The shed reeked of paint. Along the back wall, several planks had been laid across a pair of sawhorses, and on them sat a bottle of Old Crow, a large coffee can stuffed with brushes, and at least a dozen quarts of paint clustered together and stacked on top of one another, their colors striped and smeared across their sides. Frankie felt tired again, and slightly dizzy from the fumes. He wanted to find out whatever he could, finish this conversation, and get back on the road, maybe pull over somewhere and sleep. He felt warmer than he thought he should; his fever had returned. “They told me that everything I’m ever going to do is already written down,” he said. Stacks of painted boards stood a foot deep against the walls on either side of him—all calendars, from what he could tell.

The Reverend walked over to the makeshift table and opened the Old Crow. He swigged from it, watching Frankie.

“They didn’t say too much.”

“Heh,” the Reverend said—to the whiskey. He set the bottle down. “Look up here.”

He pointed to the shed’s peaked ceiling. Frankie looked up. Suspended over their heads was a round, three-dimensional object with a hole cut out of its bottom. It was painted silver (rough brushstrokes were visible in the dim light), was at least as wide as the makeshift table, and was sprouting tentacles. The Reverend unwound a nylon cord from an anchor on the back wall. “The hull I made from specifications they gave me—scaled down, of course. The inside is all my own.” He gathered the cord in his hand and then carefully started to let it out. The object jostled back and forth, and descended. Frankie stepped out of its way. “It won’t fall,” the Reverend said. “It goes to right … there.” He kept his eyes on the spacecraft as it turned gently, hanging now just above their heads. His hand found the bottle again. He drank from it. “Look like what they showed you?”

“Sort of,” Frankie said. “It was dark.”

The outside of the model, he saw now, was covered not in brushstrokes but in words that had been etched into the paint before it had dried, possibly with a toothpick. The effect was a paisley-like relief that hurt Frankie’s eyes when he tried to read it. He caught only the words cast and eventual.

“Slide that box over here.”

He looked down and saw a wooden crate next to the door. He pushed it toward the center of the shed with his foot.

“So what did they tell you?”

“This is good,” Frankie said of the ship, beginning to move around it. “They told me I was going to get sick.” He heard the slosh of liquid as the whiskey bottle was tipped up again.

“Go on.”

“They told me I might die.”

“Christmas.”