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1 . Christopher Pulanco: "Corner Stone"^

The high was starting to hit Seth more than ever. His arm had been in pain for about half an hour now but it didn't seem to matter so much anymore. He had gotten used to it. The rush, the fuzziness, the swirls that were starting to develop in front of his eyes, those were the only things his mind was focused on at the time being, not the sting from the needle or the infection that probably had developed where that red mark beneath his elbow was. Pain was secondary now. It was always secondary.

The high was really all that mattered.

And the high was just how he liked it. It was exactly what he imagined when he initially cleaned off that needle with the handkerchief he had back in his apartment. One shot right in the vein underneath his elbow, and instant happiness, instant pleasure, instant forgiveness came in one fell swoop. Now, thirty minutes in, the thoughts of what brought him to where he was now all came together as he stared at his half-empty cup of coffee.

The four words that he had been waiting months to say. The four words that could change any man's life forever.

Sara. I love you.

Of course, to say such words was so much easier said in the mind than done in action. As he mulled over in that brain of his whether or not he still had the courage to do such a bold maneuver, he took another drag of his cigarette and sip of his coffee while his stomach began to intertwine a little more by the second. His mind was in a different state right now, a zone one would say perhaps. He could hear the ticking of the clock that hung up on the wall above the waitress, who was sitting right behind the counter, reading a senseless paperback that was the typical drivel read by middle-aged women. The sound annoyed him. Tick…tick…tick…tock. Tick…tick…tick…tock. Three annoying ticks, not two not one. Why did have to be three? Every clock had two ticks than a tock. Even more clocks had a simple tick tock combo. This one seemed to be the exception. Three lousy ticks, and than a lousy tock. It drove him mad. The three ticks, the lousy coffee, the third Pall Mall he was on. All this caused by the anxiousness of saying four words.

She needed to come quick. He was starting to go insane. The high from shooting up, the anxiousness, being all alone in that coffee shop. All of that now was slowly starting to get him. Seth needed her more than ever. He took another sip of his coffee and another drag of his cigarette, and then he heard the door behind him open and a gust of cold wind hit his back.

Seth didn't turn around to look who it was; he heard the footsteps walk towards him and a hand touch his back. He expected an aura to surround him. He could picture the feeling of warmth engulfing his body when that gentle hand would caress his back. It was supposed to be like the movies. He turns around to see her inviting face and then end all that anxiety he had felt earlier with one final act, an act that neither him nor her could explain. How he wanted that. It was the sole thing that had consumed him solely these past eight months. He wanted to end that waiting tonight here in this coffee shop called "Corner Stone".

"Seth I'm sorry."

The hand was not gentle, and the voice was not of hers. He recognized the man's voice even though he didn't want to say his name. It would only bring further pain to his gut. Now he felt lost. The feeling of hope, anxiousness and desire had now sunk, and he suddenly felt as if he were falling off a building. He could feel the rush, the chaotic swirl of emotions that pulsed throughout all his nerves. Maybe it was the high. Heroin could do that to a guy sometimes. But maybe it was the feeling of utter hopelessness too. He couldn't quite say for sure.

"What did she say?"

"Seth, she says, she's sorry."

Sorry. All she could say was she was sorry. He didn't quite expect that. He expected something else. Maybe something dramatic such as "I'll never love a goddamn heroin junkie!" or "I hope you live a miserable life!" But "sorry?" He sort of wished it were one of the other two, something emotional, or something more concrete so he knew how she really felt about him. Now, he was only more confused, and instead of having the opportunity to ask her what she meant, to maybe truly understand from her lips what she truly felt, he had to deal with this sap. A big dumb oaf who could only relay four damn words: She says she's sorry.

"Tell her thanks."

"She couldn't be here. It would've been too hard on her. You know how she feels about you and your…you know…addiction."

"I'm sure."

She never understood what it meant to him, how important his addiction was to his life, his existence. She was too caught up in all the Christian bullshit to really understand how it could change and shape one's life. To Seth, it was the only thing that kept him going. That and her of course. If it wasn't for those two things, he was just a normal guy, an everyday salesman who punched in his card everyday from 9 to 5. Some people, Seth especially, couldn't live on that. People like him needed an extra drive to keep on living.

However, now one of those drives was taken from him.

"I'm sorry to break it like this. I wish it were different. You have anything else you want me to say to her?"

Seth shook his head as the guy took his hand off of Seth's back. He put out his cigarette on the counter, and after flicking it to the ground underneath his seat; he reached into his coat pocket. The handle of his 9 mm felt warm, but it felt like it had been ages since he last touched it. As a matter of fact, he couldn't remember the last time since he fired the thing. He didn't like carrying his gun around too much, but he did anyways tonight. After he shot up back at his apartment, he had a funny feeling that it would come in handy for tonight.

Sara. I love you.

To some people, one woman was all you need in your life. Furthermore, to some people, one bullet was all you needed to find yourself from that feeling of being lost.

All he needed was one bullet right in the forehead, and when he pulled the trigger, it felt just like shooting one up in the arm. It comes quick and then all of a sudden…. nothing.

2 . Adam Membrey: "Everlasting"^

They say you lose a person in pieces.
One day you forget how their voice sounded in moments of triumph and sorrow.
One day you can no longer hear the laugh that rose above the room and made you smirk. One day you can’t remember the details of their face; it’s a beautiful blur you can’t bring into focus. One day the warmth of their touch turns cold and the color begins to drain from your face. You feel you’ve lost them; forever. But a memory cannot die. It may fade, but just as new blood brings a face to life, a sudden burst of recollection revitalizes the images as they simmer in your panicked mind. Relax, they say, relax and let the show play out in front of your mind’s eye. But the memory began to fade, and I could not bring it to life. So I walked out into the cemetery and I stood before my friend’s grave. It wasn’t helping, as memories continued to fade into the cold ground I could not help but stare at. And then I looked up beyond the grave and forward to the tree. It had been there ever since my eyes began to realize the world around me. It always stood there, somehow comforting in its constancy and motionlessness. And then I began to feel a wind brush up beside my back. I knew I wasn’t alone. It was then I remembered the times I sat by this very tree, talking with my best friend about the greater questions in life; about mortality, our future, and the past we could not help but laugh at. And without realizing it, the memories began to come to life. No longer were they fading, but instead rushing to the forefront with the excitement of impatient children. I can hear his voice rising and falling; rising in moments of sorrow and falling in moments of triumph. I could never figure out why this happened until just now. He didn’t care about accomplishments – he cared about the hardships that made him grow, that made him understand what life was all about. I can now remember that breathy laugh that just seemed to glide into the air, just loud enough to make you smile and just quiet enough to make you realize your humor needed some work.

I can now remember the stubble on his face he never bothered to shave, the hole in his iris that just always seemed to beg all of my emotions to jump in. His blonde hair seemed to match perfectly with the setting sun, blending in and allowing me to forget how unkempt it always looked.

And now that I realize how cold I am, I can sense his warmth carry through my body.

I’m not alone, nor will I ever be.

I look to my left hand and touch the wedding ring that I still have not bothered to take off. He will always be mine, and I will always be his. And in these memories, I realize it makes no sense to think of him in the past tense. He is and always will be a man of great humor, dignity, of love. The tree will always be there to remind me of the memories that won’t fade, and the wind will always be at my back, like his gentle hand that always calmed me down. I find it ironic that he has, once again, become the man of my dreams. I still dream of us having deep conversations by the still tree, still smiling at the bit of disguised wisdom he lays out before me.

No, he is not gone; he is as present as ever.

3 . Marcy Ray: "The Man Whose Letters You Will Not Open"^

A common housefly buzzed trapezoids around the threads of a bottle of Perrier sparkling water, and the sunlight flamed off the bubbles like the opal Floyd Christmas had bought his ex-wife the year he first tried to fall in love with her. She had been a Carbunkle by birth, which meant nothing but that she had an eye twitch inherited, like the pocket watch she would one day give her adopted son, from her grandfather. Nancy’s twitch, like Talon Sr.’s before her, got worse not when she was stressed, but when surrounded by water, which is one of the reasons Floyd always insisted on taking couple-showers.

Floyd shook his head in lieu of laughter. The fly had landed and crawled headfirst into the bottle of firewater. Floyd snapped the lid up to the mouth of the bottle and turned it slowly around the threads, eyes on the fly. He sat in the booth of Hole in the Wall, the best authentic Mexican Restaurant of Cody, Wyoming, flicking the Bic lighter he had been carrying in the change pocket of his Carhartts since the day he had seen the Fancy Dancers from the Spokane Indian Reservation. The dark-eyed girl in the bead and feather headdress picked up the lighter when Floyd chucked it to the ground after it failed to light. "I believe you dropped this." He took the broken lime lighter from her slender fingers like a gift from the gods. Until he saw her again he would take those words as some sort of Indian proverb for not littering—something you try to lose will always find you again.

On the day he waited in Hole in the Wall for Paddy O’Shea Floyd flicked his broken Bic. Hole in the Wall had been so named because one night when they were still in Tucson the Arredondo Brothers went out, as usual, to the Tavernacle. As Fernando chalked his cue he noticed a small hole in the wall just above the chair-rail in the shape of Our Lady of Guadalupe. "Hey, hermanos. Look at this." Javier and Manuel gathered around their baby brother and stared into the plaster face of the Holy Mother. That night Manuel dreamt of tumbleweeds. The next week the Arredondo Brothers were in Cody, Wyoming, buying an abandoned tattoo parlor where they would one day serve enchiladas to Floyd Christmas and Padreagh O’Shea.

Paddy O’Shea walked into the Hole wearing a Hulk Hogan shirt stained in the armpits and between the pects. Until the day his wife’s nephew would call him out on it, Paddy claimed the boob sweat came from Marie Osmond when they made things steamy in the Portland Japanese Gardens. Years down the road when his wife no longer let him smoke tobacco in his pipe, his nephew would out him at a family reunion barbeque explaining that Uncle Paddy had never even been to Oregon, or, until he met Floyd Christmas, any further west than that day he woke up in an abandoned Chevy Corsica in Cody, Wyoming. "Besides, Uncle Paddy, Marie Osmond? That’s not something you brag about."

He had been wearing that tee-shirt underneath argyle suspenders the day he first met Floyd Christmas. He peeled his drool-stained mouth off the leather interior and blinked around thinking perhaps the world would focus if he only had to concentrate on one eye. He was wrong. Resting on the dashboard was a faded gray fedora that he could only assume was his. He put it on as he stretched out of the car and headed down the dusty street. He made it to just outside the Hole before his brain started feeling like it had been hit by a Molotov Cocktail instead of the whiskey ditches he imagined he had been drinking the night before. He leaned to his left, spitting out the worms that had been gathering in his throat and entered. When Fernando came back from the dumpster he would see in this spit-wad some distant similarity to Judas Iscariot. By the time Floyd came around both Manuel and Fernando were in the dirt digging up the spit-wad with newly laminated menus in attempt to reclaim the glory of the Hole. Floyd leaned over their hopeful shoulders and increased their odds with a spit-wad of his own. Inside the Hole that day, Floyd Christmas met Padreagh O’Shea.

Floyd Christmas had not thought about his ex-wife in months, and other than crucial moments alone in the bedroom he had not thought of his Indian Princess in years. On the day Floyd sat in the Hole waiting for Paddy O’Shea he thought about them both. Paddy was good with women. His accent ensured that it didn’t matter what he said, which was lucky for little Padreagh because he could never remember what he told to whom. Floyd’s mustache, handlebar, had the opposite effect on women than he got when he looked at it in the mirror. It was what he had always dreamed of since he started a band with his nine friends in high school. Valhalla’s Dove played three gigs at a smoky bingo hall before they were booed out of their musical careers by Sampson Kincaid, an old open-mouthed breather who would never win a game of blackout bingo.

Floyd had contacted Paddy O’Shea three days before he sat in a booth watching a fly taunt his sparkling water. He had received another missive from The Man.

"The Man Whose Letters You Will Not Open?"

"I’m afraid so."

"What are you going to do?"

"I have no choice, Padreagh. You know that. I’m going to have to drown them in

the Spokane River."

"The Man?"

"No, the letters."

"Why Spokane?"

"Sherman Alexie is going to read at Auntie’s. So you know who else will be there?"

"No. Don’t care."

"The Princess. She’s got to be there. I need your help, Paddy."

"I know. I’m in. How do you figure all this shit out?"

"Glorie Wilkins looked it up on the internet for me."

Little Glorie Wilkins was the metal-mouthed Girl Scout that would one day consent to marry Paddy. After the Hole expanded to become part internet café, Glorie spent her afternoons on the web looking up foreign places that she was never to visit. The closest she would ever come to international was marrying O’Shea in a small ceremony attended by the Arredondo Brothers. The day Floyd Christmas announced his plan to drown his communication with the of the Man of the Letters, Paddy took notice of the many resources possessed by that crafty little Girl Scout and thought she was something that might come in handy later in life.

Paddy would eventually marry Glorie Wilkins with a turquoise ring he had mined out of the Nile River when he had been in Africa hunting wildebeests as a spiritual purification. After a long, barefooted day of hunting he knelt beside the great river and cupped his hands around the water to cool himself of the blowtorch fire of the African sun. When he lifted them up the water bled back down like tears between his fingers. As his reflection slowly drained out of his hands he was left with the turquoise ring. Sometimes when he told the story he had been sleepwalking and the misty morning spirits of the forest led him to it. Never was it a part of his older brother’s rock polishing kit, received on his ninth birthday. But by the time he bothered to tell the story, the man known as Padreagh O’Shea was not even aware he had a brother.

Life began for Paddy the morning he woke up in Cody, Wyoming and found a credit card under the ripped leather interior his face was drooled to. For all he knew he wasn’t even Irish before that hangover. Although Paddy assured Glorie that he came from independently wealthy potato farmers back in Enniskerry, he knew that the wealth of the magic card would one day run as dry as the bottle of Thor’s Hammer he woke up clutching on that day of birth. It was safer to wed with the turquoise he found in the glove compartment than waste unnecessary funds on a diamond ring.

The men parted ways after they arranged plans for their Spokane adventure. As Floyd Christmas walked out of the Hole thinking of his wife and his princess for the first time in years Paddy stole 35 cents of the $ .87 that his friend had left as a tip. Paddy always carried enough change with him so that he would be able to pay for the journey across the River Styx. He had been walking around unprepared for several hours that morning after he used his last bit of change to place a phone call.

The first time Paddy O’Shea sat in the back booth of the Hole the only thing he could remember was a series of six numbers. On the day he met up with Floyd Christmas a seventh number popped into his head as the sunlight pierced through his curtains: 9. It wasn’t enough for a social yet but it just became a possible phone number. Floyd tried it out on his way to the Hole.

The day before the boys headed for Spokane and the Indian Princess Floyd checked the weather report through the Girl Scouted skills of Glorie Wilkins. She stopped and sighed at something on the homepage, making Floyd nervous.

"Someone stole a puggle from a pet store."

"What," he exclaimed with frustrated relief.

Glorie had wanted a puggle since a girl in her English class started showing everyone pictures of her new puppy on her tickle-me-pink cell phone during their discussion of King Arthur’s Might vs. Right speech from the movie version of Camelot. Emily had a pink phone and a puggle—Glorie figured she should be able to have at least one or the other. She would never receive either. Padreagh wasn’t one for the grasping of subtle hints, and, years later when they tied the knot, Glorie would never get anything out of her marriage unless she came out and asked for it. She never would.

"What does that mean? What does it mean, Glorie?" pleaded Floyd.

"Op, says here they found it. So it’s ok I guess. I would never let my puggle get stolen. If I had one."

Floyd Christmas saw stealing as the same kind of bad omen as broken lighters that you try and throw away: steal something and you’re going to lose it the next day anyway.

Tom Sherry’s Barbeque Forecast for their Spokane trip the next day looked grim. Floyd lamented that if it rained, his Princess had no need to perform the rain dance, and if she was not rain dancing where was she? Still Floyd would not be defeated, not by a few puddles. He and his friend climbed into the Chevy Corsica that Paddy O’Shea began his life in and headed towards the setting sun.

He dropped Paddy off at O’Doherty’s then headed east on Upriver Dr. Floyd pulled over next to defeated benches situated across the river from a white sea-plane with a red stripe. He grabbed the letters out of the glove box, dislodging the ring Paddy would call dibs on later that night on their drive home. As he walked down to the water the waddling ducks reminded him of the day his ducks back home aborted their own egg. They came to his pond every year from the time he was four until he left that dump. Never had they laid an egg until their thirteenth year. His father called him to the kitchen window and pointed it out with his half eaten snickerdoodle. The ducks didn’t build a nest, and rarely did either one of them sit on the egg. Floyd Christmas was horrified by their lack of parental instinct. Eventually the egg rolled into the pond to be eaten by raccoons. That abandoned egg would haunt Floyd’s brain until the day he got Nancy Carbunkle drunk enough to accept his offer of marriage. Then he figured he could reorder the natural balance of things by hatching some eggs of his own, or Nancy’s. One drunken night not long after this Floyd got a little too excited for his future.

"Everyone, I am literally having a baby."

Most people rolled their eyes and went back to their drinks. Daddy Carbunkle did not. He went home and broke out Nancy’s brother’s baby clothes and she never had the heart to tell him they weren’t having a baby. In his mind this was somehow going to replace his own child that they lost. Talon Carbunkle Jr.’s first and only son had been "killed" when he threw himself in front of the oncoming traffic of the New York subway. Suicide was a dirty word not in the Carbunkle dictionary. Eventually Nancy would give in and adopt a son of approximately the correct age and present it to her father as the offspring of Floyd Christmas. Grandpa Talon would nickname him the sprinkler for his enuretic tendencies he’d retain throughout grade school.

With both hands Floyd plunged the papers under the water, and held them until his fingers couldn’t take it anymore, and he was sure the letters were drowned. He watched them drift down the river, but he knew he was not finished with them.

When Floyd and Paddy interrupted "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore" to ask if anyone had seen a beautiful Indian Princess in a headdress, Lucy, a local high school student who declined an evening out with her new boyfriend to hear Alexie talk, glared at him with eyes like cigarette embers. She would be dumped four and a half days later without so much as a kiss from the relationship.

"I think he’s talking about Meghan Flint," said a youngish sort of woman to Sherman; to Floyd she answered, "She moved to the Bowery years ago with her two daughters." Floyd felt his life ending, and chose to stumble down the stairs into the rain before the room could completely close in on him. Paddy went to browse through Uncle’s Games. Head reeling, Floyd staggered down the street in the direction of the river. He had not been talking about Meghan; he had been talking about Tiger Lily. She was not in New York; she was standing on the corner of Riverside and Washington smacking her newly glossed lips under the shelter of a floral, clear plastic umbrella.

"I was the lime lighter," he stuttered up to her.

"Excuse me?" she furrowed her brows at him, looking out between two painted daisies.

"I was the one you gave the lighter back to after the Fancy Dancing on the reservation."

She felt it best to ignore the Spokie next to her and continue with the process of cleaning out her purse. Her mother had been an oven checker; she was an obsessive-compulsive purse cleaner. She figured somehow that the ordered perfection of her purse would make up for the other chaotic aspects of her life that were so appalling to her father. Floyd watched and gasped as she pulled out a water-logged red envelope.

"Where did you get that?"

"It got caught on my leg when I was swimming in the river…"

Floyd took this to mean she was bathing in the waters of brother river, naked and glowing. He saw her gliding through the water like a copper dolphin with wet hair she would whip around and flail like the head feathers of the Sulphur Crested Cockatoo. Floyd found himself staring at her long brown hair which was pulled back in a figure-8 hair tie with two yellow beads, the kind Glorie Wilkins sometime wore around her pigtails.

"…anyway, I thought it was kind of cool at first but I opened it up and it was just a lame birthday card or some shit."

"Please just tell me your name," begged Floyd.

"I think it will be better if we all just stay unanimous," she said nodding her head with wide eyes.

Floyd pondered the depth of these wise words and contemplated putting them on his gravestone. Tiger Lily continued to clean out her purse as she came across a crumbled movie stub.

"It was my last date with Michael," she remembered both to herself and Floyd. "Well, I suppose I am better off without him. Anyone who is so hella-obsessed with Italian shoes is way to metro for me."

Floyd stood there in disgusted amazement. With one pseudo-word the image of his Indian princess shattered like the silence when a judge throws down her gavel.

Paddy drove the Corsica back to Cody, Wyoming that night with his newly purchased game of Life resting between the two silent men.

"So it was a birthday card. That’s what this was all about," Paddy spoke up after the second repetition of his Alabama’s Greatest Hits cassette.

"I don’t want to talk about it."

"I had no idea you were a Cancer."

"Padreagh."

Floyd Christmas became an ear puller during that car ride back to Cody, Wyoming. A habit he would not abandon until Padreagh and Glorie O’Shea buried him six feet under a gravestone marked only by his name and dates. Nancy would fly in with a little Asian boy who always assumed he was the son of the man buried in that plot. As they rummaged through Floyd’s belongings, Ascot Carbunkle-Christmas attempted to understand a father that was never really his. He came upon a broken lime lighter worn almost white that Padreagh and Glorie did not know to put in the right front pocket of Floyd’s pants. Ascot would keep it for himself. Nancy Carbunkle came across a box

of letters and cards all from the same address with no name marking whom they were from.

"Whatever they were, he spent his life trying to escape them," Paddy announced from the doorway.

"You can’t measure a man by letters."

"He did. Those all came from The Man Whose Letters He Would Not Open," he said taking the box of letters from her hands. The next day, during the movie on the flight home, Ascot Carbunkle-Christmas would fall asleep before he’d be able to read the cast list in the end credits.

4 . Grazia Salvemini: "The Santissima Annunziata Moon"^

The moon hung low over the square and revealed the sordid lives its drug dealers and homeless. The shame of the impoverished and fugitive circles around a weatherbeaten statue of a Medici on horseback. Cocaine, marijuana, and heroin are all available for the asking. Occasionally, police roam the courtyard, trying to maintain a semblance of order. College girls, lulled with the pleasantries of Tuscan cuisine, avoid the square, or quickly link arms if they decide to risk a crossing. There is a squalidness that is catching; distance must be established.

Five hundred years ago, the moon watched in the still of night as a young woman crept slowly towards the Hospital of the Innocents. She carried an unmistakable bundle, and faltered on each cobble-stoned step.

She reached the shelter of Brunelleschi's perfect loggia and behind a gray pillar her father watched her, his heavy form lurking in the shadows.

They were wealthy merchants, unwilling to disgrace the family with shame. She had been whisked away to the summer villa and a child was born. The baby's grandfather wouldn't let himself look at the child. Her brother sent wary and threatening glances towards the neighborhood men, but the family was adamant in its silence.

"He's only nursing, we have to keep him a little longer," entreated the grandmother in vain earlier that morning.

Now it was night, and the conflicted young mother reached for a bell next to a revolving window. She was about to place her bundle on the revolving platform, when she suddenly turned back and ran to the imposing pillar where her father stood.

"Oh papa! Since the baby couldn't even look at his father, won't you give him your blessing? Please papa…"

Her father complied and felt sorrow. "You know I wish you could keep him," he wanted to say.

She was weeping, and in between sobs broken thoughts spilled from her tears,

"I am worried I won't recognize him. What if I don't recognize him? What kind of a mother can't recognize her child?"

She repeated her words in a fervent prayer; her cries echoed in the empty square. Her father managed to stroke the child's head in an apostolic gesture of compassion.

Remembering herself, the young woman resolutely stifled her tears. She turned towards the left window and placed her baby on the round platform. Making her commitment, she ripped off a gold cross from her neck and snuggled it next to the sleeping child. She rang the bell of separation and footsteps pattered down the inside corridor. The platform slowly turned and a nun's sympathy pierced through the thick walls.

The woman would marry well, bear several successful children, and die with a title. One of Michelangelo's pupils decorated her tomb. Yet, for eighteen years of her life, she haunted Piazza della Santissima Annunziata with a regretful and searching presence.

The moon has watched lovers embracing the banks of the Seine, it has seen heroism and valor triumph over ancient Greece, and it fiercely guards revolutionaries in Peru. The secrets of the world radiate in its milky white surface. The moon also presides heavily over the square of Santissima Annunziata; it illuminates the entrapped shame and fear of generations.

Embittered men sit and watch willowy figures of shamed women parade in front of them. There is no wind, but yesterday's litter rustles under the movement of the marching pale women. Old family names are whispered, cursed, and forgotten. The broken men and conflicted women are ghostly companions in the lonely dark, vigilantly clingingly to their vices and obligations. Past and present join together in the moonbeams to relieve their burdens.

5 . Adam Membrey: " The Business of God"^

He was already nauseous. A foreigner in a strange, strange land, he crawled in and through the massive double doors into the main office. He truly did not understand why he was there. He had received a phone call only the day before, asking for him to come in and give one of his leadership presentations. But that was all he was told.

"Joe?" the secretary asked.

He gave her a bewildered look. "How did you--"

"They're already expecting you," she said, looking at him with a big smile on her face and her eyes slightly wet. "Go down the hall, the office is the second door on the right."

He did not understand this at all. And walking down the hall certainly did not help. All he could see were framings of bible verses in beautiful handwriting and all kinds of Christian paraphernalia scattered across the wall. His only guess was that this was a company that sold all kinds of Christian propaganda, all part of a plan to make people believe in someone that would never listen to them.

He stopped in front of the majestic mahogany door. But before he could open it, his throat caught again. Etched firmly in the door was yet another bible verse:

"Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, Just as in Christ God forgave you"

- Ephesians 4:32

He took a deep breath and pulled the door open, just barely slipping in through the doorway. He waited to hear the door shut behind him and then glanced down the small hallway. On one side he could see a crucifix, and immediately he felt better. At least these people believed in something tangible.

"Welcome, Mr. Hayes!" came a voice from inside the room. He turned around the corner to find a giant, polished wood table with several business people seated firmly around the perimeter. At the very end of the table was an old man, his face marred by what looked like years of hard living. His eyes had heavy bags and, judging by his flashy smile, he was wearing porcelain dentures. But for all his tired and worn physicality, it was off-set by a nice, grey suit and a welcoming personality.

But Joe still didn't know why he was here. He set his briefcase down at the head of the table and glanced towards the small title card resting firmly in front of the odd-looking old man - "Vice-President of Operations" it read.

Joe opened his briefcase, allowing himself to glance out towards his audience every once in a while to see if he could get a sense of what was going on. He did not want to give this presentation. He was clearly not the right man for such a presentation. There's nothing worse than trying to convince people who are already set in their ways.

"You may begin when you're ready," the old man said. But his smile had an unusual quality to it – it flickered. His lips would quiver every once in a while and start to hid the smile before he brought it back out again in full force. He would take his glasses off every few minutes to wipe his eyes – either from exhaustion or some phantom emotion. But the most noticeable thing about this old man was his hands – they shook with a streak of nervousness and anxiety.

Joe gathered his papers and set them down before him. He cleared his throat and looked up clear to assess his audience. But none of them had notepads. Clearly nobody was here to take notes. Even worse, none of the board members seemed to have any idea what was going on. They glanced from side to side and from above to below, looking for something to focus on.

"I'm here today," Joe began, still trying to find some steadiness in his voice, "to tell you about a new leadership style – functional atheism."

The board members shuffled and glanced around like attention-deficient pigeons, but the old man didn't move. That is, except for his nervous hands.

"I truly believe that people give too much credit to something they can't see. In other words," Joe hesitated, "they give God too much credit. Because the truth of the matter is that we are in control of who we are and what happens to us.

There is no man behind the scenes tinkering away. We must rely on ourselves, and not our faith." This was getting difficult. There was no feedback except for the half smile and dancing hands of the old man. "For people to rely on God to give them answers is, I believe, the wrong way to act. The real problem is that believers don't trust their own ability. They don't trust the fact they can do it on their own. They don't believe in themselves."

Before he began his next sentence, the old man raised his hand.

"Yes?" Joe was glad to get any kind of feedback.

"Did you ever consider," the old man began, "that some people believe in God because nobody believes in them? Did you ever think about how maybe some people hit such a low that they don't think they can pull themselves back up, that

they need God to help them believe that change is possible?" Joe stood still for a moment. He wasn't sure where this was coming from.

"I've known all my life that sometimes you can only rely on yourself. I know that sometimes you can't trust people, and you can only trust yourself. I know that when you have a mother working all day and night to make sure you have food on your stomach, there isn't a God watching over you smiling."

The nervous hands of the old man finally calmed down. He sat up in his chair and leaned over the table. "Did you ever consider that sometimes people need  God to forgive them because nobody else will?"

Joe eyed the old man for a moment, still unsure of what to think. And somehow, when the old man's eyebrows scrunched down and looked somewhat serious, it felt somewhat familiar.

"Joe," the old man started.

"How do you--"

"Do you believe in forgiveness?"

He had to know. Why did it seem like everybody knew his first name when he never had it on his business card.

"Do you believe in forgiveness, Joe?"

"But how--"

"How do I know your first name?"

Joe breathed out. He nodded.

The old man stood up from his chair and took a deep breath. His hands finally calmed own and his smile didn't seem so false anymore.

"Joe," he said. "I'm your father."