Get Over Here Sister

Screenplay draft

Vera Voss slipped through the side door of St. Agnes of the Bleeding Heart just past compline, her cigarette-stained fingertips still smelling of the lounge ashtrays she had fled three states ago. The habit she had stolen from the laundry line scratched her collarbones, but it hid the low-cut satin sheath underneath and the two grand in crumpled tips she had shoved into her bra. The abbess, Sister Mary Ignatius, took one look at her rouged cheeks and assigned her to the scullery without questions. For three nights Vera scrubbed pots while the sisters chanted the psalms in perfect thirds. On the fourth night the chant changed key.

Sister Ignatius stood at the lectern and lifted her rosary. The beads clicked once, then the silver chain uncoiled with a sound like a zipper. The crucifix at the end slammed into the chest of the visiting monsignor who had come to audit the books. He flew forward into the front pew hard enough to splinter oak. The other sisters answered in four-part harmony: “Get over here.” Their voices held the note while their chains lashed in unison, yanking two debt collectors the monsignor had brought with him off their feet and into the aisle. Incense censers swung on long chains, cracking skulls in time with the descant. Vera watched from the shadows behind the font as Sister Ignatius finished the verse, released the rosary, and caught the monsignor’s falling body on the toe of her polished oxford before the final “amen.”

The next morning the sisters continued their duties as though nothing had happened. They polished the chalices, mended the kneelers, and rehearsed the same motet at noon. Vera was told to join the alto section. Her first attempt at the entrance came out flat; Sister Ignatius corrected her pitch by flicking a bead against her ear hard enough to draw blood. During the second repetition Vera hit the note. The crucifix on her own borrowed rosary twitched once in her palm, eager. By vespers she understood the rule: every syllable had to land inside the chord or the chain would not extend.

An ex-boyfriend from the lounge circuit found the convent by tracing the tip money. He arrived with three men carrying baseball bats and a demand for the two grand plus interest. The sisters let them through the gate during recreation hour. The fight began when the novices formed a circle around the statue of the Virgin and began the Regina Caeli at full volume. Chains snapped from beneath their sleeves. One collector was pulled into a confessional booth so fast his bat embedded in the grille. Another tried to run; Sister Ignatius sang the pickup line on a rising fifth and the rosary wrapped his ankles, dragging him back across the flagstones into the path of a flying processional cross. Vera stood frozen at the organ until the third man raised his bat at Sister Ignatius’s back. She sang the line herself for the first time on pitch. The crucifix caught him in the sternum and yanked. He landed at her feet. The sisters held the final chord while the last body stopped twitching.

Word spread through the diocesan grapevine. A cardinal who had once been a collector himself sent a squad of plain-clothes seminarians armed with suppressed pistols and a writ of suppression. They struck at midnight during the Great Silence. The sisters met them in the nave wearing full habits, faces hidden by starched wimples that doubled as blindfolds. The gunfire sounded like dropped hymnals. Rosaries intercepted bullets mid-flight and returned them with interest. Vera, still wearing the satin sheath beneath her habit, hid behind the altar until the last seminarian took aim at the tabernacle. She stepped out, sang the line on key, and the chain she now wore around her waist uncoiled. The crucifix struck the man between the eyes and reeled him into the rail where Sister Ignatius waited with the censer. When the smoke cleared, the cardinal’s men lay stacked like cordwood beneath the Stations of the Cross.

At dawn Vera stood alone in the empty choir loft. The sisters had already begun the morning office in the garden, their voices drifting up through the rose window. She removed the habit, folded it, and laid it across the organ bench. The satin sheath still fit. She kept the rosary. From the garden came the soft click of beads counting out the next verse. Vera walked down the center aisle, past the bloodstained pews, and out through the front doors into the morning light, the chain already warming in her hand.