FIRST LESSONS: By Suzanne Feathers
January 27th, 2012I was eight when I attended this school. It had a huge foreboding grey stone convent that to some was a gothic beauty.
To me, it was a House of Usher, bleeding its black blood on rainy days from crevices cut into its grey gargoyle skin.
Whenever I think of my school days there, I think of those dense rainy days that washed a sickly green hue over the classroom wall and defaced the open-out windows with dust filled droplets.
The classrooms were across the drive in what was once then, a new, modern facility. It was a seething place of hidden agendas.
The nuns seemed to float on unearthly feet barely touching the floor. They appeared to be moving way too fast, to be human, often flying around corners in a swirl of evil black, their long rosaries sailing out from their waists with a clacking sound. The silver cross weighing the end was heavy enough to knock a child out or at the very least, loosen a few teeth. It was a sacred weapon, like a Samara’s sword. Held high over the classroom’s somber faces, it not only cast out the devil, it also filled every soul there with dread.
I had no friend in Jesus. God was a force you did not want to awaken at any cost. It was a good thing to become very, very small so you would be unnoticed.
More than one child would be dismembered and eaten in the course of an ordinary day, their bones left to be picked over by the favored jackals in the class who escaped the wrath.
That’s how it was with me. I was a troubled dunce; A fruitless daydreamer. I was tossed into the convents midst so they could rearrange me around what was obviously dysfunctional to them.
I never gave them the satisfaction of a tear; Not one. Well, maybe once, when my heart was just too full to take on any more water. Once, when I thought the pain in my chest was indeed my heart splitting its seams from where the cancer of fear had weakened it.
Nuns in my world had a musty unclean smell about them. And yellow teeth. Their breaths foul from spitting out so many hurtful words to be obeyed.
I remember having to leave my classmates twice a week to be tutored by the Superior Mother. She weighed three hundred fifty pounds or more, rolling her enormous bulk around herself to motivate from one place to another. She resided in the bowels of the convent, where she waited for me in a small dark room at the end of a long cement hall where pipes of all sizes groaned along the ceiling.
On those special days, I prayed to the God that held me in scorn.
I took several deep breaths leaving the security of my smallness in the classroom and letting the heavy homeroom door click almost silently behind me, setting me adrift in a linoleum river that looked endless from both sides. There was a large window at the one end of the corridor that spilled faded light.
My tiny steps echoed off the eternity of space, one timidly after another.
I prayed. I prayed to a deaf God for protection that I knew would never come for everyday I was chained to the agony and horror of His cross. It was not a gentle place to be.
Passing the closed classrooms into the darkness penetrated only from the escaping light from the class door windows, I prayed.
Crossing the empty driveway to the grinning mouth of the sleeping dragon beyond, I prayed.
I hurried past the damp windowless room where the stone crypt slept and tried in vain not to look in and see the waxy white yellow face with the half closed eyes that laid in unholy rest within the stone box.
The saint, the founder of this terrible place, a nun never buried, the icon worshiped in some dark ritual that no one ever witnessed. On rainy days this bride of Christ was even more horrific.
Mother Superior sat spread out with knees an akimbo in a chair that vanished beneath her; her fingers barely touching their tips in an attempt to cross her arms across her massive chest. She never smiled.
Arriving to that room from the basement nightmare of dark winding veins within the demon was cold comfort.
I sat wordlessly down in front of her and opened my workbook. I never understood a thing she said in those hours. I only nodded my approval at her explanations and offered a blank null and void face to her questions.
When the time had finally drained from the glass, the High Priestess of the Catholic Cult waved me away, like a fragile cobweb.
I tiptoed past the sleeping corpse, my nose catching the tendril of rotten skin and ancient death.
I stopped for a moment and turned to see the shadow move from the crypt doorway.
She was walking and coming for me, her white mouth gaping open to reveal a nest of restless roaches. Her black habit hung in tortuous shreds; her headpiece and veil tilted on her flesh stretched skeleton head. The dark holes for eyes wept with burgundy blood tears.
She reached for me, suddenly flying like a brown dead leaf blown from a door draft right towards and through me, knocking me back, my screams cemented in my throat, her vile chill penetrating into my very being.
I ran with the hair bristling up the nap of my neck out from the drooling dragon mouth and across the castle road into the other dangerous place.
Racing madly down the forbidden hallways to the door I wildly hoped was the right one. Entering to a sea of smirking faces and the cutlass gaze from my homeroom nun, I slipped back into my seat, to become very, very small once again gagging on the hideous secret that I would encounter week after week.
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©2012 Suzanne Feathers
Suzanne Feathers was born in Philadelphia Pa. She now lives on a small farm in east-central Pennsylvania where she had raised and trained horses for many years. She now currently has a boarding kennel business and raises and handles shows dogs. Writing numerous poems, prose and short stories throughout her life, she is now finally settling down to have her works published. Her first novel The Deal Breaker is submitted and awaiting approval.
