"Forgive me father for I have sinned." He was sitting in the confessional, his hands crossed on his legs, his hair clean-cut and combed. It was easy to ask for forgiveness, it was easy to sin. There should have been something more. Actually, most sins throughout the day went unheeded, unremembered: looking at the voluptuous blonde with the short miniskirt, smelling the bum walk by with disdain, honking the horn in traffic with thoughts of violence. Sin was like a river. It flowed on and on.
Only in the dark confessional where the shadows stood behind closed doors and the light peered in through the minuscule cracks, the dust dancing in circles, could the sins be let out of the closet, no faces, no stories, only shadows, barely no words at all, at least no regret.
He had sinned just as usual. Without sin what would be good. Truth to tell, God was good, and God was sin too, just as God was both life and death. The difference was revelation; the difference was minute.
"Forgive me father, for I have sinned." He whispered in the dark shadows behind closed doors. He wasn't even sure the father was on the other side of the wall, listening to his petty stories of lust and violence, regardless, most important was that he confessed his sins in this house of holiness and eased the burden off his soul so he could walk through the pearly gates when the time came, if it ever came.
But every single time he stepped into that dark room to empty his soul, he wondered to himself, what if there was no Heaven, what if we just died and that was it, end of story. Would things be different? Unfortunately, no one knew until it happened, and when it happened, they would not tell.
Still, he did not believe in God. Faith was a hard thing to come by. He had decided to go to church, go to confessional, at first, to please his wife and family. But it soon turned into a "what if". What if he really died and went to Heaven. He had to cover all bases.
So, he confessed half-heartedly, reciting the words as if he were just reading them in some cheesy commercial. And, the father listened to them as he listened to the other hundred people that came during confessional, faceless confessions, all different but all the same. The father gave the punishment, and David said it, ending what was really nothing there to start with. "Hail Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death."
The circle of sin continued like a river of endless water.
Later on, after many events at the hospital, the rumor started among the night shift nurses on the tenth floor of that hospital. First one thought she saw a nun walking through the empty halls about three in the morning. Then another saw the nun sitting next to a patient in intensive care. The nun was young, beautiful, always smiling, always walking with such grace that it appeared she was floating. The rumors spread from there, and after a while, the hospital's entire staff became familiar with the nun on the tenth floor, although hardly anyone ever saw her. The rumor finally spread to the point where the nun had a name. It was Mary. The same one who jumped from the tenth floor years ago, the same Mary that worked with the terminally ill children. Some of the older workers even attested to the fact that the face indeed matched Mary's, even though none of them actually saw the ghost.
Even David heard about the ghost. One night, he was working late in the intensive care unit on the tenth floor. The whole floor was nearly empty, with just a few nurses walking around and tending to the patients. Just the tenth floor alone of that hospital had over 30 rooms on two different sections. He needed coffee so he went to the break room. Inside the break room, two nurses were talking almost in secrecy about the recent sightings of the famous nun. At first, David ignored the nurses. But as he poured his coffee, he couldn't help but listen to their stories. One was telling the other that Jeannie had just seen the nun the night before walking in the graveyard. Jeannie was looking out the glass windows in the back of the tenth floor that overlooked the graveyard, when she saw something moving amongst the graves. It was the nun. Her long, black robe followed her as she slowly moved among the graves in the children's section. Of course, it being night and all, it was almost impossible to see the nun in any real definite form, but Jeannie swore that she could see the robe. By the time Jeannie was able to get another person's attention, the figure had mysteriously disappeared. Again, no witnesses were available to see the ghost.
David immediately wrote the whole idea off, attributing it to just another story concocted by night shift nurses that had too much time on their hands and too much imagination to do any good.
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