Magdalen Laundries.

Oh those dirty, dirty girls. God Bless them, I crossed myself. The calico itched my breasts under the starched wimple and I was grateful for God reminding me, in His Infinite Wisdom, that I was right. That little scratch, a raw red line across my nipple straight from him; his caresses against me, and I was glad for it.

I would have to punish Rose later, but that was not until later, and I would be ready for it by then. After all, they needed to be kept in line, and kept well, or they would not be here under his Divine Plan; it was merely us that carried it out, specially. And I was not perfect; my waistband cut into the soft white flesh from too many potato farls, my five decades on this mortal coil began to strain my corpus at the edges. I, too, was to ritually abase myself before Him.

I wasn't always in tune with His plan. I remember the grass on my legs when Peter and I played by the stream near ours; and I told him how girls were beautiful, I thought, I thought the books I read showed me the truth. My brother said these old masters, these latin men, had said the same thing, and everything we did now came from them. I said it was a sin, to say such things of heathens; but their language is ours now, and their practices are out. Their words are gorgeous though, I crammed them into my mouth greedy like doughy lumps of bread, I couldn't wait to devour the verbs and the roots of all our words, our bastard words. It wasn't to be though; they wanted me to marry, to stop working (it ain't for a girl, says mother, unless you want to be a nun). I could never love a man; marriage seemed to me a shackle to a tiresome beast. I liked the clean; so I went to our convent. I'm a good nun. I'm Mother Superior, I am Him.

In my mind, He was never a He. He looked like the girls in our place; he looked out of their terrified eyes at me, his was the tiny gleaming stone in an edifice of sin. I can look at those girls and see something beautiful in their fallen, sin ravaged bodies. They are beautiful (but the Devil will make them beautiful, and God is ugly because he is honest. They are always godliest after their eyelashes drip with the blood of their newly shaved heads, a baptism in their own soiled viscera to be born again for me, my dirty daughters).

I can be kind. Iona's son left the other day; a boy, and he never knew his mother. The others sob and scream the grey air blue; they tear their hair, if they have it. She sat, with his imprint still left in her arms, staring at the wall and refusing to acknowledge his not being there, she would not wash and she would not sleep. She stayed in the room for two days. When they are like that, He wants me to comfort them. I stroked her shiny hair (it is shiny, though when we crop it usually it springs into tufts) and caressed her breasts. They respond to that kind of touch sometimes; I know it is wrong. But I cannot always be Godly, sometimes, he works in mysterious ways. When I touched her, her milk sprang forth in a stream over my hand but she did not move to wipe it. I kissed the wan lips, mine wet with colostrum, and stroked that pretty head once more. She is beautiful, the devil, Lucifer; and when I touch her, I am putting God back into her, I enlarge that tiny speck of good in Beelzebub's girl.

She started back on the iron press after that, anyway.