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5 How to Pray Falling down on your knees is the easy part, like drinking a glass of cold water on a hot day, the parched straw of your throat flooded, your knees hitting the ground, a prizefighter in the final rounds. You’re bloody, your bones like iron ties, hands trembling in the dust. What do you do with your hands? Clasp them together as if you’re keeping your heart between your palms, like their namesakes in the desert oasis, because that’s what you’re looking for now, a place where you can rest. It has been a dry ride for months, sand filling your mouth, crusting your half-blind eyes, and you need to speak to someone—though who you don’t really know. Pardon is on your mind. Perhaps you could talk to your mother. You are fifteen and think her life is over. You don’t say it, but you think it, and she’s ten years younger than you are now, her hair still dark. How do you thank her for waking up each morning and taking on a day that would kill you and not just one but thousands? How do you thank her for the way she tossed words around and made them spin and laugh and do cartwheels on the lawn? And your father, he’s the one who loved poetry, bought the book that opened your world to you like someone cutting into a birthday cake the gods have baked just for her. Do you talk to him about not caring and teaching you that same cool touch? And King James, how do you thank him for all the words his scribes took from Wycliff and Tyndall, and Keats for his odes, and Neruda for his. But this wasn’t meant to be a prayer of thanksgiving but a scourge with a hair shirt and whips and bowls of gruel. But is it blood the gods need, 6 or should your offering be all you have—words and too many of them to count on the fingers pressed to your lips, or maybe not enough and never the right ones. ...

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