The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors Read Online Free PDF Page A

played in his mind. And he responded to it, as he’d been unable to respond to her, and he touched himself, as he had done so many times in the past, and as he’d known he would do from those first moments in the bar.
    Afterward, driving home, he thought: Next time I’ll do it. Next time for sure.

The Hereditary Thurifer
    STEPHEN L. CARTER
    I
    A MANDA SEAVER TRACED the sign of the cross above the bread and wine and waited for the magic. There had been a time in the yet recent past when the act of consecration had sparked in her an elemental tremor, as though in response to a raw electric shock, followed by a prayerful buzzing in her ears, damping the sound of Sunday shoes on thick carpet and creaking pews as parishioners rose and gathered at the altar rail with its heavily polished dark surfaces that had known the folded hands of generations of communicants.
    But no longer.
    Candles flickered to either side. The chalice winked gold. The vestments lay heavily along her slim arms. Arranging her face in an expression of proper sobriety, she held the Host in her right hand and the glittering chalice in her left, lifting both toward Heaven in accordance with the rubric of the Anglo-Catholic tradition. The congregation shuffled uneasily before her, three hundred faces, most of them black, observing, assessing, judging. She chanted the litany with care, reading the prayers rather than reciting from memory because the Episcopal Church of Trinity and St. Michael, here in the heart of Washington, D.C., disdained the contemporary Eucharist with which Amanda was familiar. Beside her, the deacon, yellowy face locked in permanent disapproval, turned pages in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and pointed to the proper lines. Amanda felt grateful and angry at once, worrying about her own feelings when she should have been thinking about the consecrated Host she was about to distribute. Today was her first Sunday as rector of TSM, as the younger members called it, and she knew she had not been these people’s first choice, nor their second, nor their tenth. They had sent the bishop of Washington a list of a dozen traditionalists they could accept as their new leader.
    The bishop had sent them Amanda.
    They’re good people , the bishop had instructed her. They just need to be shaken up a little .
    Meaning: Teach them to think like we do. Bring them into the twenty-first century .
    â€œAnd although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice,” Amanda reminded the flock, secretly begging God to restore the magic, and, at the same time, avoiding the gaze of the deacon, whose ability to read her innermost thoughts she found both appropriate and scary, “yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses, through Jesus Christ our Lord”—frantically signing over the bread and wine, as though the intricate gestures of her craft could conjure afresh the faith that had slipped behind her with the years.
    But she felt nothing. No stir, no magic, no miracle. A thin, tasteless wafer and heavily watered wine. Calling the congregation to the altar, preparing to offer the consecrated Host on its gleaming silver tray, Amanda Seaver imagined that the greatest mystery facing her was how long she could pretend to possess the belief she lacked.
    She was pardonably mistaken.
    II
    Amanda slipped out of her vestments in the sacristy, laying them in the waiting hands of a trio of older women, two black and one white, who represented the altar guild. At her former church, a dying all-white congregation near Boston, she had counted herself lucky to scrounge a single sixty-year-old acolyte for Sunday services. Here, the mass was choreographed with a precision that would have done credit to Westminster. Leaving the sacristy via the narrow hallway behind the altar, she overheard the women whispering.
    â€œWhen they said a woman, I