Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

“Stitches

than before, her cheeks shining—many of us began to see her as separate from us. Search and you will find, as it goes, and needless to say, what we found unnerved us; we marched like bullets to the chapel to kneel in prayer. Back then we still thought that certain things were incompatible; prayer we instinctively associated with the known, so it followed that prayer could dispel the unknown. We still understood everything in pairs. The nuns didn’t mention anything, but they were suspicious. So much praying, they said when they saw us marching about the chapel at three in the afternoon, at eleven in the morning on a Saturday, after dinner. So much praying. Could it be because they don’t want to study? They need to study, because they’ll have to do something with their lives when tomorrow comes. The latter, which the nuns said casually, startled and confused us; we’d always known that words like past, present, and future didn’t make sense in Polar, but the nuns, who’d been there longer than us, used them anyway. What we wanted to do when tomorrow came, we had no idea, but we knew what we didn’t want to do: be nuns. Trusting Imogen less and less, we began to observe Sister Elvira Lecumberri ourselves. We felt unsettled, because it had never occurred to us to distrust one of our own. At the beginning, it was hard for us to interpret what we were seeing. We spied on them rearranging the flower pots through the window overlooking the patio and, reading their lips, we found that it was Imogen rather than the nun who said: This goes here, Sister Elvira, and that goes there. Don’t you see? And Sister Elvira Lecumberri said yes and did as she was told. Then she rearranged the flowers as she’d had them before and then again how Imogen instructed. Imogen stuck too close to her; Sister Elvira joked, at first, that she wanted to escape (which surprised us), but then she would let the matter drop. What do you have for us today, we pressed Imogen too eagerly at night. We still wanted her to tell us in her own words. She 169