june, 2020 3rd place winner violet by gokul sharma

Sister Violet gently drew the curtains in the vast silence of that cold dusk. The snowflakes slowly swirled down gently spreading over the front yard of the girls’ hostel. The long benches, the desolate fountain, the effigy of Virgin Mary, and the pines across turned all white. The endless indecisions in her mind made her inner world much colder than what these flakes could bring.

The entire block of St. Joseph’s Convent School cloaked itself in the snow as the last lights of the day slowly juxtaposed with the darkness. A silhouette of a person slowly walked out of the hostel, she had no name in this darkness. Somewhere by the road beneath the school, a man stood there by his scooter. The silhouette slowly came closer to him crunching the snow below with her boots. In fear that someone would spot them, he quickly told her to get onto the scooter as they drove past the nearby cathedral.

The man, a local pastor had lost his wife a few years back and had been seeing her for the past few months but had never been so intimate until this evening. The dim candle on the table melted slowly as they finished making love in his cottage.

Usually sister Violet would switch of the light of her room past midnight after reading but that night her room remained dark. The next morning the snow-capped mountains looked sharp and distinct, the sky turned blue, the sunbeams exuded golden tones on the massive roofs, and the air was fresh.

It’s been six years since sister Violet’s suicide .There is a new nun who has replaced her. She stands by the same window this twilight watching the snowflakes. She wonders what separates a sin from a mistake as the darkness slowly falls.