A Tiny Piece of Sky Read Online Free

couldn’t think of a worse hymn to sing without Joan, because this one had a mess of high notes. Frankie hated the high notes and most of the time just skipped over them and let Joan take them on. Mother poked Frankie again and she stopped scratching at the back of her legs.
    Reverend Martin nodded and smiled, but Frankie noticed that he was blinking an awful lot. Which Frankie knew was something people did when they were nervous or weren’t telling the truth. Like the time Reverend Martin found a Toby Wing pinup stuck in thealtar book in the middle of Sunday service. He had held it up in front of the entire congregation and asked the owner to come forward to claim it and beg the Lord for forgiveness, but no one budged an inch in their pews. The reverend barely held the picture by its very corner so as to not have his fingers touch any part of Miss Wing, who was wearing nothing but sparkly shorts and a bathing suit top made from a single piece of Christmas ribbon.
    Reverend Martin’s eyelids fluttered like butterfly wings the whole time. And as he waved the picture around, the temperature in the sanctuary seemed to go up ten degrees. Frankie, along with Joan, Ava, and Martha, could tell that every boy in the entire place was sweating. “That’s the hellfire, most likely,” Ava whispered to Martha, who then assumed they were all about to burn and immediately began to bawl.
    In the middle of all that heat, Robbie McIntyre’s eyelids were blinking rapid-fire. Everybody between eleven and fifteen years of age knew the pinup belonged to Robbie, had seen him the night before at choir practice bragging about it and offering a peek for a penny. He’d nearly been caught by Miss Fisk, the church organist, and so he hid it in the altar book and forgot to get it afterward. But he would never admit to it. Never in a hundred years.
    That blinking, though, sure as the sun will rise, spelled G-U-I-L-T-Y.
    Now Mother and Daddy ushered the girls to the sanctuary, and they sat in their regular pew in the first row. Daddy always said that on Sunday mornings he wanted to get as close to God as he could without crossing Heaven’s gates. But Frankie and Joan knew that it was because he only had one good eye—the other being madeof glass—and he wanted to sit up front so he didn’t miss anything. You see, when Hermann Baum was a boy, he and his friend Charlie Lohman were playing with pocketknives, as young boys back in those days often did. They practiced throwing the knives at tree trunks to see whose blade would stick fast in the bark. They sharpened their blades on fieldstones and tried to see whose knife could saw through the most black locust saplings in ten seconds. Hermann’s record was eight saplings, but he knew he had it in him to cut through eleven or twelve.
    One afternoon, after they’d cut through a handful of saplings from Charlie Lohman’s backyard and whittled them into spears for throwing at each other, young Hermann thought of a new game. “Toss your knife in the air and try to catch it one-handed,” he told Charlie. Hermann flipped his pocketknife a few inches into the air and as the blade fell, he pulled his hand out of the way before it nicked his skin. He tried it again, this time catching the knife rather clumsily by the smooth, wooden inlay handle.
    Charlie, not the sort of boy to be outdone, grinned and tossed his knife up higher, so that the blade surpassed the top of his head by at least a foot. He grabbed the handle with ease on its way down. “Beat that,” he told Hermann.
    Hermann sucked in air through his teeth and dried his palms on his pants. Then, after counting to three, he let go of the knife with enough force to send it high above his head. As he tilted his head back to gauge the blade’s trajectory, the sun came into his eyes for a few unfortunate moments.
    Remember this, boys and girls: it only takes a few seconds to lose