I say no, not really, but then I remember when I was a nineteen-year-old missionary in Ilagan, Isabela in the hell-heat of a Filipino summer watching as all the children & youth in the congregation I was assigned to wore pioneer-era clothing—gingham dresses and bonnets, cotton shirts & wide-brimmed hats—all the while pushing handcarts in their tennis shoes & flipflops around the basketball court just outside the chapel singing pioneer-era songs in English while jeepneys & tricees honked by & taho sellers hooted & palm trees sentineled the blacktop but barely shaded the brim hatted boys & bonneted girls giving it their all for God at the end of July & a group of guys wearing Steph Curry & LeBron James jerseys hung on the wrought iron fence longingly, some rubbing their hands together in anticipation of their next 3v3 pickup game, others spinning Spauldings and Wilsons on their fingertips, still others dribbling or practicing their ballhandling on the narrow sidewalk, all waiting for the procession to end so they could use the basketball court how God intended.
Jace Einfeldt is a writer from Southern Utah. He is the fiction editor at the Arkansas International. His recent work appears or is forthcoming in Hobart After Dark, BULL, X-R-A-Y, the Glacier, and Aethlon, among others.
