Penelope Vaughn, a tall and spindling girl, twists her body this way and that. The waiting room chair creaks under the weight of her, long limbs rubbing indelicately against the molded vinyl. Three seats over, an older man in a woolen three-piece, polished leather briefcase set by his ankles, looks at her over the top edge of his newspaper and coughs.

“It was the chair,” she says. He flicks the paper back up to cover his face.

Fluorescent lighting beats down on them from above, buzzes against her skin. Penelope squints down at the intake forms the nurse has given her, stacked on a clipboard branded with some flashy new pharmaceutical Hail Mary, a pill guaranteed to cure all the aches and pains and doubts of the last big breakthrough drug. She stares at the blank space at the bottom of the form: Date of last confession. She stands her pen against the edge of the open white box, taps it against the clipboard when no words fell out of it, plastic clacking on plastic clacking on—

“Penelope?” A nurse opens a door on the other side of the waiting room, calling out across the dozen rows of empty seats.

“I’m Sister Margaret. If you’d like to follow me, we’re ready for you. I can take those if you’ve finished,” she says. The buzzing grows louder, the sound of locusts gathering, waiting to burst out of the outdated drop ceiling. Penelope stands up, smoothing her skirt down with damp hands. Her brown polyester wicks nothing away, leaving her hands slick with nerves. The nurse shows Penelope into a confessional, where she pulls a white gown out of a drawer and hands it to the girl. Alone, Penelope unbuttons her blouse and dropped it to the floor, slipping off her skirt on top of it in a loose pile. She kicks both into a corner and places her purse on top; it falls over, hard candies and old receipts leak out. Her skin goosepimples against the cold as she slips into the gown, a flimsy sheet that leaves most of her bare. Her hands fumble behind her back, searching for the ties to secure her body inside when she hears two sharp knocks against the door.

“Penelope?” a man says, poking his head into the room. “Hello, hello! Deacon Caldwell.” He enters the room, a stout man in a black cassock that drags against the floor. She can only see his eyes, the rest hidden behind a surgical mask. He’s too cheerful, doesn’t notice her fingers picking at the skin around her nails, peeling herself back away from him.

“Hello Deacon,” she whispers. “Nice to meet you.”

“I see you’re here for a standard absolution?” he reads from her chart. “Your husband thinks it’ll help calm down these outbursts you’ve been having. Happens a lot to girls your age.” Penelope nods. She knows why she is here.

“Do you have any questions about the procedure? Your husband should have told you all about the risks and side effects after he called to schedule. We went over it in plenty of detail with him. The best thing is to relax and just have a little faith.” He finds himself funny and chuckles, flips through the paper charts one more time, pushes his lips together. His pen scribbles over more forms, filling them with black ink. He tells her nothing. She has no questions, cannot think of where her voice has gone. They must have already taken it.

“No,” she says finally. “No questions.” Relief swarms in—it was only hidden, not gone. Not yet.

“Wonderful!” he says. “Sister Margaret will be in again momentarily to start the procedure. We’ll have you home in plenty of time for dinner, right as rain.” Penelope is alone in the room again. The tips of her fingers are bloodied. She balls up the loose bits of skin she has pried away with her teeth and flicks them to the floor.

Sister Margaret announces herself with a knock and opens the door, entering the room backwards. She pulls in a metal cart, four erratic wheels squeaking as they drag over the patterned linoleum. Penelope sees the needle carefully laid across the top, how it gleams and glimmers in the flooding artificial light.

“Don’t be intimidated,” the nurse says. “We see hundreds of women in every day for this. It’s a quick in and out. Nothing to worry about, not at all. My own daughter had it done just last year, and she’s never felt better.” She hums, pushes the cart behind Penelope, opens the gown at the back.

“Just a small pinch, dear.” She drives the needle past Penelope’s skin, just under where her hairline ends in a fragile point at her neck. Penelope can feel it cleave apart the meat of her, sinking deeper, guided to her spine by Sister Margaret’s obstinate hand. Around her, the room spins, becomes dark, disappears.

When she wakes, the buzzing is gone. There is a quietness in her head, instead. So loud, it’s deafening. Every thought she has is hunkered down, tucked away in the underbrush of her mind to hide from the storm. They may never come back. Penelope looks up and sees Sister Margaret’s smile flash across the room. She sits up, and Penelope Vaughn smiles back.

Erin Elizabeth Williams (she/her) has two degrees in religion that she doesn’t use, a dead cat who went by Kurt Vonnekat, and a house from 1890 that leaks every time it rains. Her fiction has appeared in JAKE, Defenestration, God's Cruel Joke, and some other places. Her only social media is Instagram, and she can be found at @erinelizabethyo where she never posts anything, or at erinelizabethwilliams.com.