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     By DouGlas Er eiMer

       when the sun refused to shine

       when the sun refused to shine

       oh lord I want to be in that    

            number

       when the sun refused to shone

Darkness came, and the sun no longer held the world in light. Now a form crept with care from the old mill house, crossed the yard in the shadow of trees, and entered the church. No canle shone at any window. The dark casements of Église St. Surplice glowed black and still against the wispy lumination of moonlight. A night cock wooed, and from behind the house the Lilburn Wrentit babbled through the mill wheel. Crickets and dogs in the far distance. Cloying hibiscus nearby. Lilac flowers dropping their odors on everything. Dust of the earth needing rain laying on the tongue and in the nostrils. The hour of sacred love had come.

        Her habit about her, Justina, nun of the Whitefrock order, stood at the front of the church, cheerful, and too full of anticipation. Her heart beat quickly, and her hands held each other. When the door opened, and Enry entered, she whimpered loudly enough for him to hear and he stopped in the aisle. He did not feel her fear. He felt, if anything, a great expectation, and her frightened sob encouraged him. He walked easily now, not as he had done in crossing over to the church, and in a moment he stood before her. The alter loomed. Above them a statue of a suffering Jesus in the arms of a tender mother Mary hung high  up in the carapaces of the cathedral. 

        "Justina!" Enry said, quietly, for he was not a boorish man. She said nothing, but mewed again, put her hands to her face and covered her eyes.

        "We are not alone here," Enry said. "Look!" He turned his eyes upward toward the ceiling and there statuary and paintings, alive with the faint light of the faces of throngs of those saved at the end of days, dove and swam in the vaulted heights.

        "I don't think we should go through with this!" Justina said quietly, fearing that her sisters would come to her aid. They slept, all twenty-three of them, young and old alike, in rooms along the edges of the chapel  built there for them by beneficiaries centuries ago. Their sharp ears heard everything. Mice dared not walk too boldly over the stone floors. Bees roused them, arriving at the hive below the eave late after a night of drinking, bumping in accident against their window panes. The nest of dovelets cheeping in their little sleeps, caused the twenty-three to turn and look once about. The twenty-three were a restless nest of lets themselves.

        "None but thou and I shall know of this night's deeds," spoke Enry with strong assurance and he placed his hand upon sweet Justina's breast. She moved from him, and then she moved again, this time into his embrace with a willing forcefulness that surprised him who thought her so lightly driven.
        "Oh Enry!" she said. "Twelve years this need has been on me and now I will take what I may from you to drain it away! The time has come. Now is the day of reckoning!" So saying, she's threw off his hat, pulled sharply at his shirt buttons, grabbed at his belt buckle, and then yanked down his trousers with a suddenness that left him speechless.

        "My! Jristina! What have you done! This is not the way . . . ." His words fell on deaf ears. As suddenly as she had started, she stopped. She attacked her own habit, and before a cock could have crowed twice, she stood there in her natural finery, resplendent, with thighs, stomach, arms, breasts, legs, and throat displayed in the moonlight filtering down from the ponès above. The scent about her was roses in dew. Enry turned to run. But it was too late! She lunged forward and snatched him firmly by the belt. She drew him back toward her with a willfulness out of keeping with the nuns of Whitefrock. She undressed him leisurely, and then took him in her arms, his eyes wild and roving, his hands reaching now and then for purchase. Such dreadful longing he had till now and in all his born days never beheld nor had to endure enacted upon his person. She nibbled, licked, tickled, toyed, pressed, depressed, slid, tangled, felt of, sprinted, sprangloticled, whispered, sucked, prodded, probed, knickered, wumpleed, snumped, pressed some more, squeezed, grabbed, yanked, tore, pummelled, whipped, mittened, handled, dallied, mouthed, and snickpelted with such a will and for such a duration that Enry fell senseless to the floor, deprived of even the feeling now of fear. For the first time in his life he had met his match and from that day forward, notwithstanding the irony of the situation that the cavalier had been outcavaliered, he would have have none of nuns. He crossed the street when he saw them.  He hurried along down allies where he thought not to meet up with them. He seldom attended church except with a bodyguard at his side, and he kept his muzzleloader about him wherever he went, even to the bathroom, for it was especially there, handling himself (as briefly as ever he might), that he felt most vulnerable. He was destroyed. Heavy need had ruined him. Longing of the most unendurable sort had taken him by the horns and found him wanting. He never again saw Justina, but on certain nights of the summer season, when the moon shone steadily down and with modesty, he fancied he heard the cry of a woman in grave danger and urgent hope drifting down from the heights of the church steeple.