"Mike Moscoe - The Strange Redemption of Sister Mary Ann" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moscoe Mike)

 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.