Paincourt
an excerpt

Sister Mary Bertram contemplated the advertisement in the phone book as she sipped her tea at her desk and wondered if Larry’s Super Fast Pizza would deliver to the convent. Maybe they could deliver to one of the outbuildings, a eight inch cheese and red pepper would be lovely…..No, probably not. She sighed. Mostly she enjoyed being a sister of the Order of St. Elizabeth of the Holy Heart but not on Tuesday. In order to commiserate with the world’s hungry, they would be having lentils, and only lentils for dinner. Sister Mary Bertram certainly wasn’t a glutton, but she did enjoy her food and a dinner of lentils was not her favorite. She glumly concluded she would just have to commiserate with the hungry tonight.

A loud slam of one of the convent’s heavy wooden doors brought her out of her reverie. Her intern for the year hurried in with a large padded envelope in her arms.

“Sister Mary Bertram! A package came for you and Sister Immaculata asked me to bring it over,” she said dumping it on the work table.

Sister Mary Betram eyed her intern with disfavor. “That’s very nice, Astrid. But I’m sure there is no hurry, you don’t need to rush about so.” Astrid had been really a very useful intern. Unlike many of the young novitiates assigned to work with Sister Mary Bertram in the archives, Astrid seemed to have an affinity for the work. She enjoyed the painstaking work of cleaning coal dust off of the 19th century records of the order. St. Louis had been a very dirty, smoke filled city at that time and that had certainly left it’s mark on the papers. Astrid was generally a lovely girl, full of enthusiasm but she lacked a certain dignity and grace that seemed to be a hallmark of the typical nun. That should come with time, though. She had only been with them about four months, and in that time she had not lost what Sister Mary Bertram concluded was the general manner of the world today, hurrying about everywhere making lots of noise.

Astrid was studying the package with interest. As she stretched her neck to peer at the return address label, Sister Mary Bertram could see the edges of her tattoo peeking out from under her sweater. Sister Mary Bertram smiled down at her mug of tea.

“Why don’t you go ahead and open it, dear? The scissors are on the table in the tool caddy.”

Astrid’s face brightened, “Cool. I can’t wait to see what it is! We haven’t accessioned anything for ages.”

Sister Mary Bertram enjoyed supervising the order’s first tattooed novitiate. Some of the other nuns were actually a bit frightened of Astrid, which was in Sister Mary’s opinion simply ridiculous. At twenty-two Astrid was just trying to find her path in life. None of them were quite sure if the order was going to really be her way, but they would see when the trial period was over. Anyway, after four months, the dye in her hair had grown out till it was just the tips of her hair sporting the rather festive green and her tattoo (a large dragon-she had showed Sister Bertram the first week) was kept safely hidden most of the time. Sister Immaculata had actually had to form a policy about tattoos. Sister Immaculata quite enjoyed making policies and that one kept her busy for several days.