Chapter One
1.
Along the walls of the church in Navar, there are oil paintings of saints instead of windows. Yellow bones in tarnished reliquaries, faded plastic flowers, and plaster statues crowd tables pressed up against the stone walls. Since the only light in the dense darkness comes from the candles reflecting off the swirling columns of the gold altarpiece that stretches to the ceiling, objects emerged from the murk only as I passed by them, disappearing again as I stepped away. The cool dampness turned the layer of dust on my skin into a paste.
I knelt in the back of the church, my forehead on the top lip of the smooth, varnished pew in front of me. The wood was hard against my forehead, but not rough or uncomfortable, and after a while it felt as though my skin had begun to wrap itself around the pew, and that the wood had begun to mold to my head. I hadn't noticed that the evening's pilgrim's Mass had ended. I'd been crying for a long time, and I was startled and confused when I first sensed a gen ...
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