Free The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater

gargantuan and supposedly forever-frozen stained-glass windows was moving, yes,
moving
, inching out, and out, accompanied by a series of rusty bronchial screeches that suggested, in retrospect, hidden, unused hinges on every one of those supersized works of art.
    “What’s that?” I recall someone said, and then a “shhh,” and then, “Goddamn it, guys,
shut up
.” That did it. Andrea stopped her Clydesdale imitation, and, as if on cue, we all looked up, searching for the source of this strange sound. And that is when we saw it, the ten-, maybe fifteen-foot panel opening above us with a crackling, sickly creak that was still somehow strong enough to move a giant Jesus through the air, his crown and cross captured in the cut of glass and careful curves of lead.
    I was sitting smushed up against slurry-nosed baby Joe, who right then and there wet his pants, my pants soaking up his seepage and his smell. “Shhhh,” someone said again as the window kept coming, moving slowly out, and out, the late light landing on the colored glass, inflaming it. “God,” Andrea said, meaning, I think, that she thought God was making the window move, but I thought I saw the dark shadow of a person and a hand clutching what could have been—must have been—a crank, and then the crank cranked up and released the most unearthly rasp, a sound arthritic and scraping, as though the Jesus pictured on the moving panel had begun to speak of his agony in the only way he could.
    And the last of the light turned the blood of that approaching Jesus dark and darker still, until finally Jesus’s blood was the color of gravy falling from his form. We all froze solid fear. Mary, who had been standing the entire time smoking and sneering in the corner of the lot, dropped her cigarette, just let it fall from her hand and then held her hand there, in the same stuck posture.
    And now, appearing in the open window, the upper half of an old, old man, only a few wispy whites on his scraped scalp. The old, old man was wearing, I could see, a stiff white yoke around his neck, and when he stretched his arms towards us, his black robes billowed in the breeze. “Mary,” the man said, and Mary’s sneer fell from her face so quickly and completely I could practically hear it hit the ground, and her face turned soft and scared, both at the same time. “Joseph,” the man now said to the boy crammed next to me, and then one by one he recited the names of those six Roman Catholic Callahan kids—his congregants every Sunday—from his ledge on high, the man’s hands on the sill of a window gone wide, so Jesus entered the Golden Ghetto with all his horror and none of his purported peace. The old, old man pronounced the six names of the children he must have baptized at their beginnings, articulating each name with a purpose so pure and so mysterious that the names kept echoing in my mind all that evening, the man pointing with one rickety finger to each child as he titled them,
declared
them, and then, when he was done, his finger found me—the singular Jew and, for a reason I still today cannot say, a great fear filled me, perhaps because I did not want to be declared, could not be called by a man in billowing black, his finger fixing me to some barbed spot. I sensed danger—
what danger? why danger?—
the stained glass burning in the last of the light as he pointed straight at me, his eyes beaming blue beams until a bird blew by, breaking his gaze with a sound I could almost hear: sweet snap. I was free.
    I ran. I ran away. I was at the edge of the parking lot when I heard the priest say to his congregation of children, articulating, again, each and every name as though their lives depended upon it: “Mary, Jim, Mark, Grace, Andrea, Joseph, go home. Go home now. It is late. Your mother must be worried.”
    Late, late that night I awoke to the smell of char, the sound of sirens, striped lights swinging across my wall. I fell back into the fastness of