The Sunday Scaries
Volume 1, Number 23
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror

Sister Theresa

It was sacrilegious, Theresa thought, vomiting in the toilet. Jesus, it looked like a crime scene. She felt ashamed at her choice of words. Am I a teenager, she asked herself, to curse all the time, and at a moment like this. But it was obscene: The tiny clumps of holy wafer floating in a foamy sea of pink wine and stomach bile. It seemed like quite a lot. She had only taken the one wafer and the one sip of wine. She wasn’t a gulper. It wasn’t like she’d drained the chalice. The rest of it: tea, she supposed, and whatever was left in her stomach from the night before.
          You always feel better after you puke. But the following Sunday it happened again. Jesus Christ, she thought, not this again. The matter was even thicker this time, redder, the white lumps more varied in texture, some brownish and hard. Is that blood? No, no, not—well, not her blood. Was she allergic to the corpus of our Lord Jesus Christ? Sister Jeannine would have found a way to blame her for this.
          She went to confession on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Father Shawn encouraged her to see a doctor. He’d had an ulcer once, he said. But a few lifestyle changes and it was all better. Still, it never hurts to be careful. He knew a young woman her age who developed uterine cancer—but Father Shawn, whose mouth sometimes ran ahead of his tact, realized this anecdote was unlikely to give comfort. He changed the subject, praising her for her work during the clothing drive. It embarrassed her. She would rather no one ever knew she had organized it. Hiding your candle, teased Father Shawn. No, it was just—she crossed herself and did not come back until the following Sunday.
          She didn’t even make it home this time. In the ladies’ room in the church basement, while the congregation mingled out on the sidewalk, she knelt on the tiles and vomited over and over into the toilet. God, it was shuddersome.
          Her throat felt lacerated, her stomach stripped bare of its lining. The toilet held a ruby pool that smelled of perfume. In it floated shattered splinters of wood, some of them inches long. She reached into it and her fingers found what she knew would be there. She brought it close to her face and felt the love of everything holy as she beheld one of the long black iron nails that on that sacred day so long ago had pierced a limb of the Lamb our Lord.
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