed before the black eye vanished. It was the middle of autumn, and Ignazio began frequenting daily Mass before school, solitary in the back pews within a web of daydreams until the moment of consecration when, alert, he fastened his eyes to the host and begged for la milagrosa, that which would obliterate the very existence of his secret, the logical release which would save and heal him. Soon, he began growing, and soon he witnessed in the empty corridor after school the new student, Danny, fussing over the pink wad of bubble-gum someone had jammed into his locker's combination, and soon he stopped believing in hell.

The day after his secret was revealed -- a school administrator interrupting his broom-closet tryst with Danny -- his uncle with pursed lips and solemn eyes guided Ignazio into the warmth of his study where the catechism at the desk lay open like a spellbook. He quoted aloud the three clauses Ignazio had already privately memorized, and by reflex, as if by an instinct ingrained in the natures of all his brethren Ignazio issued the best expected responses: agreement, submission, a resolve to eternally guard his heart from the occasion of sin, and he sensed from the stillness of his uncle's brow that he'd employed the correct reaction, like in the choose-your-own-adventure role playing books he'd gobbled as a child. Ignazio was to pray not for transformation but for the relinquishment of his sinful tendencies and for the peace of Christ to make healthy his heart. He was to pray for the strength to serve the church as a celibate, to partake the body of Christ as a bride without distraction, and meanwhile, in a wildflower-choked duplex across town blue-eyed Danny would spend the following days scrubbing spray-painted profanity from the front of his garage door, ignoring the telephone, adamant in the face of his chain-smoking mother of his innocence. Christmas was close, and the two would never speak to each other again.

He is alone. Night has fallen. The girls haven't returned so he assumes they've again found food that in silence will be secreted inside their backpacks. He considers his uncle's words and wonders, standing and stretching within the blur of altar-lights, if God regards him with eyes of contempt or longing, and he remembers flinching as a child at the physical ugliness of his uncle and wonders if his uncle's celibacy proved effortless because of this. He wonders if God crafted his uncle's repulsion to keep him at arm's length from the lures of the world, and if so, what of those not afflicted with such a blessing? At some point -- he imagines the bishop weeping as a teenager in front of the bathroom mirror -- his uncle had simply given up, prepared himself reluctantly for a lifetime of loneliness. Ignazio knows he is not ugly. He would have nothing if not for his beauty, not even the girls he'd befriended, who'd submitted to trusting him ever since the night last week they'd hitched a ride with a sad middle-aged man southward out of the city.

He pictures the grave of Eleanor Larkin and wonders if, hovering fold-by-fold through the bliss of an omnipotent dimension, she knows that her name is materializing across his mind, and therefore if she floats now beside the eternal consciousness of his uncle he wonders if the two regard him with eyes of contempt or longing.

The girls return, claim their seats beside him without a word. He understands by the severity with which they observe each other, unaware of his perception, that they are hiding something -- the devilish arches of their eyebrows -- and he doesn't care but glances over his shoulder through the plump railings of the choir pit and decides tonight it is where he will sleep.

Sybil admits nothing of her history, says nothing of why she left home, but Ignazio senses that her secrecy is rooted in absent-mindedness, in living-for-the-moment nebulousness rather than defense. But Rachel's mother committed suicide the year before, leaving Rachel to foster-care, to the Bible-thumping lunacy of a childless Pentecostal couple who forced her into denim skirts and months without television, so when Ignazio sees her now, donning the long-sleeved workman's shirt that all day had been knotted around her waist, he knows she will turn out alright.

The girls make camp on the flat space between the first pew and the sanctuary steps and convert their backpacks into pillows, and without glancing back Ignazio retreats into the hallway dark near the stairs announcing he will be sleeping in the choir pit, and he gropes for the stairway light and climbs to the second floor, doorless, a mere balcony complete with organ and fold-out chairs. He clears a space, discovers a tangle of moth-shredded linen in a corner box that he bunches into a pillow and stretches flat on his back. But he cannot close his eyes.

"Life is never fair," his uncle had said. A vicious gush of wind assaulted the backyard oaks, tearing from their limbs swarms of yellowed leaves as the back-porch step hardened beneath his weight, his knuckles burning. He thinks of the beauty of the priest they'd watched earlier, and Sybil and Rachel, their beauty, and that in the end beauty didn't matter.

Life is never fair. In the morning, scrambling to duck out before the arrival of the first parishioners, Sybil and Rachel will learn this. After sneaking the final nibbles of their pirated snacks they will call his name from the floor, and, looking at each other, frozen, they will glide the lighted staircase into the choir pit to find only a bundle of ratted sheets. He thinks of Rachel peeling with her knife the skin off the apple at the grave of Eleanor Larkin and knows she will always be safe.

How deeply will their blame tarnish his name? Who was this devil, this honey-voiced giant who'd led them piper-like and pious through the sweltering southern half of the state, only to vanish, to abandon them to their own devices? He'd been too large for them, his shadow engulfed their every breath -- they were nothing. Closing his eyes, he wants them to realize what he'd already learned: that they were nothing, they were not immune, their beauty was insignificant. Trust no one. Everybody is an enemy.

He grins. We are the lost souls, the unchosen. He wonders at what point God ceased acknowledging his childhood devotion. He believes still in Christ's presence in the Eucharist, Christ frozen in time and conscious of every hair on his head, who will remain for his unchosen steadfast in silence so thus his unchosen after the expected tedium of prayer and lamentation at last surrender to the lures of the world, to drugs, to sex, to betrayal and murder and suicide, and for the others, the sheep within the pen: grace, prosperity, and miracles. There are no shades of gray. He hears the girls whispering below. Confused, in the morning they will blame him for their abandonment, but eventually they will blame God -- God who ordained their triangle of rebellion, God who guided them into the clutches of Ignazio, a liar. A thief. Suddenly, he's too angry to sleep. He thinks of Danny. He thinks of Sybil plunging her finger into the angel's wounded palm, and now he's eager to adopt the role of victimizer and villain, to be the wolf amongst the sheep. This, he realizes, is the most logical revenge.