chapter one

Monotonous. Catherine's life in a nutshell.
Scrambled eggs at 9, math, science, history. Early morning service Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Communion, after school bible classes. Every day seemed to merge into the next. Even her day dreams had become routine. Her birth parents coming to rescue her and the three of them gleefully burning the school to the ground. Drowning the younger children in the baptismal font.
Placing the large easter candle in Father rossi's mouth and watching the wax slowly drip down. She never shared these thoughts with anyone, mainly because she had no one to share them with. Over a hundred children attended her small Catholic boarding school and weeks, sometimes months would go by without her ever speaking to a soul.
Catherine did have three escapes though.
The first was drawing. She would sit up for hours in the bathroom after lights out, speed drawing in a frantic haze. She never knew where these images came from. The things she drew were things she had never seen before. Women giving birth to demon children, long haired men with rippling muscles riding through purple fires on horseback. Her notebooks were filled with hundreds of beautiful and hideous creatures that only came to life in her dreams.
The other escape was weed. She didnt get to smoke as much as she would like to but obtaining it was fairly easy. An "anonomys donor" had been paying for her upbringing since she was an infant. They also sent the school checks every week for her leisure money. When the weather was warm, Catherine would sneak into the cemetery behind the church with her homemade bong and a bottle of communion wine. She lay atop the graves and look up at that sad lonely moon. She had memorized all the headstones and had a personal relationship with each of them. One in particular held a special place in her cold heart.
Annalise Shepard. Born September 29 1865, Died September 30th 1865 "Some people only dream of angels... We held one in our arms"
In the winter Catherine would sneak into the church after hours and lay atop of the alter inhaling joint after joint. Letting her mind sink into the darkest corners of her subconscious. Sometimes she imagined ripping the crucifixes off the wall and beating the nuns bloody with them, once she even plotted to sneak rat poison into the communion cup. The thought of watching the nuns and the other children all slowly collapse in the pews ignited a flame in her she could never understand. After so many years of catholic school Catherine knew all the stories of the bible and noticed things so many overlooked. The sex, violence, incestuous relationships, it baffled her that religious people regarded this book as wholesome.
During the sermons, she would always graffiti the hymnals in permanent marker. Using her amazing artistic talents to depict the nuns giving blowjobs to the devil or being sodomized by St.Peter. One drawing in particular had landed her in confession for six months straight after she doodled Jesus masturbating as he auto-erotically asphyxiated himself with a rosary embellished with blood soaked thorns.
Catherine's third escape were her dreams. She had stolen many library books about lucid dreaming and put the knowledge to good use. 99% of her dreams were controlled, the other 1% terrified her.
Every month on the eve of her period she had a horrifying reoccurring dream. A black haired woman running through a frozen forest with a newborn clutched to her chest. Catherine could never see what was chasing her, but the look in that womans eyes was a look of such horror that she didnt want to see it. Even though she didnt know what was always just a few steps behind, she could hear it. This human, or creature, let out a blood curdling shriek. It was the kind of scream that has to be pulled out of you at a time of extreme adrenaline, like the moment before a fatal car wreck. Every time she woke up from the dark forest nightmare, she found herself shivering in a pool of cold sweat and thick menstruation that pooled beneath her. She would lie there for hours, clutching the pewter and amethyst rosary that was left on her when she had arrived at the boarding school all those years ago.
Catherine knew her time at the orphanage would be running short soon. She had two options, face an uncertain future in the outside world or become a nun. Both filled her with a nauseating kind of melancholy and when she thought of these prospects she would escape to her drawings or get so high that she could no longer see. The boarding she lived in was predominantly white, they housed a few black and mulatto children but Catherine was none of these. Thick in the chest and the hips with long unruly black hair. The nuns had tried several times to remove this unholy symbol of her vanity but during every attempt Margaret would kick, scream, and blaspheme like a wild cat.

It was 3am. Margaret had been sitting hunched over in the bathroom doodling in her sketch book. Tonight she drew a naked maiden holding a large apple above her head and menstruation leaking down her legs. The maiden had anklets made of thorns around each ankle and an orgasmic expression on her face. She closed her sketch book and slowly shuffled to the sink to wash her face.
As she toweled off her forehead, she stared long and hard into the mirror. She couldn't help but to study herself. Were these gray eyes her fathers eyes? Did the full lips come from her mother? The pain and realization of never knowing flushed over her in a wave as it usually did. A single tear ran down her cheek into the porcelain sink. It was all to clear to her that she would never know.