A Shortage of Angels By Penny Pickle A Shortage of Angels is set in 1968 in the rural, God-fearing East Texas enclave of Onward. The town is blessed with a side-winking, stick-chewing, ain’t-saying fifth grader at Mirabeau B. Lamar Elementary named Calvinia Jean Prather. “Cal” lives with her granddaddy “Packy,” who is a mortician, in their combination house and funeral parlor. Packy is tall, truthful, loving, and a master at hem hawing about what really happened to Cal’s mother and father. On an evening pick-up with Packy, Cal meets Clovis Ray Jr, a stillborn baby angel. Through him, Cal learns she can bring her mind to the clarity of seeing angels. Matriarch seraphim Maraeze, admonishes Cal not to interfere or call on the angel’s power and bounty of light for her own purposes and to trust in the divine plan of the Great I Am. She is only to intervene when called to act as a child of “special purpose.” Cal’s best friend is Moody, a child with social challenges, whom she fosters towards manhood and acceptance. Tara, the help, warns them not to go near the forest that is inhabited by a savage wild woman. Enthralled with local legend, together the duo secretly strikes out for the forbidden reaches of the Sabine River Bottom. On the riverbank, they witness a murder confession as they are innocently playing a game of Indian scouts. Saved in the last minute from discovery, a haunting river creature distracts the killers while Cal and Moody escape. In the darkness of night, Cal sneaks out alone to avenge a prank played on her beloved Tara. She quickly realizes the danger she has brought upon herself as she hears the eerie nighttime noises of the meadow. Nearing the Black folk’s squatter-town, she is surrounded by howling coyotes. She is saved by another witness to the murderer’s confession. When the killers return to find and silence Cal and Moody as witnesses, the children are caught in a tangled web. A befriended forest women and a traumatized, hermit doctor are powerless to save them as they too are captured. Cal must choose between her solemn oath, not to call on the angels to intervene in earthly matters, or risk the lives of those she loves. She can summon but one angel on such short notice who has the power and accumulated light to save her and that of course is…Lucifer. Her gamble of bargaining with Lucifer brings her to the jaws of death and Onward townsfolk to a time of reckoning with their own dark prejudices. Cal must choose between her oath, her loved ones, her duty to do what is right, and her own place in eternity. Her actions bring about revelations to help her understand the circumstances of her mother’s death, the discovery of her real father, and the opening of her eyes to see Moody as he really is.