The war of the rosaries

The War Of The Rosaries: Tell Your Beads Or Say Your Prayers!

Story By: Joseph Markenstein May 8, 2017

Do not go gentle into that good night!

Dylan Thomas

When night air is fresh and the moonlight, so bedight, casts it’s shade, night-dreams become broad realities under its pale cast hue, the pallor who kick-starts the imagination. On one of these nights, a man is anxiously waiting for someone or something to come along. He, so angry with his wife for not wanting to go to church or pray with him, is now standing on a dark dock down by the wharves. Waiting with a gun…waiting.

What he’s waiting for, he knows not; to kill? To frighten? If his wife had only not teased him about his religious desire to pray, he would not have left her. His anger is toward his wife’s general lack of interest and devotion; indeed his frustration has waxed to its wane while he whiles away the time to retrieve his thoughts. The intensity builds in him as his face flushes into flames and he grits his teeth to gnashing away. He arrests his seizure; here comes someone.

A young lady is walking along the dark docks down by the wharves, as she does on occasion and thinks about the love letters she wrote to her beau. She knows he’s not committed, though she doesn’t imagine him a cheater. He just won’t appease her in engagement; he prefers common law. If only he wanted her dream! To be part and parcel of her in one flesh and not some “In ‘N Out!” After all, wasn’t he the one who wooed her with such soft caresses and tender words?! Was he not the one who kissed her so softly and hugged her with firm assertion?!

With soft sigh, she cries and one tear begins to swell and finally drops over her cheek.

She remembers how much attention he gave her over her luscious cheeks…those tender pecks, those meek butterfly eyelid kisses. Here, history is made for the conviction to leave Victor. This tear will be the final one shed; a debarkation, a christening, a mazel tov cocktail to crush the id!

Suddenly, she is taken by surprise when this man leaped out of the dark, disguised with a mask and pointing a gun and wearing a frown. “Alright sister, get in there and get in deep.

See?” he stridently tells her. Her limbs went numb and a lump swelled in her throat and slowly she swallowed it all the way down. She says hesitantly: “What are you going to do?” “Just get in there” he says, “And don’t forget to get in deep!” “What is that supposed to mean?” she says with a pathetic whimper; her voice begins to crack. He responds impetuously: “Look, just get in there.”

This shack is dark and the floorboards unsteady. She moves forward trepidatiously; striking her toe on an object lugubriously bearing itself out of the pitch black like a skulking snake in the grass. As her eyes adjust, her bust brushes his chest and she chokes on a scream from her unbeknownst loneliness causing unexpected arousal. That kind of disarming, alarming, charming state of breathless. She rushes to catch her breath and he says to her: “Alright, you see this string of beads? I want you to take them in your hand and follow my lead.”

All-of-a-sudden, her anxiety collapsed into deep repose as she reply’s with bated breath: “Are you kidding me?” He then cocks the trigger hammer and says: “Tell your beads or say your prayers!” She retorts with the question: “Who are you that you would get me in this dark dock down by these wharves to say a Rosary?” She speaks more out of shock and bewilderment than antipathy. He continues: “I’m a desperate man and I’m not afraid to use this gun. In a pause of recollecting himself, he says: “You already know they’re Rosaries. Now I ask you: Who are you that you know these are Rosaries?” He says this in a stern voice, choked by a growing lump in his throat. She answers him with a comely voice: “I am a Roman Catholic and I pray the Rosary every day. Here, I have Rosaries in my burse. I keep them here to stop from tangling.” Before she could finish her statement, he fell apart; sobbing and crying while he buried his face in her feet, weeping and washing them with his tears. She asks him: “What is your name?” After some time, he collects himself and reply’s: Wane,…Wane is my name.” Well, she says, we chime for mine is Jane, perhaps it’s a sign we were meant to meet this way.’

The warmth and chaleur whiles away the hours while they pray. The War of the Rosaries has been fought and won on both sides. They amiably chide one another for having lacked faith that there was one out there in the public en masse who goes to Mass and prays the Rosary.

Fin