The children cluttered the wide, warm lap of the man, surrounding the book like planets frozen in orbit around the sun. If the children were planets, the man was gravity, holding the scene and their reality in place. And the book was the morning star.

The children loved the book and the man said he did, too, so they gathered around it every evening and every morning in the big leather armchair. The woman peeked in from the kitchen, dishrag in hand, and when the dishes were done she would come in and sit on the floor at the man's feet until the oven buzzed or the washing machine called for a fresh load, her back against the cool leather of the chair.

There was a wooden table for the book to rest proudly on when it wasn't in use, so that its title could be sung forward. And beside that table was the chair. When the chair was empty it was cold and dead, because it did not have the man and the children and the book to give it life. But when the table was empty, it was alive, because that meant the book was is use and the words the man read flowed to the table and gave it life.

The chair and the table and the book were in a wide, round room, with wide, tall windows across the wall so that passers-by could look in on the scene. The man and the children in the chair, and the woman from the kitchen, read the book and listened to its stories, stories of love and hope and heaven. When the children went to school they quoted it, and the other children looked at them with contempt and well-hidden jealousy that their copies of the same book were crisp from neglect and shiny and dead. When the family went to church they heard the book’s stories, and they felt glad that they already knew them. They knew how to be good and loving and loved.

The man and his children and his woman loved the book, and it was a lovely book indeed. They devoted their lives to it, to these stories of love and kindness. So every morning and every evening, the children cluttered the wide, warm lap of the man around the morning star and the woman took breaks against the cool leather of the chair and the man played gravity and read from the book loud enough to mask the sounds of hungry hands beating and begging against the glass of the wide, tall windows.