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Exhaust fumes and damp air hung over the streets in a miasma that exhausted Sidney Berger. Still two hours to drive the fleet cab before his shift ended. The half-filled container of coffee threatened to slip off the dashboard and into his lap, but he willed it to survive Manhattan’s potholes. He’d had faith for three years.
Sidney shook off the fatigue when a nun flagged his cab from the corner of Perry and Charles Streets in Greenwich Village. Finally a fare. The clergy were bum tippers, but something indefinable excited him. She could have been Darcy McFarquhar — Darcy who graduated college with him, went on to become a novitiate in the orders of Saint Somebody, and took his soul with her.
He wheeled the car to the curb.
“Where to, Sister?”
“West Eighty-Eighth Street, please. I’ll tell you the building number when we get there.” She slid in, tucking her habit safely inside and closing the door carefully.
Sidney couldn’t stop gazing in his rearview mirror as they cruised up Eighth Avenue. She had fair skin, from what he could see, and displayed an air of serenity that had disappeared from his life. What did Sidney have now but a photo of Darcy, a prayer card from her funeral and an obsession?
“How long have you been in the service of the church?” he asked, inserting a conversational gambit. The fantasy he had buried was coming to the surface. His palms were becoming coated with sweat, thinking of Orpheus who fetched Eurydice back from Hell.
“You’ve been staring at me,” she recited in a throaty voice. “I know you have questions. Most people do. My name was Monique Arielle Johnson. You can call me Sister Anne — or just Monique if that’s more comfortable. I took the orders four years ago and it was for two reasons — God’s calling and the fact that my mother hated me.”
Sidney was silent, letting the Eurydice analogy dissipate. Those were, generally, the questions that churned in his mind like ice cubes in a margarita shaker. The lights of Forty-Second Street passed overhead before he spoke again.
“I have another question, Sister, but I don’t want to offend you.” He might still reach out to Darcy. If he didn’t take the risk of asking he might just as well give up every hope buried in his memory.
The nun smiled. “My son, you can’t offend me. When you’ve been a nun as long as I have, you’ve seen and heard just about everything. I’m sure that there’s nothing you could say or ask that would surprise me.”
He paused, and then burst out. “Well, I’ve always had a fantasy of kissing a nun. It’s not perverted, just a kind of… of blessing I’m looking for. What’s it called, closure? A spiritual problem.”
“I’m afraid I’ve never heard of that problem.” The nun gave what might have been a laugh. “I’ll allow one kiss, but only if you’re single… and you are Catholic, aren’t you?”
Sidney’s pulse raged and the blood pounded in his head. “Oh, yes,” he blurted, “I’m single; and I’m Catholic too.”
“All right,” Monique said, and Sidney thought he heard a sigh either of resignation or anticipation. “Pull over to the side of the avenue and I’ll give you a kiss.”
Sidney parked the car, got out and trotted around to the passenger side. Monique opened her door, stood up and put her arms around Sidney’s neck. Their kiss was deep and exploratory and seemed to go forever. His heart pounded and he felt a release from the fantasies he’d had. Silently, his lips formed the word Darcy. With his soundless benediction he could bury the ghost of his unrewarded love.
Stepping back onto the sidewalk, Sidney was buoyed by a wave of gratitude. The vacuum that sucked at his heart since Darcy died, the daydream that never went away, had been fulfilled. He got behind the wheel and turned into traffic. As they rolled north along the silent avenue, a tear started to form behind one eye. Who was he kidding? Darcy could never come back. In the back seat, the nun noticed as he wiped his nose with his sleeve.
“My child,” she said, touching the Lucite partition that separated them. “Why are you crying?”
“Forgive me, Monique — Sister — but I sinned. I lied to you. I’m married and I’m Jewish. I made believe you were a girl I once loved. And lost.” In the mirror, he was horror-stricken as a smile crawled over Sister Anne’s face.
“That’s all right, I knew it. I saw your name on the hack license.”
“You forgive me?”
“Not a problem, Sidney. I lied too. My name is Kevin and I’m on my way to a Halloween party. Except that my mother still hates me, and that’s the truth.”
Walt Giersbach‘s fiction has appeared in Bewildering Stories, Big Pulp, Every Day Fiction, Everyday Weirdness, Lunch Hour Stories, Mouth Full of Bullets, Mystery Authors, OG Short Fiction, Northwoods Journal, Paradigm Journal, Short Fiction World, Southern Fried Weirdness, and Written Word. Two volumes of short stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, have been published by Wild Child Publishing.
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26 Responses to “NUN ON THE RUN • by Walt Giersbach”
Comments
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February 13th, 2012 at 1:15 am
I thought I’d sussed it from the throaty voice clue but quickly dismissed the idea again as just my lurid imagination. Still made me laugh aloud at the end though.
February 13th, 2012 at 1:53 am
Walt you got me! Five!
February 13th, 2012 at 2:49 am
I knew you were up to something but – you sly dog
LOL
February 13th, 2012 at 3:52 am
03:50AM, A good laugh was a fine way to start the day. (Oh, well written too.)
Thanks
February 13th, 2012 at 5:24 am
Er… I’ve heard this one somewhere before, on TV I think. This just has some additional incidental description and back story.
February 13th, 2012 at 5:35 am
Funny.
To me, it doesn’t matter if its been told before, here it was told well. I don’t mind hearing something familiar, just that its good.
February 13th, 2012 at 5:53 am
Nicely written.
Second paragraph: It should say, “she went on to become a novice,” not a “novitiate.” A novice is a person. A novitiate is the period of time during which one is a novice, or the building where the novices live.)
I don’t mean to pick on you, but I see this mistake a lot, even on TV shows, whenever nuns are mentioned.
February 13th, 2012 at 6:09 am
The novitiate mistake was the character’s. And, may I say, not his only mistake!
February 13th, 2012 at 6:20 am
To me, this was the literary equivalent of the whoopie cushion, handshake buzzer, or can of spring-loaded snakes — a very familiar old gag that might still provide a surprise and a laugh if delivered well, but all too often elicits just a groan.
But in this case, the timing and the delivery were spot on, and the laugh was well-earned.
Nice job, Walt.
February 13th, 2012 at 7:25 am
Thank you for those kind comments. This was a fun piece to write for the challenge of turning bathos into levity with a little social horror woven in. A novice, not novitiate. I’ll remember that as a backsliding Protestant.
February 13th, 2012 at 8:11 am
So we are recycling old jokes now? I like reading the stories here because most of the time they are fresh and original. I usually try to be positive with my comments, but this one was as as stale and unseemly as a fart at a funeral.
February 13th, 2012 at 8:28 am
seriously a joke thats in every joke book published in the last 25 years and we’re putting them here now??? and this guy is actually claiming CREDIT for it?..(” This was a fun piece to write for the challenge of turning bathos into levity..”)
heres a google link to a ton of references to this joke:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=nun+and+the+cabbie&gbv=2&oq=nun+and+the+cab&aq=0j&aqi=g-j1&aql=&gs_sm=1&gs_upl=641l4719l0l5656l15l13l0l2l2l0l297l2154l0.2.7l9l0
Hey I’ve got a great idea for a story I’m writing….its about a woman who owns a plantation in the Civil War South and loses everything and gets it back…her name is Scarlotta and her boyfriend is Brett Butler…..i’ll write it here next week…you guys will love it!!!
February 13th, 2012 at 8:33 am
I found the dialogue a bit clunky on this piece.
February 13th, 2012 at 8:45 am
I’m with Brian and loungey – an old, old vaudeville joke, barely repackaged and presented as an original story? Awful.
February 13th, 2012 at 9:43 am
I give this five stars. I enjoyed the whole story and laughed at the end.
In the author’s defence, I’ve never heard this story and don’t mind, alledgely, that it might be a re-hash.
Most stories are just that.
February 13th, 2012 at 10:15 am
I had to comment! I loved this story. I believe this is the best one I’ve read yet. Kudos to Walt Giersbach for a job well done.
February 13th, 2012 at 10:28 am
Old, old joke. Heard many times before. Why did you bother?
February 13th, 2012 at 10:28 am
a good story, well-written. I did think the nun could be someone in disguise whilst I was reading, but rejected it after the kiss scene was so well-described. How wrong I was! well done.
February 13th, 2012 at 12:58 pm
Why are we picking on this story? Sure I’ve heard the punchline before but I wasn’t expecting it this time and I really enjoyed the backstory. Four story.
February 13th, 2012 at 12:59 pm
By which I of course meant *four stars.*
February 13th, 2012 at 2:38 pm
What a story – what punch-line. How well-told. Oh, how you kept me flying on the seat of my pants. Wow! Five stars, Walt, for such a piece of magic.
February 14th, 2012 at 8:02 am
Sorry, but a few too many irritations for me.
I’m too old to think ‘four years’ sits well with ‘when you’ve been a nun as long as I have’, and the Sydney who hankers after his lost love, and cries for her loss sits uneasily with the Sydney who has this fantasy about nuns. The semicolon misuse jars me in “I’m single; and I’m Catholic too.” And I may be the only one who doesn’t get it – but why would his licence tell the ‘nun’ that he’s married and/or Jewish? His name alone is surely insufficient in this multicultural age.
The end line was a ‘bit clunky’ as Paul says. Might have been stronger – maybe ‘My mother hates me though, that’s gospel truth.’
I did like ‘miasma’ though, and ‘buoyed by a wave of gratitude’, and I had no issues with the story – writers are very green by their very nature – they recycle everything!
February 16th, 2012 at 9:46 am
It takes a lot for the written word to make me laugh out loud, but you did it. And for the record, I’ve never heard this joke before, and who cares if it uses an element from something else? You go write something purely original. It can’t be done.
February 19th, 2012 at 10:01 pm
Nice to read a funny one for a change. Thanks!
February 20th, 2012 at 7:12 am
I don’t know if the British comedy film “Nuns on the Run” made any kind of impact outside the UK, but childhood memories of that movie ensured I wasn’t at all surprised by the ‘revelation’ at the end.
I thought the story was entertaining enough, although there were a couple of lines I had to read twice. For instance, the driver felt a tear forming “behind” his eye? I’m really not sure what that’s supposed to mean.
From looking at Loungey’s search results I see this joke’s been online since at least 2006. I hadn’t heard it before, but now I’ve seen how little has changed I can’t help thinking this is a particularly lazy rehash of an old joke that wasn’t all that funny in the first place.
March 4th, 2012 at 7:13 pm
Well told, Walt.