Hail Mary Corner by Brian Payton

Author:Brian Payton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2001-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

Connor and I were squeezed tightly onto Jon’s bed, trying to keep ourselves together in the midst of a delayed reaction. Eric had somehow disappeared. By two o’clock we were bug-eyed and tripping.

Jon said it felt as if he’d taken a few caffeine pills; his heart was pumping as if he’d just run a race. Connor was disoriented. His blue eyes had turned black, and he had to shield his pupils from the weak moonlight filtering through the window. I sat sandwiched between them, my T-shirt over my head, mumbling prayers through tingling lips.

Around three o’clock I went to the washroom, and when I turned on the light downstairs, I thought I was going to puke. Shaking, I sat on the toilet and wondered what I was going to do. I tried to read the sports section that had been left on top of the tank but couldn’t focus on the words. That only amplified my paranoia. I tried to concentrate but forgot the content of each sentence before reaching the end. Frantic, I ran back upstairs to the safety of those trapped in the same dimension.

Sometime after that I woke up and saw Father Gregory pulling Connor’s eyelid down with his thumb. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

The other juniors were already dressing for Mass. I rubbed my eyes but still couldn’t focus.

“We ate a banana cream pie last night,” Jon said. “I think it was bad.” He served up the lie as if it were gospel. It had taken us an hour to concoct the story.

Connor stood up from Jon’s bed, looking as if he was going to spew. “I th-think we’ve g-g-got f-food poisoning.”

Father Gregory toyed with the lure, considering it. “Vomiting? Cramps?”

A banana cream pie contained a lot of ingredients that could go bad. We weren’t allowed to have a banana cream pie, naturally, and one of us would have had to go to town to get it. We figured copping a plea to a lesser crime might do the trick.

“Mass is in twelve minutes,” Father Gregory proclaimed after a few agonizing moments of indecision. “You’re going to miss it. Go to the infirmary, get buckets from the hall closet, and wait it out. If you haven’t turned the corner by lunchtime, we’ll send you to town for a stomach pump.”

As Jon led us through the bright confusion, a maze of a place we knew all too well, Father Gregory stopped me and gave me the once-over. His face was unusually bright and smooth, as if he were young again, only flatter. “And how did you end up naked in someone else’s bed?”

I was wearing underwear, of course. Father Gregory had a talent for making things sound immeasurably worse than they were. “Sorry, Father,” I slurred. “Sometimes I don’t have any...pajamas. Oh, I think I’m in my wardrobe.”

“Sounds like the salmonella has finally reached your brain.”

Eric was found properly buttoned up in his pajamas, kneeling in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel of the abbey church. He had been in there by himself all night, feverishly praying in the dark.

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