I
swung the hammer in my lust,
Laughing
as my Savior cried.
I
stood beneath the cross and thrust
The
iron in my Savior’s side.
Naked
She was laid to rest.
Naked
She’ll return.
She was no poet, and
she had not written verse since her novitiate, but the lines had kept her up
half the night, sick with guilt and desire. The girl had left her knickers on
her desk — in playfulness or contempt, she could not say. If she had not gone
back to check the windows and the lights, they would have stayed there for a
full week, to be discovered when classes resumed after the holiday. She had
taken them to bed with her, and as she lay awake, refining the poem in her
mind, she had held them lightly to her nose.
Kristen had not
arrived as she promised, and she held up the Mass for fifteen minutes, waiting.
Seven of her girls, from her various classes, sat in the pews in front of her,
a respectable number for a holiday, but without Kristen, they meant nothing.
They were apostles in hiding, ciphers without the spirit. Beautiful
Kristen. If she had come to Mass, it would mean she had forgiven Sister
Patrice for touching her. As it was, well — she would have to think about going
away. Father White, sitting behind the lectern in a simple, white linen robe,
was growing impatient. Candles stood in racks on each side of the altar, and
behind it, the stained-glass windows, divided into quarrels of Virgin Mary
blue, made her feel as though the chapel had sunk to the bottom of the sea. Her
tired eyes were grateful for them.
Suspecting her life
and career were at an end, she gestured for Father White to begin. He stood
and, planting himself behind the altar, raised his arms.
“Please stand,” he
said. “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit.”
“Amen,” the girls
said.
“The grace of our Lord
Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
“And
with your spirit.”
“Brother and Sisters —
I’m sorry, let me amend that. Sisters, let us acknowledge our sins, and prepare
ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.”
They had barely
finished reciting “Lord have mercy” when she heard happy voices in the hall.
The door behind her whooshed open, and Kristen and her dirty-minded friend
flounced in, chattering out loud. She heard the word “Mom” just as their voices
cut off.
“Join us,” White said
from the altar. “And think about where you are.”
Stifling their laughter,
the girls sidled into the back pew next to her. Miss Nguyen, damn her, stood
was between and Kristen, and just as White was resuming, she whispered
something in Kristen’s ear. The two of them laughed silently.
She rapped Miss Nguyen
on the shoulder, pointed forward and mouthed the words “Up front.” The girl
brushed past Kristen and walked down the aisle in leisurely fashion, stopping
the liturgy yet again. The defiance was palpable. White’s eyes followed her
with contempt as she took her place alone in the middle of the front pew.
“May we continue now?”
he said.
Miss Nguyen, standing
with her back to the rest of them, fiddled somehow with her skirt, and the
resolution drained from White’s face. In the light from the stained glass, he
turned a paler shade of blue. He swayed like a dead tree, and it seemed he was
about to topple over, but at the last moment he found the strength to look past
her and go on.
“Let’s back up,” he
said. “Glory to God in the Highest—”
“And
on earth peace to people of good will.”
Sister Patrice was too
relieved to wonder about it. Kristen had come back, and as the prayers went on,
the girl took a step sideways, and another, closer. Sister gazed upon her as
she prayed.
“We praise you, we
bless you, we adore you, we glorify you. We give you
thanks for your great glory.”
She had never recited
the empty words with such full heart.
“For you alone are the Holy One—”
When they sat for the
first reading, she and Kristen were hip to hip. She placed a hand on Kristen’s
bare knee. In return, Kristen put a hand in her lap. Sister snatched it, and,
when she was sure no one was looking, raised it to her lips.
Tall Dana, from her
junior class, went to the lectern. She was the tallest, leggiest girl Sister
had ever taught — leggier even than Kristen. Six one if she was an inch, and a
professional model to boot. It was painful to think of her strutting down the
catwalk in heels and satin underwear. Damn it to hell — now she was imagining
her at the lectern that way.
“A reading from the
book of Leviticus,” Dana began. “If a priest’s daughter debases herself by
prostitution, she thereby debases her father. She will be burned with fire.”
Of course: Father
White had chosen the verses. As Dana read, Sister tickled Kristen’s knee. With
each feathery circle, her hand went up higher along her thigh.
“He shall only marry a
woman who is a virgin,” Dana went on. “He shall not marry a widow or a woman
who has been divorced or one who has been debased by prostitution, but only a
virgin, taken from his kindred, shall he marry. This is the word of the Lord.”
“Thanks be to God,” the girls responded.
Sister stroked
Kristen’s thigh under her skirt.
Dana returned to her
pew, and poor, homely Rachel, one of Kristen’s classmates, took the stage. She
was fat and brown-skinned, with cat’s-eye glasses and scaly knees, but she
could sing like an angel. The good Lord gives each one of us our gifts.
“A reading from the
book of Romans,” the girl announced in her crystalline voice. “Therefore God
gave them in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their
bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie
and because they worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator …”
Sister stroked higher.
Kristen never took her eyes off the reader, but she grinned, and she opened her
thighs, and Sister’s pinkie grazed the damp crotch of her panties.
“For this reason God
gave them up to degrading passions,” Rachel read. “Their women exchanged
natural intercourse for unnatural, and the same way also the men, giving up
natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men
committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due
penalty for their error. This is the word of the Lord.”
“Thanks be to God.”
Rachel sat down. White
stood and approached the lectern.
“Please stand for the
reading of the Gospel,” he said. “A reading from the book of
John.”
And what sexual lesson
would he find in there? Sister wondered.
“Early in the morning
he came again to the temple,” White read. “The scribes and the Pharisees
brought a woman who had been taken in adultery …”
Oh, for heaven’s sake.
It was Holy Thursday. What of the Last Supper? The mystery of
the Eucharist? It was true, what the girls whispered about him. The man
was a lech.
Kristen put her weight
on one leg, leaning into her. Sister put her arm around the girl’s waist. White
glanced back at them, but kept reading.
“…and making her stand
before all of them, they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the
very act of committing adultery.’”
She took her hand from
Kristen’s hip and ran it up the back of her leg, coming to rest on the thin of
barrier of cotton that covered her ass. The blood throbbed in her head, and she
barely heard White say:
“When they kept on
questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who
is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’”
Her hand went up
higher. She dipped her fingers into the waistband and thrust down, but just as
she was cupping the cool round fullness, Kristen turned on her heel and marched
out of the pew. Her panties snapped shut, as loudly, to Sister’s ears, as the
slamming of dungeon gate. She shouldered her way through the heavy door,
glancing back with a cock of her head, and was gone. Sister felt frightened
again, and foolish.
White looked at her
quizzically, but he didn’t miss a word:
“When they heard it,
they went away, one by one …”
She had to catch her,
reassure her. She made a circular motion with her left hand, gesturing for him
to keep going, and stepped into the aisle. The last words of the reading — “Go
your way, and from now on do not sin again”— followed her into the hall.
Kristen had
disappeared.
She looked each way,
hesitating, wondering. In front of her was the main entrance. To the right, the
hall led to the auditorium and the gym. To the left was the suite of offices,
beyond which the corridor continued around a corner and down to the rear exit.
Only that door was unlocked today, but every other door could be opened from
the inside, and there were a lot of them. The poor girl could have run
anywhere.
Then she saw it. Down
to the left, where the hallway turned, there was something on the floor,
something that shouldn’t have been there, something small and brown in a pool
of pale light. She had not gone far when she recognized it. It was a shoe, a
girl’s penny loafer, tipped onto its side.
She reached it. She
picked it up. A girl running through the school with one
shoe? No — with no shoes. Around the corner,
halfway down the side hall, lay the mate, but this one had been placed
deliberately, in the dead center of the floor, the toe pointing away from her.
She went to it, and despite the urgency of finding its owner, she took a moment
to raise it to her face and breathe. She held it like a mask, with the opening
over her nose and mouth. The dark smell of leather, and the
faint scent of Kristen’s toe-sweat. Oh, my.
Her head swam, and,
light-headed from huffing, she had a small epiphany: She was spending her
insignificant life in a closed system of grids. Everything around her joined at
right angles: the doorways, the lockers, the floor tiles, even the crucifix
around her neck. At this moment only one thing broke the pattern, and that was
a flattish white ball on the floor. It lay at the entrance to a side stairwell
near the end of the corridor. Sister knew what it must be, but did not dare let
herself hope until she held it in her hand — a white knee-high sock. Unlike the
shoes, this couldn’t have simply fallen off the foot of a frightened runner. It
had to have been intentionally stripped.
“Oh, you wicked thing,” she said out loud.
She looked up the
steps. Halfway to the second floor was a landing where the staircase turned
back on itself, and yes, the other sock was there, the toe dangling over the
lip of the top step like the head of a dead ermine.
It was an effort to
climb to it. Her legs had begun to feel weak. She stuffed a sock into each
shoe, and turning about, hauled her herself up by the handrail, gripping,
pulling, gripping again, all the while shaking at the thought of what she’d
find next.
What she found was the
skirt, left in an open circle at the head of the stairs, as if the owner had
stepped out of it on the run. She half expected it to scatter when she touched
it, like khaki dust, but it retained its substance, and she draped it over her
arm. For a moment, she rolled the hem between her fingers. She had not realized
just how coarse and scratchy the fabric was. What a relief it must be to get
rid of it.
She followed the trail
up the hall. The fluorescents were off up here. The only light dribbled through
the windows in the classroom doors, and in the dimness, the girl’s white top
glowed like a flare. It, too, had been left in a heap, and she placed it over
the skirt, smoothing it on her forearm. The circular crest met her gaze like a
green eye: Saint Agnes Academy, it said, the letters arcing against the upper
border. At the center, in heavy stitching, were the initials SA, with what was
supposed to be a torch between them, and along the bottom, the school motto —
Corpus, Mens, Spiritus.
She went on, turning
the corner. It was becoming difficult to breathe, and she stopped entirely when
she stumbled upon the next crumb in the trail: a pair of lavender bubbles in a
froth of straps and panels, another spherical blasphemy in the dogmatic box of
Saint Agnes.
“Lord have mercy,” she said, remembering to exhale. “Christ have mercy.”
She genuflected before
the bra, and she blessed herself before she picked it up. It hung weightlessly
over her fingers. She pressed it to her lips, the way a priest kisses his
stole, and when she lifted her eyes again, she saw the last prize in the chase.
The door to her own classroom was open, and hanging on the inside knob, like a
bottom- heavy wreath, were Kristen’s lavender panties.
“Uhhh,” Sister said.
She dragged herself to
her feet. Her movements were leaden, as though she were walking under water.
Her heart pounded and pounded, but it gave her no strength. Her hands were
numb: she felt only the tingling in her fingers as she lifted the panties from
the doorknob. She gathered herself, in fear and trembling, crossed the
threshold and beheld — nothing.
Kristen had led her to
this spot, only to leave her wanting. It was a judgment on her lust. If she
could breathe, she would have laughed.
Shuffling into the
room, she dropped the bundle of clothes on her desk. She leaned heavily on the
edge. Her head drooped. She panted like an animal, struggling to pray: “The Lord
is my light and my salvation: whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of
my life; of whom shall I be afr—”
The door slammed
behind her. With her last strength she whirled around, and the radiant vision
assailed her all at once: The raised arms. The hands on the door frame. The fall of hair above the baby tits. The
pushpin nipples. The dandelion puff above the long,
long legs. And the teasing smile.
“Took ya long enough,” the vision said.
“Sweet Jesus,” she
cried, and she crumpled to the floor.
A bloody mist obscured
her vision. Through it, she could see only the marbled linoleum that touched
her nose. A twinkle pierced the red cloud, then another, and a third. Sparks of green and yellow flashed in her eyes, igniting a shower
of purple and white. The floor was studded with opals, it seemed, until
the red fog cleared, and she realized that what she was looking at was
Kristen’s polished toes.
Many
times she had pecked the plaster feet of the crucifix on Good Friday, but with
a line of worshippers behind her, she knew only a passing frisson of surrender.
Here, it was hers to savor. She kissed each toe. She licked the gullies between
them. In growing desperation, she washed each foot with her whole tongue. She
was abject. She was prostrate.
She
was ecstatic.
Kristen
shifted from foot to foot, raising one, then the
other, wiggling her toes as Sister licked the soles, the arches, and the crumbs
of floor-grit that clung to them. Kristen, balancing herself on the chalkboard,
laughed at her piggish slurps and smacks.
“Easy,”
she said.
“Uh
uh,” Sister gasped, shaking her head. “Uh uh.”
And
she threw herself even more eagerly into the dizzy humiliation of foot worship.
She sucked, grunted and snuffled until her head spun.
It
went on for two full minutes, and would have gone on longer if Kristen hadn’t
wanted more than this fawning subjection.
“All
clean,” she said, and she squatted down. Her knees pressed Sister’s shoulders.
Her hands tugged at the zipper at Sister’s back.
“Sister,”
came the voice from above, “take your clothes off.”
Simplicity
is the watchword of a nun’s life, but not when it comes to her habit. For a
woman wedded to chastity, undressing is an exercise in mechanical engineering:
first came the cloth belt, which unhooked in the back, and the rosary that hung
from it, which she reverently worked into a tight Flemish coil, the cross at
the center. Then the black shoes with the ratchet-tooth rubber soles, kicked
off while Kristen undid the zipper along her spine, and the black slip, the
unrolling of the black hose, and finally the black panties and the plain black
bra. Kristen insisted on taking that off herself, unhooking it from behind,
then reaching around and cupping her tits while she kissed her neck and
shoulders. One solid nipple stuck squarely in each of the girl’s hands.
She
was nude, but for the black lacquer crucifix, with its silver-plated Jesus,
that hung between her breasts.
“I
want to keep it on,” she said, clutching it to her heart.
“Sure,”
Kristen said. “Whatever you want.”
“Do
you think it’s pretty?”
“I
think you’re pretty.”
They
stretched out on the cool floor, amid the scattered black garments. Sister
settled on her back, Kristen over her, propped on her elbow, the dominant
partner for now. They kissed, and Kristen kept a hand on Sister’s breast,
playfully wobbling the generous swell.
“You
do like my tits, don’t you?” she said.
Kristen
replied by clamping the breast in her mouth. In a flood of emotion, she grasped
child’s head.
“Darling,
yes,” she said. “Kiss them. Suck them.”
They
stayed there a long time, the Madonna and her suckling infant. Kristen reached
between her legs, fingers slicing through the brilliant thatch of orange hair.
They rolled across her sex like a heavy tide, down and back, and firmer with
each pass. There was no hint of retaliation for yesterday’s sin. She would not
be cast into hell. The masturbation was sweet, and the infant’s lips and
tongue, moving from one creamy-pink nipple to the other, raised the pressure in
her cunt to an irresistible pitch.
“Jesus — Kristen!”
She
came. The girl, with a supernatural wisdom for one so young, did not let up.
She sucked harder. Her hand flew in a fury, jerking Sister’s gushing pussy. The
orgasm washed over her like a violent baptism, and a lifetime of guilt and
repression washed away with it.
When
the room stopped spinning, Kristen’s face was inches from hers.
“Well,
you flunked,” she said. “We have to do this over and over until you learn how
to control yourself.”
Sister
couldn’t help laughing.
“You
smug little bitch.”
“Hey!
You should give me an A for the semester.”
She
held Kristen’s face in her hands and drew it down to her lips.
“You dear thing. You dear dear darling thing.”
“Sister,
I—”
“Call
me Patty. In your arms, I’m Patty.”
“Patty,
I—”
“What
is it, child? Say it.”
“I
love you.”
“I
love you. I love you so much it hurts me. But we have to be careful.”
“I
don’t want to talk about that now.”
“No, of course not. But we need to get back, and I didn’t
pleasure you.”
“It’s
all right,” Kristen said. “I got what I wanted.” She gave Sister’s titty a squeeze.
“Are
you sure?”
“I’m
OK.”
“So selfless. I tell you what. We’ll go down and
finish the retreat. We’ll pray and we’ll mediate and we’ll talk about God, and
then we’ll come back here and I’ll kiss you all over your precious body.”
“Sounds
like a plan.”
They
got up and got dressed. But when they got back to the chapel, the place was
deserted.