Sumac

Its berries drift up from the earth like a colony of red coral, swaying in a current of breeze and rippled by the passage of a white-tailed doe. Had they the least suggestion of radiance, these sumac berries would be prized as rosary beads: gathered by poor devout locals, blessed by the parish priest, polished, pierced, and strung onto silver filaments, then packed and cargoed to a St. Vincent de Paul storefront in the city, and arranged in a glass case near a three-dimensional figure of Christ, thorn-crowned, who bleeds as you turn him to the light; the most perfect of the rosaries presented to the archbishop as an example of good works and the primacy of the Church over nature from now until the hour of our death, amen.

As it is, the dull surfaces of sumac berries resemble only a scarlet carpet stained and scuffed to a fuzz by people who wear the same shoes to church as to work, and these berries are worshipped only by finches and sparrows, whose sole authority is the power of winter, the absolution of spring.