A 1980S sin. Yet a sin that stiffly sat on human hearts refusing to budge, to give way to the nineties and after.
A sinful morning. A dictation test.
My home held a pair of parents who cared a straw for my scores. But Alan’s mother would almost skin him alive if he dared mess with his marks. Alan was not exactly dumb. But then he was a boy/man and so it was natural for him to be a little dumb.
It was a nun smelling classroom. An immaculate portrait of the Last supper hung on the farther side of the Wall and a little Christ watched us from a blue edged frame.
I guess I had a way with words because the guys around me desperately dropped their pencils or their erasers just to get a glimpse of my paper. Alan seated to my left did not drop his eraser or his his pencil till he came to the last word on his test paper.
I felt him suddenly fidget, I felt sweat beads glisten his forehead; I felt his little feet nudging mine.
I looked at him shocked that my five year old knight had so fast deteriorated in his sense of integrity.
I hissed at him “copying is a sin, copycat”
Alan didn’t smile, instead he implored, “Please, just the mosquito…does it end with an ‘e ‘or not”
His little fingers tremble as he pushes back my pad with unseeing eyes.
The bell rings.
We had sinned over a mosquito, the ‘e’ in a mosquito.
But the weight of it was heavier than a million fattened mosquitoes.
We hardly talked sitting on the blue painted bench.
It was not guilt.
It was not shame.
Yet it was not an ordinary act for convent ridden minds.
I finally break the silence with a morose tone, “now we can’t go to heaven”
He replies, “It was just a mosquito”
He was quite a man at five for he said, “I will confess tomorrow at church.”
I was woman enough at five too for I raised the tone of being wronged against helplessly, “And what about me?”
He looks at me then points to the blue framed baby Christ, “Tell him now you are sorry”
I look up the wall and manage to say sorry but the guilt of it makes me uncomfortable and I tell Alan, “He is glaring at me”
“Who” Alan whispered a lower whisper than mine.
I silently pointed to the blue framed Christ.
Alan cast his eyes down with as swiftly as he had raised them.
He then held my little hand sin his and then did a very unmanly thing…Alan sobbed.
To me the weight of the sin together with the sight of myself proclaimed life partner sob away was a little hard to digest. So I yelled at him, “You are a man. Stop sobbing”
Alan‘s hallmark ever since I could remember him was his running nose and now it was functioning at its best; so I lent him my handkerchief.
He whimpered through real hard wipes, “You are a girl. You must weep”
Somehow I didn’t weep.
Maybe I was not woman enough. Or maybe it was a shame to weep beside sobbing manhood.
Somehow I think we realized the shape of a sin. The function of a sin.
It felt like a sob worming through two guilt ridden heads, like a leaden feeling that made the heart heavy and the eyes droop.
Alan was a true Christian, a far better human being than I.
He sobbed it away.
I washed my guilt watching the shape of his tears, hearing the buzz of guilt in a written away mosquito.
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