Fourth Week: A Short Story

Words: 1783
Pages: 8

Every Tuesday night just before 9:30 you grab the rosary you got over a decade ago on your first communion from its newfound home in your backpack. The white beads are plastic and cheap, and one from the second or fourth decade cracked and fell off one night. That night, you were distracted by your bewilderment of what happened to the bead as you prayed. You found it later though there wasn’t much you could do to save it. You kept the pieces just in case and stowed them away with the rest of the rosary in the little white pouch they came in. You used to gather in the Peace Chapel, where you go to student Mass on Sundays at 4:00 PM, but because of security concerns over at the monastery, which is connected to the chapel, it was moved across …show more content…
Depending on who all’s there, this can be an easy task or like pulling teeth by the time you get to the last decade. The third is typically yours though you have led the fourth before. Your freshman year, the very thought of leading a decade terrified you. It wasn’t until holy week Rosary that year, when only four people showed up that you decided to give it a shot. It wasn’t that bad after all. Slowly, you gained enough confidence to volunteer every week. There are always regulars. For instance, your first year, there was a senior from Mexico, who led the fourth decade in Spanish, which you thought was kind of cool, but he graduated, and that tradition …show more content…
At least not with your whole heart. You’d rather be doing or think you need to be doing something else, but the stubborn part of you makes you keep going. If you skip one week, it’d turn into missing more weeks until you neglect to go at all. Those are the nights, much to your chagrin, you run on autopilot. Sophomore year of high school, you talked about that in CCD. Every Sunday began with a communal portion before you all split into your tiny classes according to your grade. You remember during this portion of CCD one week, a couple of your teachers read a skit about someone praying the “Our Father,” and God kept on interrupting her to make her really think about what she was saying. At your confirmation retreat later that year, the college kids performed the same