Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 7

empty cathedral. I couldn't place the exotic accent, but English was not his native tongue. "Remember it was I who saved you, not your prayers."
    I couldn't formulate the questions I needed to ask, couldn't form the words. Unable to fight any longer, I lost consciousness. I was home when I woke. It was almost dawn.
    My dreams swam back to me through the murk of just-waking. There had been peace for once, sweetness, but something more, something awful and awe-inspiring. I waded through the flotsam of conscious thoughts that tried to assert order and logic over my memories. Slowly, I lost my grip on the dreams. Their fabric unraveled and floated away.
    One word remained with me: Ursulines.
    My laptop sat open on my dorm room desk, hibernating like my roommate at this hour. I tapped the touchpad and pulled up Google. I typed "Ursulines +'New Orleans'" and the page flooded with historical information that I'd not lived in the city long enough to have context for. There was a coffee dispenser in the common room, and I made it there and back on that Saturday morning without seeing another soul.
    Swilling thick, burnt-tasting vending machine cappuccino, I browsed the internet looking for some clue to my dreaming, some trigger to bring back what seemed to me, as I sat in the growing light through my barred window, increasingly urgent. Something inside me still slumbered, and I needed to find the alarm it took to wake it.
    As I sipped my coffee and read site blurbs and news item synopses, I realized why Ursulines should sound familiar. There was an avenue in the French Quarter, not far from where I was attacked, named for the Ursuline order of Catholic nuns.
    A chill went through me as I remembered his words: "Prayers haven't worked in this city since the Ursulines came." But the monstrous scholarly database system I accessed through the university confirmed that the Ursuline nuns had been in New Orleans since the 1720s. It was Ursulines who provided medical care for the early settlers of the fledgling city. They were regarded as heroines whose lives of self-sacrifice were nothing short of holy.
    No prayers answered in almost three centuries. What a strange thing it had been to say, and with such certainty. It had seemed ordinary in that illusory world of shadows and weightless, childish relief, but now I wondered.
    The sky brightened moment by moment beyond the cheap miniblinds. Soon Prime bells would ring to call the worshipful and penitent to morning prayer. I was neither, and the stillness before the tintinnabulation seemed the best time to escape. Ursulines Avenue called to me. The voice in my head, the effortless strength, mysteriously waking in my own bed compelled me.
    I dressed in a white polo and khaki cargo shorts in deference to the humid swelter that increased by each degree the sun rose above the horizon. I noticed as I dressed that I bore no bruises from my beating. When I knelt to tie the laces of my running shoes, I felt no pain in my kidneys. My knees bore no scrapes. I felt mystified and energized, brimming with curiosity.
    Though I was confused, a perverse instinct drove me: Knowing dictated my actions. I knew , and for the first time since I was thirteen and first jerked off over another boy, I understood what it was to have faith. The heady wonder of it propelled me from the quiet dormitory near Audubon Park and across Freret, through Broadmoor, Central City, the Central Business District. Each neighborhood stirred a vague sense of déjà vu.
    Had my rescuer carried me home this way? Had he driven me? Put me in a cab? It was more than five miles, a long way to go on foot carrying a grown man. I jogged it, as I jogged most places in the city. Disowned by my family and living on a tiny scholarship stipend, I couldn't afford any mode of transport but my own feet.
    I arrived in the French Quarter sweaty, thirsty, a little winded. As always, it was magical, a repository of secrets even in its state of perpetual decay and reconstruction. Though Katrina had raised her fist to destroy it, the people here refused to yield. Every freshly painted residence, every newly planted tree seemed to me a middle finger raised to God. You will not erase us so easily from the earth, they seemed to say. You may own the heavens, but upon this land, we lay our claim.
    Oh, I liked it here.
    My mother would weep to know I thought such things, if she still thought of me at all.
    Unlike so many here, I was not raised Catholic. My