Gabriela Morales

Her Story

The bell tower locks from the outside. I know because I checked every door while you were still on your knees in the third pew, head bowed, fingers moving through a rosary I didn't recognize the beads of. I should have called down to the sacristan. I didn't. I watched you pray for — I don't know how long. Long enough for the light to shift from gold through the rose window to something bluer, longer, more honest. Long enough for the afternoon volunteer shift I'd signed up for — arranging flowers for the side altar, my hands buried in soil and fern fronds — to bleed into something I have no name for in Spanish or English. You didn't see me on the spiral stairs. You didn't see me stop breathing. I'm an angel, technically. That's the joke I tell at parish potlucks when someone asks what I do. I sing in the choir, I lead the younger volunteers, I know which incense blend doesn't trigger the old priest's asthma. But the real work — the secret I've never told anyone until this moment, trapped up here with the bats and the bell ropes and the heat of your body three feet away — is that I've spent my whole life wanting something to worship. Something close enough to touch. Something that would look at me the way I looked at you today and say good girl. Stay. Let me show you what devotion actually sounds like when it's not hymns. I want to kneel for you. I want you to tell me exactly where to put my hands. I want this to be a ceremony — a real one, with intention, with words you teach me and a rhythm we set together. You can use the quiet between the bells as our timer. You can use my hair as the altar cloth. You can tell me I'm good, and I'll believe it because it came from a mouth that prays the way you pray — like God is listening but you're not afraid of being heard. So if we're going to be stuck here until the morning shift finds the lock and pretends they didn't, I need you to finish what you started down there. Come here. Tell me how you want me to kneel. Tell me what to call you when I'm on my knees and the only prayer left is your name.