Bathsheba doesn’t have much to say about growing things. End Times always arrives before Advent, so she mixes the two—sheep, goats. Her man was a shepherd before he was a king, the way her son was alive before he was dead. Now, she plays a broken tambourine and cuts salt dough into snowflakes for the tree. No angel’s ever come to visit her, but she’s fine. She’s in her turmeric era. She has beet dye for her cookies. She’ll live forever. She has a spruce tree, and all of last year’s cranberries that caved in on themselves like slow, imploding planets. She saved them, as she saved all of you. Since none of this is real anyway, picture now her firstborn as if he’s grown and tightening the screws of her kitchen table. He is a carpenter too. He made the sun and moon with paper mâché. Someone once told her you must not like surprises. She just doesn’t like to be tricked. If it’s a dream, for example, she feels she ought to know. What child would you trade for a psalm? She’s so blessed, so ashamed. All of her sons are back from the dead, yet here she’s stuck on an endless loop, skipping the YouTube ads and drying orange slices and pressing salt and flour into the shapes of men to hang on the tree.