When God is a Shard of Glass in the Gut

I heard him first before I saw him. Three chirps in a row, again and again, the same three chirps I’d heard the afternoon before, when I spotted the robin fledgling fluttering helter-skelter onto the branch of the honey locust tree. I’d sat on the front step and watched for mama bird to arrive with a fat worm, but despite his incessant chirping, three times in a row, again and again, I never saw her come.

The next morning, early, when the sun was still slanting golden through the branches of...