Chapter 1

Friday, February 13, 2010

Heat's on. Window's down. What I've created is a fabricated thaw.

Beckley, Bluefield and Bland. All lawyers. All dead. Deservedly dead. No remorse, no regrets. A job.

Being good at being self-employed has its perks: quiet cars to hear what's lurking in the scenery.

The pick of safe roads out of town if they were needed.

Free of suspicion.

Free of the paper chase, but owning a formidable calling card: Brigid O'Flynn, Knight Templar. Authorized to kill for the glory of God.

There was that once, when she thought she'd like to be a nun. And then some angel came and sang to her.

Recruiting.


Chapter 2

Watches create tension, which leads to worry which can affect your concentration, causing you to make mistakes
that might find you out, subject to questions that have no earthly answers. It was best to trust the blur of instinct and training.

Leave home without the watch; it might catch the light, catch someone's attention, initiate a memory that would bring those questions to her door.

The caution of ice at the end of the drive of Brigid's nearest home would melt on its own. She was raised to think green, to think outside the box.
Think and read. Read and think. Thinking was what landed her here, on the snow covered sidewalk outside the offices of Beckley, Bluefield and Bland about to cross
the street and head for the nearest cup of coffee, or stiff drink—she didn't care which came first—there was no blood on her hands. No blood on the floors upstairs. Michael,
said there wouldn't be. Just the lawyers. Dead, for their sins. Deservedly so.


Chapter 3

Flashback:

She was in the library after lights out. Out of bounds. Out of patience. Out of a sterile room to think. About to

chuck the nun thing for a pull off the cigarette she held in her hand. Her brand. A toke and coke. Contraband.

Her cousin could smuggle the obvious and never get caught.

"You don't want that cigarette," he said.

She nearly shit her pants. That wasn't Padre Langford's voice standing behind her.

After leaving the absurdity of God speaking to her from an artificial Yucca plant in the library, Brigid made a mental note to research psychotic breaks
and check the web for clues to God, the Father, ever showing signs he had a sense of humor.



Chapter 4

Ten Years in the Past

Brigid stared at the Gothic cross marking the sun-enemic skin on the inside wrist above her left hand. It was the emblam of the Knights Templar. Of the one hundred and fifty items she brought with her to begin her tenure as an asperant in the Order of Benevolent Sisters, Brigid was taking little with her as she prepared to leave the religious life that had trumped her dream of becoming a famous singer. What she thought was a true calling to the sisterhood happened in a meeting with her high school principal in April of her senior year. Sister St. Martina had called Brigid to her office a few months before her high school graduation, asking her to close the door, offering her a seat in the wing-back chair no student in her memory had ever sat in. It seemed the staff had come together to discuss who, among the school's graduating class, evidenced a call from God to serve Him as a nun. The name on everyone's lips had been Brigid's.

There was a picture on the strip of wall between the two windows that threw a soft yellow light across the neatness that wa salways St. Martina's desk. The picture was of a French nun, her head turned, her face unseen, hidden beneath the left wing of her cornette, her right hand touching the edge of a deep window well cut into the stone blocks of some artist's vision of a long, dark convent hall. The lone figure in the picture appeared as if she had stopped to consider the light from the scene's only window. Brigid thought the mellow, autumn-like rays might be representative of God's holy light. The moment after St. Martina's startling pronouncement left her lips, Brigid's eyes traveled from the figure in the picture to the light falling across St. Martina's desk. They were the same shade of comfort. Brigid's heart made a choice. She began her studies for the sisterhood at the Order'snoviate house in Portland, Maine the first Sunday in September after her graduation from Harvard. It rained like a mutha that day.

Now here she was, six months later, packing a pair of Pagonia winter boots her cousin, Colleen, insisted she needed to keep her feet warm in those long, notorious New England winters with the blue, velvet pouch that held her father's rosary beads.  

Her first planned stop back in secular freedom would be a casual visit with her Aunt Mildred, the psychiatrist. She wouldn't mention the tattoo that wasn't a tattoo, or the dusty, glowing, artificial Yucca plant that spoke to her. What she was after was the definition of a Just War, one she could believe in

Keeps me both off balance and engaged, Maggie. Love the ending.
You call this prose?
typo at "suspician"? Tom

I too very much liked the last line, and admired the staccato of the rest.

I too question the prose here. The lines really slap me around, in a good way. I need a few more reads here to really dive in...

Thanks for the reads, all. It seriously is a book, or maybe a free verse drama. Hope you come back for the rest of the story.

Thanks, Maggie

You know, I think Chapter 1 might really be a prologue.

OK Maggie, I'll play along with the book idea.  A William Carlos Williams kinda deal... I dig it.

Love this - I'll be back to read again - hopefully read more? M

Great read still. Tom

Psychotic assasin takes out Beckley, Bluefield and Bland, blurring the lines between prose and poetry.  This should  be fun.  Dan

Delightful flash. One snag: Chapter Two; 'Leave home without the watch; it might catch the light, catch someone's attention, initiate a memory.' great line except for 'light'. It seems too easy and not tied to what the watch's value in the line???

In last part, 'Mental notes' drops the reader quite far from the rich sense of the narrator's tranformation. I almost want to say show us not tell us. I think Sister Agatha left her book's ribbon at the humor pages of God's book...

love it Mags,

larry

loving this....waiting on the follow up..all the best

james

Chapter 4, love it. Tom

Tom, When you get a chance.

All very readable, Maggie. You got my curiosity all perked, I really like the whole frame, subject,  concept. More. Tom

Chapter 2, for its few lines, needs some changing.