“Saint Nobody” by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple (fiction ’19)
An excerpt from “Saint Nobody” by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple (fiction ’19) published by Pigeon Pages.
Saint Nobody
To prepare the eighth graders to choose their new names for confirmation, Sister Antoninus lectured them about the saints. The miracle workers, the mystics, the martyrs with their severed limbs and cut out tongues. The girl found herself drawn to stories about acts of penance, self-mortifications. She liked to hear about hair shirts, especially. Whenever the topic came around to St. John the Baptist, his image appearing on the slide projector in his wiry loincloth, a shroud on his shoulders of coarse animal hairs irritating, purposely scratching his skin, the girl was reminded with a pleasurable stab of him, the boy she loved. She held her breath and squeezed her knees together in the dimness of her religion class and wondered, with a shudder, how the source of such feelings could be anything less than a miracle, an actual gift from God.
[…continue reading “Saint Nobody” at Pigeon Pages.]
