Sisters of Sorrow by Axel Blackwell Read Free Book Online

pee herself again.
    Anna still wore her shoes, hoping they would keep her feet warm and fearing she would lose the key if she took them off. Her toes prodded and caressed the iron. She sank deeper into the straw as the girls nestled together. Her mind flashed the images of the day. Sister Elizabeth dashed to pieces in the pipe, swept away like the refuse in one of those new flushing toilets. Her own drowned face floating lifeless below the surface of the water. The face of her baby brother who drowned all those years ago. The black iron key lying on the burlap sack, hard and heavy and real. And the eyes. Those disembodied yellow disks hovering in the mist and darkness. Those eyes promising to take her away from here, promising to rescue her and protect her and care for her. Those eyes following her down into dreamless sleep, undisturbed by the radiator’s racket or the squirming nest of rats.

Chapter 6
    Life at The Saint Frances de Chantal Orphan Asylum was a study in monotony and exhaustion. Days bled into weeks and weeks into months. The routine had become a horrible opiate, hypnotizing the little workers until thoughts were muddled, individual personalities were ground down and nothing was said or done or thought, except for ‘the next thing that must be done.’
    In this state, months had slipped away without Anna noticing. Seasons had come and gone and come again while she had no sense of their passage. But now, with the key wearing a blister on her sole and a hole in her sock, every hour felt like days. Every cruel word, every lash of the crop seemed an insufferable evil. The five days felt to her like a sentence far greater than the four more years she had been expecting to live in the Asylum.
    During dinner, three days after Anna’s encounter in the pipe, Lyla announced there had been a death on her hall. Lyla was one of the other head girls. She claimed to be Italian, but Anna had overheard Sister Eustace say that she was half Negro, “which is why they sent her to us rather than to one of the favored institutions. Her white mother is still alive, probably the father, too. But what would they have done with a thing like that?”
    It didn’t matter to Anna what Lyla was. In here, everyone was equally wretched.
    “Amy caught cold on the night we had no blankets,” Lyla explained. “There was never much to her to begin with, and she wasn’t able to eat the next day. Then, she got the pneumonia, I guess, started coughing so much. When we woke this morning, she was gone.”
    Lyla told the story without emotion, as if she were reporting the number of shoes she had boxed and crated that day. Anna knew the inner distress she felt, and knew the danger of admitting sorrow in a place like this. She had lost more than one little girl in her care, and she had expected to lose more. Maybelle, the mute who had been added to her fold just a few days ago, probably wouldn’t last the year. But Anna planned to be long gone before she lost another one.
    “They buried her at sea while we were working today,” Lyla continued. “She had always wanted to go on the boat. She wanted to see the ocean, again. I guess we all get to ride on that boat at least one more time.”
    “I saw the ocean,” Anna said. “Sister Eustace has a balcony off of her office that overlooks it.”
    “We all saw the ocean, Anna, when we came here,” Jane said.
    “But I saw it just three days ago. It was beautiful,” Anna said. “When I leave here…”
    She stopped. The other girls looked at her with a mix of wonder and disgust. Every child in the building would have sold their soul to escape Saint Frances, but only the little ones, or the perpetually stupid, expressed a hope of ever leaving.
    Jane bailed her out, but only after letting her fumble for words and come up short. “She has been behaving very oddly ever since Sister Elizabeth hit her in the head with a shovel.”
    Lyla nodded, still eyeing Anna. The other girls relaxed a bit.
    “It