Flashback

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Sister Heloise got up from her place at the back of the nave and made the sign of the cross. It was compline, her favorite of the hours, and normally she stayed till the sweet and bitter end, till most of the other sisters had left and the chapel was dark and hushed. But tonight, with Eve gone, there was the work of two to be finished before bed.

“Your anger has overrun me,” she heard Sister Magdalene read as she turned and headed for the door, “your terrors have broken me.” It was the end of the Eighty-seventh Psalm, the prayer of the gravely ill.

“They have flowed round me like water,

they have besieged me all day long.

You have taken my friends and those close to me:

all I have left is shadows.”

It was a dark prayer, Heloise thought as she stepped out into the cold air, dark and beautiful at the same time. What was it St. Benedict had said? Something about living constantly with death. The door swung closed behind her, muffling the voices of the other sisters. “I cry out to you, Lord, by day and by night. Alleluia.”

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