Excerpt from Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt

Lost Lambs

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.

On this day, the first of April, the rainless peak of the rainy season, Father Andrew was getting ready to leave and catch a cinéma français screening at the Vintage Theater when there came a knock at his office door from the youngest Flynn girl, Harper. She hadn't been to church since her parents opened their marriage. Father Andrew fancied himself a progressive priest, but the Flynns' marital "arrangement" seemed neither exploratory in the swinging-sixties sense nor justified in the new age liberal poly-whathaveyou sense but rather a creative avenue through which each spouse could inflict pain upon the other and their three daughters. Harper must have been twelve now, he thought, maybe thirteen.

Harper slid into his office. The stained glass window cast a rainbow palette across her little face. Her little freckles. Her slightly upturned nose. Her hair in twin French braids, rich and brown like a prayer bench. Like a well-kept horse. The three Flynn girls, Abigail, Louise, and Harper, no longer attended mass. They did not come to Sunday service and often skipped their school's Wednesday chapel assembly. They turned in forged notes from the nurse at Sacred Daughters Preparatory School to justify their absences: toothache, feminine troubles, whiplash, duress induced by spoiled milk. They were missing from the community performance of Noah's Ark and were later spotted in the parking lot, a lion, a fox, and a hedgehog, sharing a cigarette. They had not volunteered that year for the town's winter food drive, the Christians for the Cure walkathon, the three-legged race for three-legged dogs, Apple Bobbing for Autism, or Knitting for Narcolepsy. There was no excuse, really, for poor attendance after the church's employment of digital devotionals. Father Andrew was a practitioner somewhat canonized for his adaptation to the digital age, his multivalence when it came to mass. All places of worship in the town had adapted to the changing times—Rabbi Hoffman had even instituted a mobile bris service: Take an Inch, Give a Mohel. Yet the Flynn girls, the whole Flynn family, were AWOL. Father Andrew reminisced about how they used to love Apple Bobbing for Autism, a real shame.

Excerpted from Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash. Copyright © 2026 by Madeline Cash. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.