Theft

Filing out of the family van, we saw snowflakes could float, dust-like, up from the monochrome rug that God had unfurled before Maranatha Baptist Church. There, at eye level, they kept us for a second from seeing what we’d driven an hour to see, a life-sized nativity, its figures arranged in semicircle, golden, exotic against the chapel whitescape. I watched Mother Mary peer into the manger, her smile aglow in the vesper light, and caught myself wanting to worship her just once without blasphemy, the way Joseph was, staring not down at the baby but over, into her, with a kind of awe you can’t condemn. My parents looked so old and small next to them. Whose life was this size? Up close, the gold paint was scotched and chipping. I could see arches and loops and whorls in the wood grain beneath. It took a while to realize there was nothing in the trough but powder. About the Author Drew Rollins Drew Rollins is a writer, poet, and translator who grew up in Maryland and Bulgaria. A recent graduate of the Boston University Creative Writing MFA Program, he is working on his first collection, which has to do with faith, human nature, and also regular nature.

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