Free The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts by Laura Tillman Page A

read these off to me as if they were part of a coherent whole. I told him I had to go, that I had a meeting, but he insisted that we make copies in the front office.
    As I walked out to my car, the director of Good Neighbor approached me. I asked him if he knew anything about the scientist’s backstory.
    â€œHe showed us some pictures where he was in a classroom setting and of course he was much younger, and it looked like he waslecturing, and from what I understand at one time he was a very bright, very intelligent guy.”
    â€œI believe it.”
    â€œHe has a lot of knowledge up there.”
    â€œSo what do you do for someone like that? I mean, is there anything you can do, or do you just help him when he comes in?”
    â€œThere really isn’t much we can do. He doesn’t want to be helped. He’ll want to call up the president. . . . He calls a lot of people.”
    I went back to Good Neighbor to check out a crafts class, where a group of women were given free materials, with the goal of ­helping them make a profit from their crafts and create a self-sustaining enterprise. That week, in preparation for Thanksgiving, they were using ribbon, thread, and hot glue guns to make turkey pins. The tail ­feathers were yellow, and the turkeys, with googly eyes, had little orange feet hanging down at the bottom. A petite, enthusiastic woman from Matamoros had started the class two years earlier . She’d come to Good Neighbor to spread God’s word, but realized that the soup kitchen’s patrons also needed a way to make money.She changed the arrangement, teaching one hour of art, one hour of Bible study each week. After the turkey pins were done, a plain-looking woman who had formerly said little took charge of a microphone attached to a ­karaoke machine.
    She spoke excitedly about passages from the Bible. “Lo que Dios dice, se cumple.” What God says, he does.
    The two dozen women in the room joined in on the se cumple .
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    On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I’d sat in a synagogue listening to a reform rabbi deliver his sermon about a familiar passagein the Torah: the story of Abraham and Isaac. God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and Abraham endeavors to comply with God’s command. But just before the moment of sacrifice, God sends an angel to Abraham to grant Isaac a reprieve. Instead, Abraham sacrifices a ram, and father and son return safely home together.
    Many of the stories in the Torah drift away, but that of Abraham and Isaac sticks. A father is told to kill his own child and says yes. God commands, “Thou shalt not kill,” but he directs his disciple to do exactly that.
    If one believes in God’s might, and the direct intervention of God in one’s life, wouldn’t it follow that Abraham would comply with this directive? Abraham is proving his absolute allegiance to a single God, a concept that was radical at the time. When that God, all-powerful, issued a command, it stands to reason that Abraham would obey. If he did not, the consequences could be incomprehensibly worse than the loss of one life, even if that loss was his own child. On the other hand, it’s possible that killing one’s own child sits at the limit of the horror we are capable of comprehending as human beings. Perhaps a reasonable person trying to evade this fate would be willing to gamble on any other consequence.
    As I listened to the sermon, it took me a moment before John, Angela, and the children flickered into mind, like a lightbox faltering as it switches on. According to John, something told him that killing the children was imperative, that he was engaged in a battle of good and evil, and he was on the side of good. He said that he had long seen himself as exceptional, chosen by God for some purpose, and had dreams where he battled demons. Where those thoughts and the message to kill his children came