Catholic School Girl's Bathroom

So I did my usual late night brain deluge of weird ideas, recollections, and scenarios and this one had to do with 8 years of Catholic grade school that probably established half of the oddities in my personality for the rest of my life. When I was plopped into 1st grade at the age of ‘just turned 5’ I had already had about 6 months of public school in another town. I was only 4 when I started and they didn’t have kindergarten so first grade was it. Then we moved and ended up in the Catholic school where things took a turn for the weird and fantastic. I was just a little kid and very small for my age and I didn’t have a whole lot of life experience. So when I was introduced to the rolling paper towel dispenser in the girls bathroom I was intrigued! I had never seen anything like it. Every time the towel was pulled a crank would turn and the dispenser would make a sort of metallic clang and then after a few seconds it would click and then it would be ready to turn again and there, right in front of me was a clean spot every time! I couldn’t get over it! And no matter how many times I pulled the towel a clean one came around. Engineering wasn’t in my brain yet so I just figured there was this one towel and somehow it got clean every time I pulled. I still remember = pull, clang, click, pull, clang, click…which must have been highly annoying to the nunners whose tea room was on the other side of the wall….so while I was indulging in a high concentration of magical towel pulling, all of my attention totally engrossed in the clean white towel from the rolling towel dispenser, it did not register that something creepy was about to bring my rolling towel dispensing to a shrieking halt….’STOP!!! JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?’ I froze. One little hand on each side of the rolling towel. I was stuck. It was like the game Statue we used to play where all the kids would dance around and do goofy things on the lawn till whoever was it yelled freeze and you had to stop in whatever position you were in even if one foot was over your head or up behind your butt and whoever moved first was kicked out. It was a stupid game but that was my reaction to the evil voice behind me. Then I started trembling, ‘TURN AROUND!’ Slowly, shaking, I let my fingers slide off the rolling towel and turned and there came face to face with Jesus on the cross! A black wooden cross as big as my face with Jesus hanging there suffering at the end of a string of blackened beads the size of crab apples! WHAT!!?
WHAT WAS THIS??? Jesus hung there against multiple folds of black cloth that fell all the way to the floor. I lifted my eyes following the big black bead trail to where it wrapped all around the waist of a creature that I had never imagined. Things like this were not in my life’s tableau at that age. The worst thing that ever happened at public school was falling on the playground and skinning my knee or getting paste in my pigtails in art class while I was making lovely ornaments for my mom and dad…. My gaze crept up ...more black cloth in wide folds led up to one huge white bib. Stiff and stark white, so white it could glow in the dark, made out of some kind of hard cardboard so stiff that it moved as one piece whenever the creature moved – which wasn’t much – there was only a threatening stillness (later when I had time to think I would wonder why the nunners needed these bibs and why there were never any crumbs or stains on them and thought maybe they must have a stack of them in their tea room so they could change them periodically during the day…) and then the creature’s seething face, eyes gleaming behind gold wired glasses and then a crown of white! But on that crown was no white lace veil like one would expect, just more black. A sheet of night hung from that crown and fell almost to the floor. I was just a little girl, very small for my age and I knew this was not a good thing. If I hadn’t already peed and washed my hands and dried them on the rolling towel dispenser which is where my problem started I would have peed right there on the floor in front of the giant black creature and Jesus on the cross! I wondered if maybe Jesus had found the rolling towel dispenser too and this is what resulted... I vaguely remember a long arm extended, a finger pointing straight out the door, long billowing black sleeves. I thought that I could be snapped right up and stuffed up those sleeves never to be seen again and only brought out for daily torment. I had a good imagination but I didn’t know it was imagination so I thought this all could really happen and no one would ever find me…
I have no recollection of whatever happened after that. Whatever my punishment was. I was scared shitless and maybe that was it. I remember having to use the rolling towel dispenser again and when I did I would place two fingers on each side and verrry slowly tug the towel till it stopped and wait for the threatening clang, the click, swipe my hands across the clean part and run like hell out of the girls bathroom hoping that the nunners weren’t having their tea or if they were I would be blessed with lightning speed and could get to my classroom before even the fasted nunner could get to the girls bathroom door and block my path. I swear the Catholics build those schools just to frighten the hell out of little children…