Frankie hesitated inside the spacecraft. He bent his legs and pulled his head out, and he had to turn around to face the Reverend again. “Yes.”

“Can I use it?”

He glanced around the inside of the shed. “What for?”

“What do you think, son? For a minute, that’s what for. I just got to hear something.”

“Okay.” He dug his keys from his pocket and stepped down off the crate.

“No, no, you stay here,” the Reverend ordered. He took the keys. “I know how to work it. Just let me use it for a minute. Keep looking in there; you might learn a little.” He indicated the spacecraft with his jaw, and then walked straight out of the shed with Frankie’s keys in one hand and the bottle of Old Crow in the other, his red bathrobe flowing behind him like a cape.

Frankie watched the Reverend climb the back steps and disappear into the house. He stood for a moment on the plywood floor, surrounded by the unnumbered calendars. Then he stepped up onto the crate and eased his head back into the diorama.

His strength—what was left of it, for the day—was waning. He felt it, sometimes, trying to find a way out, slipping through his veins, pushing at the ends of his fingers or traveling with gravity down his legs and collecting in his feet. Going home now made sense. Going home might even be what they wanted him to do, what they had already decided would happen. Could they steer the future? Not just predict it, but guide it down a particular path? He would ask the Reverend about that when he got back.

Then it occurred to him that the Reverend might be stealing his car.

From outside the spaceship, he heard the loud, repeated banging of a piano chord. Then an explosion of violins. He pulled his head out and stepped down off the crate.

Someone—an anguished-sounding man—began to sing: I saw the light on the night that I passed by her window.

Frankie crossed the yard and entered the house through the back door. In the living room, he saw the tape deck still had a hammer sticking out of it, but its front panel was open, the chamber empty.

The song was getting louder. The singer’s voice seared the air like a bolt of heat lightning. Frankie pushed through the screen door and was descending the front steps when the chorus started, carried on a wave of mariachi horns.

Why, why, why, Delilah?

The Volkswagen was parked where he’d left it. The driver’s door was open and the Reverend was sitting behind the wheel. Between Frankie and the car, the row of calendars hung with their backs to him, unpainted, rippled by humidity, blanched by the sun, like an unfinished fence that had never been properly primed.