Day 455: 5 Minute Freewrite: Friday - Prompt: church lady

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The Church Lady

wore a black veil over her face, old style like her hat and coat, a long black cashmere that smelled of mothballs. She glided along the city streets with her head lowered, her dead husband's Purple Heart pinned to her coat collar. Drug addicts had assaulted her for the loose change in her pockets but she kept up her daily rounds, handing out pamphlets to the desperate and destitute and whoever looked like he was having a bad day. Most of our homeless derelicts were soldiers wounded in battle but mercilessly kept alive with their wounded minds.

Someone said her name was Eve, and that was our first clue that she was hiding something. But what crime could anyone charge her with? She handed out prayer cards with the name of St. Michael's, the oldest church in the state. One by one, the homeless vanished from our streets. Where they went, nobody could say.

News reporters followed her with cameras but she moved quickly, all in black, into the shadows and eluded them.

I was one and twenty, dodging the draft, seeking a way out of fighting in a bloody civil war. I would not kill my fellow countrymen and women, nor burn farms and villages and the innocent children hiding in attics and barns.

Dressed all in black, I followed the Church Lady whenever I could catch a glimpse of her. She passed out her cards to homeless war veterans and vanished into the shadows.

It wasn't exactly a stroke of genius but a brutal stroke to the back of the head that led her to me. I'd been robbed and left for dead in a dark alley. When my eyes opened I knew I was doomed. I'd be arrested and imprisoned for draft dodging.

Instead, I found myself peering into a lovely face, barely visible through the black veil. Smiling, she pressed a card into my hand.

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She was gone

before I could sit all the way up. I crawled to a brick wall, leaned against it, and stared at the address on the St. Michael's card. The street name was right, but the building number wasn't.

Two men in black moved like ninjas through the darkness, and I wouldn't have detected their presence at all if one hadn't clapped a hand over my mouth while they helped me to my feet.

In silence we passed through the shadows. We walked past the church. Sentries patrolled the sidewalks with their whistles and clubs, but they showed no sign of hearing or seeing us.

Under a gibbous moon the cemetery lay in its usual eerie stillness. One gravestone, a flat slab of granite, bore the name of a war hero, and the year of his birth matched the number of the street address on my St. Michael's card.

The stone irised open, and the men nodded for me to go down first.

What if I resisted? I was injured, outnumbered. What was down there?

Church Lady, I don't know who you are, but I'd rather die at your hands than kill others in a war I refuse to fight.

Taking a deep dreath, I descended into the darkness, but my heart felt curiously light.

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