Rosary girls

2 5

The blackness was complete, seamless, a perpetual night that ignored time. Beneath the darkness, very faint, was the sound of the world.

For Bethany Price, the veil of consciousness came and went like waves on the beach.

Cape May, she thought through the deep haze in her mind, the images fighting up from the depths of her memory. She hadn't thought of Cape May in years. When she was small, her parents would take the family to Cape May, a few miles south of Atlantic City on the Jersey shore. She used to sit on the beach, her feet buried in the wet sand. Dad in his crazy Hawaiian trunks, Mom in her modest one-piece.

She remembered changing in the beach cabana, even then terribly self-conscious about her body, her weight. The thought made her touch herself. She was still fully clothed.

She knew she had ridden in a car for about fifteen minutes. It might have been longer. He had stuck her with a needle that had taken her to the grasp of sleep, but not quite into its arms. She had heard city sounds all around her. Buses, car horns, people walking and talking. She wanted to cry out to them, but she couldn't.

It was quiet.

She was afraid.

The room was small, maybe five feet by three feet. Not a room at all, really. More like a closet. On the wall opposite the door she had felt a large crucifix. On the floor was a padded confessional kneeler. The carpeting on the floor was new; she smelled the petroleum scent of the new fiber. Beneath the door she could see a meager bar of yellow light. She was hungry and thirsty, but she dared not ask.

He wanted her to pray. He had stepped into the darkness and given her a rosary, and told her to begin with the Apostle's Creed. He hadn't touched her in a sexual way. Not that she knew of, anyway.

He had left for a while, but was now back. He was pacing outside the closet, upset about something it seemed.

"I can't hear you," he said from the other side of the door. "What did Pope Pius the Sixth say about this?"

"I… I don't know," Bethany said.

"He said that, without contemplation, the rosary is a body without a soul, and its recitation runs the risk of becoming a mechanical repetition of formulas, in violation of the admonition of Christ." nil»

I m sorry.

Why was he doing this? He had been nice to her before. She had gotten into trouble and he had treated her with respect.

The sound of the machine grew louder.

It sounded like a drill.

"Now!" boomed the voice.

"Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee," she began for what was probably the hundredth time.

The Lord is with thee, she thought, her mind beginning to fog again.

Is the Lord with me?