Blessed

The priest still has a mouth full of cake, crumbs stuck to his lips, when the mom presents a doll with clumps of hair missing, a book with crayon scribbled across the cover, a blanket still warm from the girl’s grip and says, “Bless them?” The girl cries for her stolen blankie, but the mom ignores her and shoves the items at him. The cake lodges in the priest’s throat, and he coughs as he makes his way through the roomful of parishioners to his car where he’s stored his Bible and a vial of holy water and blessed oil for situations like these. And when he returns, the mom has created a pile on the couch: two more dolls, four stuffed animals, a pacifier, six hats the mother uses to hide the bony protrusions on her daughter’s head. He has already laid hands on the protrusions, prayed over them, made the sign of the cross on them, and today he has baptized the little girl the woman has named Mathilde but calls Lilith, a joke, she says, from when the doctor pointed out the protrusions on the ultrasound and the parents called them horns. The mom smiled when she said this, but the priest saw her hug herself, her gaze drifting to the floor, and knows she hasn’t told anyone else about the vestigial tail they had removed after the girl’s birth. The priest touches each of the items, sprinkles holy water on them, murmurs a prayer, but as he completes the task, the mother arrives with more—a rainbow hairbrush, a pillow, a green ball. The girl, wearing a bonnet and droopy diaper, runs through the room, face smeared with icing, hands clutching lumps of cake. No one stops her. The other parishioners part as the mom returns, arms laden with more offerings: hair bows and a stack of dresses and a framed picture of Winnie the Pooh. The pile grows, and the parishioners whisper behind cupped hands as they watch the mother move more quickly, her arms piled higher each time she returns: picture books and bottles and a toothbrush and a toy car. The little girl snatches the blessed hairbrush from the couch, waves it above her head as she darts between legs and out of the room. The items waiting to be blessed spill onto the floor as the mom heaves a dollhouse atop the pile, and the room is silent, except for the priest’s murmuring. Until he steps away from the offerings and toward the mom who is weighed down with a wooden rocking horse and a toy kitchen, and he takes them from her arms and says, “Enough,” but she shakes her head, points to the coat rack, the couch, a used wine glass, says, “Bless them,” grabs his arm and pulls him into the girl’s room, gestures toward the rainbow curtains, the cross hanging above the crib, the yellow carpet, says, “Bless them,” pulls him farther down the hall, into her own bedroom, points to the unmade bed, a half-filled glass of water on the nightstand, a pile of dirty clothes on the floor, and says, “Bless. Bless. Bless,” tears in her eyes, nails digging into his arm, and the priest wants to say no but can’t, and so he blesses everything: the bathroom trashcan, the unopened mail on the counter, the parishioners who are now slipping out the front door without making eye contact, and the mom who reaches for her daughter, grabs her under her armpits, holds her out to the priest, and he blesses all of them, the mother, the daughter, the horns, the bonnet, the droopy diaper, but he spends extra time blessing the touch between mother and daughter, the mother’s fingers that grip the girl’s armpits, the outstretched arms that maintain distance between their bodies, the girl’s legs that dangle, already moving, as though running, and as soon as her mother releases her, the girl will sprint far from her mom and the priest and his water and his oil, and so he says, “Blessed be. Blessed be. Blessed be,” and watches as the girl squirms free and is gone.