It was the usual regimented quiet after the Monday morning flag ceremony. Julie had trained her teachers well, and the teachers, in turn, had trained their students even better. All the students queued as they were supposed to, alphabetically within the grade levels, and walked to their respective classrooms in the kind of order that she wanted. No getting out of line, no talking, no veering away from procedure. Nothing to disturb the school universe.
Procedure. This was how Julie called the discipline she required of everybody in school. The teachers had to submit their lesson plans for the week two weeks in advance. The students had to be on campus ten minutes – not earlier, not later – before the bell rang. The parents who had brought their children to school had to be out of the campus five minutes – not later than that – before their children lined up for the opening assembly.
There was always an opening assembly. She wanted the children to know that, on Mondays, there would be a flag ceremony, where everyone would put their right hand on their chest and sing the national anthem, recite the patriotic pledge, and sing the school hymn. Yes, the school hymn with hand on chest!
On Tuesdays, everyone would do calisthenics. Sound mind in a sound body, Julie would keep repeating over the public address system, counting from one to eight and backwards to one.
On Wednesdays, everyone would pray. Julie was nominally Roman Catholic, since she was baptized when she was an infant, when she had no religious freedom. She went to church every Sunday, because her husband wanted her to. She did not really understand why people had to stand, sit, kneel, sing, nod at each other, or whatever, but she wanted her husband not to know that there was something wrong with their marriage. Besides, it was good for the parents to see her being pious.
Pious she was not, but during the times when there was no one in the principal's office, she would read the Bible. She had read the entire book once, from cover to cover. Nowadays, she would play a game with herself. She would randomly insert a bookmark, point her right index finger with her eyes looking up at the portrait of the school's founder – a young mother back in the fifties who wanted to have more children than the dozen she already had – and read the verse that her finger landed on. She used that verse as others used a horoscope or a fortune cookie.
She also knew that people had to have their faith or they would, as a Russian novelist once put it, be allowed to do whatever they wanted to do. She could not have that. She believed with her entire being that, if students and teachers and parents followed procedure, the world would be a better place in the future.
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Love After Heaven
RomansaA murder victim gets a chance to return to earth to meet his wife and her lover. He still loves his wife, despite her complicity in his murder. But he returns to earth not as himself but as a priest! How can he and his wife come together again? What...
