The Strange Redemption of Sister
                                                                                     Mike Moscoe
             Mary Ann
                  Human understanding relies on models, and it? s not always clear which one is closest to
                                                                                                     truth.

             She lay in Bill ? s arms, his soft snoring merging with the chirping of crickets and croaking of
              frogs. They? d slipped out of the cabin to make love under the full moon. Now he was asleep
             and she was warm. Even after twenty years, she floated on the love she? d felt for him the first
                                                   moment she saw him.

             As she cuddled closer to his chest, the arm he ? d thrown over her brushed a breast and her
             nipple grew hard again. She felt a sneaky smile growing, along with a lot of other things, and
                considered how she might wake him up. Up was such a nice word when the kids were
                                                       asleep.

             "Mommy, play with me now," came with that blend of plea and demand babies got so good at.
                   But the kids were almost seven and she was more often Mom than Mommy.

                                              And the voices were all wrong.

             She glanced around the moonlit yard. Below her a frog plopped into the lake. Around her the
                             first of summer ? s fireflies flit. No. Those weren ? t bugs.
 Analog
              At the heart of each little light, a tiny baby wiggled. "Come on, Mommy. Play with us a while.
   and                                         Please," a shrill voice demanded.
Asimov's
             "Mommy can? t play with you," Mary Ann said, the warmth of Bill ? s lovemaking lost to a chill.
collection
                                         "You were never born, little ones."
  s are
   now       Sister Mary Ann came awake with a start as the cancer eating her gut shot a pain through her
             that almost knocked her off the kneeler. The other nuns were so solicitous of her, come late to
available
              the convent after a full life in the world and now so sick. They insisted she use the prie dieu
    at                                                to save her knees.
AUDIBL
              With a shrug, Mary Ann, slipped off the kneeler and onto the cool tiles. That should keep her
 E.COM          awake, keep the dreams at bay. Mary Ann had volunteered for the two a.m. shift of this
             forty-hour devotion as her penance, though she hardly counted staying awake any sacrifice.
 Key                                          She slept little these days.
 Word
             And here, in the early morning, the crickets humming in the dark outside the thick adobe chapel
Search:         walls reminding her of other times. The scent of the unworked wood that made up the
Analog                         ancient-style roof above her head brought back memories.
Science
              These were the smells of the house by the lake that she and Bill took the kids to for a week
Fiction       each summer. And late at night, when the exhausted children were abed at last, she and Bill
              would make love on the couch, the windows open to the chirp of crickets, the aroma of pine
                       cones and evergreens mixing well with the scent of their lovemaking.

             Sister Mary Ann recaptured her wandering thoughts and herded them back to familiar prayer,
              asking a loving God to look after the four children she had given life to, loved and cared for
              and who now lived busy lives of their own with wives and husbands, children and maybe
                                        even a grandchild. Those were easy.

              It was more difficult to ask that same loving God to forgive her the sins she had let science
             commit on her body. Here, her scientific training still battled with her faith. This close to death
   An         she tried to simply submit to Holy Mother Church? s decree. Still her mind questioned. With a
   alo               sigh she once again forced down her doubts and said her penitent ? s prayers.

   g is          The last prayer was the most difficult of all. How did she pray for children she ? d never
   no         known, the ones that had vanished so quickly across death ? s door, if indeed they had ever
               lived? Oops, don ? t argue. Submit. That cancer won ? t wait forever. She had no names for
    w
              those little ones. She didn? t even know how many they were, a hand full, dozens? She had
   av          never bandaged a knee for them, shouted at their ball games, cried at their weddings. They
   aila                    were the hard ones to pray for, so she tried to pray for them the most.
   ble
             Sister Mary Ann did not bother praying for herself. The cancer held her tight in its embrace . . .
    in       it would not let her go. The cancer ? s pain didn? t bother Mary Ann all that much. She had lived
   ele          long enough; she? d sinned as much as seemed convenient. Now her body offered her a
               painful penance. Penance and sacrifice had never been a part of her life, not around Bill and
   ctr
                 the kids. Now it demanded center place and she approached it more from curiosity than
   oni              anything else. Life had taught her many lessons; what was she to learn from this?
    c