There is a particular kind of fear that lives in the body long after the mind has tried to reason it away. It is not the abstract fear of something that might happen. It is the residue of something that already did. For those of us who sat in the small wooden desks of Catholic school classrooms in the latter half of the twentieth century, that fear often has a very specific shape. It wears a black or white habit. It holds a ruler. And it answers to Sister.
