Member-only story
Imagining the Dead: At age six, I didn’t see but sensed dead people
Summer crept into the edges of May. The classroom felt stuffy. Decades of dust hid in the spaces between the floorboards. It permeated the clothbound books, older than our parents, shelved on the windowsill in order of reading skill. Sister Romana slipped a finger under the edge of her wimple, damp with sweat.
We wilted like forgotten flowers. Our classroom was in an airless late Victorian building with creaking floors, cracked ceilings, and water fountains that tasted always of rust. We sat at oak desks of the same era with curly-cue wrought iron legs bolted onto long wood rails, connecting us in six neat rows of seven. No student ever got out of line, figuratively or literally.
We were supposed to be reading. It was too hot to concentrate. Sister Romana barked at us to rise and line up, two-by-two. And we did without a word whispered because we were obedient and more than a little afraid of the nun. She was tiny. Not much bigger than her charges. But she was quick to temper. Once when G, already assigned to the slowest reading group, struggled aloud to make sense of a sentence, Sister Romana ordered him to the jump seat, one of the benches that unfolded from the fronts of the first desks. When he could read no better from that position, she slapped him across the face so hard he slid sideways, right…
