The gnat situation in the church was getting out of hand. It was Miss Winkle’s fault, she had brought the gnats and this was unforgivable, not in the eyes of God but those of Father Andrew, who was unable to extermignate the gnats, not for lack of trying—he’d employed every trap, spray, and swatter on the modern market—and yet his efforts had little effect on the greater gnat population. If anything, it was growing. Father Andrew imagined that soon the gnats might attract a larger pest—gnat-eating spiders, perhaps—which might attract, say, frogs, which might attract rats, which might attract cats, which might attract coyotes, which might attract a larger coyote-eating mammal, and so on and so forth. It was Miss Winkle’s fault because Miss Winkle had brought the plant into the church, “like God did on the third day!” Miss Winkle attended every church function with her brain-damaged child, who wore gun range earmuffs to mass—the organs startled her—and occasionally Miss Winkle brought plants from the nursery where she volunteered, tending the orchids. Surely she didn’t know that the plant had fungal gnat eggs in its soil, but why bring a plant into a church in the first place? thought Father Andrew. It wasn’t a botanical garden. A monstera plant too, meaning monster in Latin, assumed Father Andrew, although he wasn’t sure, hadn’t studied Latin at the seminary, majored instead in French Cinema. The plant topped his list of Reasons to Dislike Miss Winkle. Also on the list of Reasons to Dislike Miss Winkle was that she never dognated to the quarterly fix-the-church-bells charity fundraiser but complained quarterly about the lack of church bells. And she was in the habit of saying “I’ll say” when she hadn’t, in fact, said anything at all. She had never, in recent memory, offered an original point or enhanced a conversation. She simply tacked “I’ll say” onto someone else’s conversational enhancement, which was disingenuous and obnoxious and probably indicative of a deeper character flaw, maybe even inherent evil dating back to Miss Winkle’s apple-eating ancestor, or at least this was what Father Andrew told the state-mandated therapist. After that unsavoriness a while back with the priests and the altar boys, Our Lady of Suffering made some structural changes to its programming, such as weekly Consent through Christ workshops, an intimacy czar at every confessional, and mandatory psychoanalysis for the presbyters with the newly appointed parish shrink. The parish shrink often attributed Father Andrew’s “latent misogyny” toward Miss Winkle to “repressed sexual desire,” a diagnosis with which Father Andrew ardently disagreed. He was not repressing anything, had been with a number of women—thirty-three, specifically, one for every year of Jesus’s life—before joining the seminary. Plus, he highly doubted that his masculine desires would express themselves for Miss Winkle, whom Father Andrew often pictured to dissipate unhallowed urges.