Sister Ambrose at Close of Day.

Sister Ambrose closes the shutters at her window keeping the last of the light from the moon and stars shut outside in the cold and dark and standing back crossing herself from forehead to breast from shoulder to shoulder with her middle digit remembering the first time she entered the convent and saw the high walls and locked doors and long cloisters and the chill that seemed to be forever in her bones no matter the time of year or season and Sister Bernard gazing at her with a combination of sternness and boredness as if it all meant nothing anymore this welcoming of new girls to the convent this taking in of new recruits as Sister Josephine called it and thinking of the first time she dressed in the habit and put on the undergarments that were as sexless as dead meat and feeling the roughness of the black serge itching her skin and boots heavy and corked soled for silent walking and never run anywhere Sister Bernard said always walk as a nun ought as you have seen them in the cloister and church entering and leaving and as she now walks to the bed and begins to undress from the stiff habit she thinks of her mother’s pale skin the last time she saw her the cancer already then dragging her off to a certain painful death the eyes haunted the lips thinly drawn across her mouth and her father standing beside her his eyes watery his droopy moustache like that of Nietzsche his hands held tightly in front of him an old rosary hanging there unused but prayed upon once by his mother in her long life and Jacques her one time fiancé standing the other side of her mother supporting her holding with his strong hands his eyes studying the one he once loved and now had lost forever behind the high walls to a God he didn’t believe in but cursed all the same and now putting on her nightgown she pushes all thought of Jacques away all memories of their love making all reminiscences of that last summer she puts at the back of her mind where it occasionally pushes itself out and haunts her and having dressed in the nightgown she sits on the bed and taking the black rosary from the bedside table with its lamp and book of prayers and chamber pot beneath in the small cupboard she begins her prayers rubbing her thumb over the Crucified feeling his body beneath her fleshy thumb sensing his head all the time the words leaving her lips like escaping birds from opened cages sometimes she feels she has angels at elbow and foot at other times she senses demons at ears and tempting her fingers to pleasure her flesh and as she moves on to the beads smooth and round like black peas allowing her eyes to wander from the wooded floor boards with its scrubbed clean look to the bookcase with bible and books on prayer theology philosophy poetry a worn copy of The Imitation of Christ and letters of St Therese of Lisieux and the old armchair where she had placed her habit and the dark well worn crucifix on the wall above her bed with the Crucified hanging there his head to one side with a crown of thorns and the closed eyes shutting out it seems to her (as her words continue to flow from her tired lips) all that is happening in the room and in the world and in her aged heart the arms stretched out across the wood nails hammered home in the hands and closing her own eyes pausing her prayers and words she imagines her soul and that of her sisters in Christ rising up on the last day and up and away like unleashed birds of prey.1