In the Pink Clock

“You are to draw Our Lady today,” says Sister Brittany, “as you see her on front of our church.”

            Her eyes weigh on you.  You start to scratch at the top of your head, still smarting from the metal blades of the Sears haircut razor your father used in the basement at home.  You want out of here.  You look up into the black-and-white circle of a face on the clock mounted out from the wall of thick, large bricks.

            6 past 9.  Too much time.

Your narrow wooden and metal desk chair tightens around your body in its uniform: starch-stiff dress-blue shirt, clip-on tie, dark blue pants of coarse cloth.  I’m a slave for her, you think, so I must do what she says, now.  You pull open the thin drawer of the desk; it presses hard into your stomach.  You tug out a pad of paper and pencil with a blunt tip of lead and close the drawer.

            You close your eyes, then you search your mind for the statue you must draw from memory.  All you see is a stone blob of a Baby Jesus swollen on a lump of a granite Virgin Mary.

You open your eyes onto a blank page of the pad.  You try to bring that picture in your mind into the pencil.  But blurry splotches are marking up the page.  None of it is correct and it must be more than correct under her eyes.  You pull the drawer out again and poke inside for a rubber eraser.  Nothing comes to the touch. 

            You yank your fingers out and, with the tip of your tongue, wet your right thumb. You wipe it over the page, hoping you can work form out of the blotches.  But you are smearing the markings.

Suddenly, you catch the scent of cheap soap and linen boiled clean above you:

            “What are you doing?” asks Sister Brittany.

Above you, dead-black heavy cowl and shrouded headpiece with its stiff-white board across the forehead.  Silver chain of the great crucifix hanging from the neck.  Bony face as white as the chalk dust along the edges of the blackboard behind her desk.

            “I asked you what you are doing,” she says, her mouth creased with stiff, chapped lips.

            “I’m drawing,” you say. “You told us to draw Our Lady.”

            She snatches up the paper to turn it around and shove it in your face.  “This?” she says.

            The bare legs of the girl with tanned thighs and feet in cork wedges are splayed out under her short-cut skirt of green-and-red plaid cloth.  Her hands are bent back at her ankles to hold her up as she tilts her head with tousled brown-reddish hair over her right shoulder.  All smiles on her tan face, you see her looking for a kiss.

            “I guess it isn’t very good,” you say.

            “You deny your sin.”

“I know I was drawing Our Lady,” you say. “I know it.”
            “I’m tired of hearing about this girl.  You and everybody else keep talking about her.  Taking my name in vain and you know it.”

            You look away from her to see the other students who are strangers to you staring at you and Sister Brittany.

            “I don’t belong in here,” you say. “What time is it?” 

            Through your watering eyes, you look at the clock again.  You wonder: why is it pink?  And why is it still 6 past 9?

            “Don’t try to get out of it,” Sister Brittany says.

            “But it’s not my time,” you say.

            “I’m warning you.”

            “I’m out of time,” you scream at the smaller and smaller shreds of the girl falling from the hands of Sister Brittany as she tears up your drawing.

Then you turn your eyes off her to see her tightly wound, black umbrella leaning against the wall. How do you know the story of how Sister Britney swung that umbrella like a black baseball bat at a boy she said committed mortal sin?  You somehow know that she hit him at the side of his head.  Then she hit him one more time and that dropped him face down onto the floor of the school hallway.

            Nobody ever saw him again.  You are thinking: I am next.

            With quick twists and turns, you wrench yourself out of the desk and shove it away from you.  You lunge past Sister Brittany toward the umbrella.  She starts moving in on you, shouting “Don’t you touch it”.  But before she can reach for it, you grab it, you wave it and its metal tip at her.  Then you yell:

“You’re not Britney, bitch.”

“Give me that umbrella,” she says, snarling, groping for it.  You aim the metal tip of the umbrella at her eyes that accused you of yourself.  She tries to dodge her head from the metal tip; it grazes her right cheek and lodges beneath the headpiece of her cowl and then your thrust rips it off.

A look of horror crosses her face.  The eyes of the students widen at the sight of the top of her head, which her pale hands are trying to hide with desperate slaps.  She howls:

“Oh – you sinful brat.  Look what you’ve done.  I’m bald.  Bald.  Oh – what a world – what a world.  Who would have thought a bad little boy like you could destroy my beautiful holiness.  Ohhhh, look out.  I’m going.  Going …”

… to jolt you out of your doze.  You lift your head from your office desk to blink into the glow of the computer screen.  Britney is there.  With wild blonde hair tangled in ivory necklace beads draped over her chest laid bare by a low-cut white-lace bustier.  Face to face with an older lady in the severe black costume of a whip-sharp dominatrix.  The Britney of your vision, the Madonna of your times, drawing you into their kiss.