plus a tan even in the winter-time.
I’ve got a nice figure to be fair, but who would ever know, what with the robes and habit I had to wear every day?
I liked working in the garden at the convent, however. I felt a little bit less like a prisoner. I felt like a free woman, a woman able to go outside and do what she wants, not a girl who had been imprisoned at the age of fifteen for a stupid mistake that had never even amounted to anything. I even successfully petitioned the mother superior to expand the garden outside the walls of the convent.
Under my supervision, we started growing more and more fruits and vegetables, to the point where we were beyond self-sufficient. We started bringing our produce to a farmer’s market down in New Orleans every weekend, and the money we donated to a school in the inner-city.
It was the long days, toiling in the garden—a garden that by this point had really become more of a small farm—that I began to fantasize about running away. As the sun set each evening and I began to hoe one last row for beans or carrots, I could see myself just dashing away, off into the sunset, never to be seen again.
And why shouldn’t I? I was nineteen now. If I wanted to leave, there was nothing they could do to stop me. I could just disappear into that brilliant, orange setting sun and they wouldn’t be able to stop me. I could show them. I could show all of them.
So, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t do that. The truth was, I was scared. I had been first in the girls’ home and then the convent, for almost five years. Where was I going to go? I had no money of my own. My family wouldn’t take me in. I had no friends on the outside anymore. I didn’t really know how things worked… I almost felt like a time traveller, someone stranded on a desert island contemplating returning to society.
It was a world I no longer knew and it scared me.
At least in the convent, I could be assured that my days would be a regular routine of awaking at five, followed by a solid two hours of prayer and then a meager breakfast, before my day of work in the garden began, punctuated by breaks for meals and prayer and culminating in an evening mass before I was in bed at ten and ready to do it all over again. It was a tiring life and it didn’t leave me much time or energy to contemplate escaping.
That is, until one summer afternoon. It was blazingly hot and I was the only one working in the garden.
This was how I preferred it. I had changed out of my dark robes and into jeans and a sweatshirt—still miserable in the ninety-degree weather but more comfortable than the black robes and about the most liberal thing the mother superior would allow me to wear for work outside the convent.
I was plucking some fresh tomatoes off the vine when I heard a thrashing in the bushes surrounding the garden. I turned around, suddenly concerned, gripping my trowel.
There were coyotes and wild hogs in the area but they usually didn’t come around the garden, despite the prospect of fresh food. I had specifically placed the garden close to I-10, the nearest interstate and a large road, which ran parallel to the convent. The cars kept the animals away. I thought it was a stroke of genius on my part but no one else seemed to understand how brilliant it had been.
“Hey! Get out of here!” I called when the thrashing continued. If it were a coyote, I hoped it would be scared by my voice. If it were a hog, then I doubted it would be scared of anything.
And then, out of the brush, came tumbling a distinctly unhog-like and uncoyote-like figure. It was a man—a tall man at that, dressed all in black leather, with splashes of red across his body. He was wounded.
Original Sin
“Oh, my god!” I cried out, running to his side as he collapsed by the rutabagas. “Are you okay?”
“Jesus H. Fucking Christ, do I look okay?” he all but screamed in my