And just as she had done it there was a noise at the open window. Looking over she was suddenly aware of the light breeze that had finally picked up against the dryness and the heat, but this feeling was secondary (and most likely only imagined later) to the great horror as she watched the gull, large and smooth, wings spread, hovering just out the window with the Monsignor’s rosary clipped ridiculously between it’s pale beak. And the bird, regarding Sister Linda joyously within it’s savage black eye, wanting to holler and whoop in triumph to all of its friends, all of them watching from the perch of a neighboring tower, but held back in doing this, if only to hold onto it’s prize: the heavy and jeweled rosary, glinting at parts in the afternoon sun.
Indeed Linda could only silently call, the look on her face as if the air had been swept from her lungs ages ago, and just begin to reach out towards the young brute when it was lifted softly away towards the sea by a gust of the picked up breeze that most definitely she had imagined only afterwards when gathering her thoughts and the feeble attempt at preparing an explanation to the fellow Sisters (and, of course, the Monsignor when he arrived back tomorrow from his trip to the capitol). The questions would come, no doubt about it, as to why she would have left the vacant rosary out like that in the first place, away from it’s velvet pouch which it was lent to her in, an offer of comfort really, from the great Monsignor upon learning of her nephew (who was actually her son) being sent to the clinic for further evaluation.
And Linda, pacing the room now, strung her hands painfully through her hair as she considered what lay in store for her when she was expelled from the Sisterhood and forced back onto the street. Only a girl of seventeen, and in all likelihood holding the Monsignor’s child, whose destruction could no longer be afforded without the assistance of The Church. She flung herself to the bed and pulled from under the pillow a portable radio and headset, turning it on and to a most colorful station. And burying her face in the sheets, her hands slowly moving down along her young fleshy body, between her convulsing legs, and the sheets absorbing her moans until she finished.
And sitting up now, taking the headset off and staring into the mirror on the door of her closet, pausing for a moment on her wrinkled, veiny legs. A much older Linda, her eyes moving from herself and searching for the rosary that is no longer there. And these notions are lifted away just in time, as she can hear the bell for dinner and the other veil which hangs in the closet behind the mirror.
