The fringe of light seemed to have escaped from the edges of the round blackness. It was white but dull and there was an ellipse of sorts, made from the same dull white light, that surrounded the doomsday sign. The day had this grey duskiness, and the class, too, was depressed. It was the end of the world and I didn't know what to do. Especially since I hadn't been to Disney yet.

The sign meant that God was coming and I was going to hell, since that's where sinners go, and I was a sinner: the Bible said that we are shaped and born in 'iniquity'. Iniquity is just a bigger word for sin.

But what if I repent and God doesn't come and the sign means nothing? Then, I thought, I would have done what I didn't want to do because I was afraid of burning in hell.

So we sat in the classroom dead quiet and afraid that the big round blackness blocking most of the sun was a sign that God was coming soon. I always knew that 'soon' could be the next second, the next day, or even the next week; but somehow, this time, 'soon' was immediately. It meant the day in which we were sitting, afraid that we were all going to hell - all except Melanie Graham, the girl who said and did nothing. What could she have done wrong? What could be her sin?

Even Ms. Jackson, the first living sex symbol of the boys in our class; the first role model of dress-up, and sexiness in us girls; the first one I heard about the sperm and the egg, the X and the Y chromosomes and all that yucky stuff from; the one adult who spoke to us as if we, too, were adults - even Ms. Jackson was now having us read passages from the Bible!

'Oh God, even Ms. Jackson believes,' whispered Fabian in the same scared tone in which I was thinking these thoughts.

'I know! It must be true then: Jesus coming and the world will end today,' I replied.

I'm sure that all the images filtered through his mind as they did through mine. I started thinking about all the people I loved and liked, all the things I'd done and all the things I hadn't done, all the places I'd been and those I'd wanted to go to. Oh God, I didn't want the world to end! I thought.

But if the world was ending, I didn't want the fire to eat my skin every day in hell where they say Satan jucks you with a giant three-pronged iron fork and you holler and scream in horror and your eyeballs pop from their sockets and fall out to the ground from the torture.

Ms. Jackson saved all our souls that day. She led us in a prayer - the sinner's prayer. As far as we knew, Ms. Jackson was a sinner like us all, an even bigger one: she had a son and she wasn't even Mrs. Something. But she saved our souls.

It doesn't matter from where salvation comes, as long as the prayer is said with your heart and you believe.

We knew that because it was always said. But there was still my dilemma. I didn't really want to be a non-sinner yet, so I wasn't sure if my heart was behind this prayer a hundred per cent. But what I knew, though, was that I was afraid of hell. Maybe a surplus of that fear was enough to cover both faith and fear and get me into heaven.

Twenty-four little souls born in sin chorused: 'Dear Lord, thank you for creating me and the world. Please forgive me for all the things I've done wrong. Please wash me in your blood and come into my heart. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.'

Thank God nothing happened that day; and thank God memory can be short. I quickly forgot that prayer, and so did most of us, it seems - except perhaps Melanie Graham, who still did nothing, really, except bleat like a goat at graduation when she sang the lead for Barbra Streisand's Memories.

Things were fine after Eclipse day. We were back to normal. We even seasoned some drinking water for our favourite grade five teacher, with absolutely no tinge of remorse. Well, actually, we regretted the fact that he didn't fall asleep as we had expected since Jody said that the salt he threw in was sleeping salts. Oh, and we threw in black pepper, too.

You see, he really wasn't our favourite teacher. He was an imposter. Our real teacher went on leave and this guy was a filler - and a poor one at that. He did everything wrong. He was a good music teacher though.

Life went back to normal for some years; and then came the year of the earthquake. I was in high school at the time, and we were in science class. There was this shaking and a shattering of glass. A girl even got her glasses broken. They filed us all out into the field - over 1,200 shaking girls. I didn't really hear anything they said - the teacher and the girls. I was thinking instead of my brother at home in his bed. What had happened to him?

My brother wasn't the same as me. He never walked. He was born that way. So I fretted over him the whole time in the line. I even prayed to God. I promised Him that if He made sure my brother was alive I'd give myself back to Him.

When I went home, my brother was fine and I almost forgot about that promise until the phone rang one day afterwards. 'Hey, Lesley-Ann, it's Janice. I'm inviting you to a special youth meeting. It will be fun, there'll be games and refreshments.'

I didn't see any harm in it since it was the church I grew up in. So I went.

Before the games started, they had devotion and that was a long sing-along interspersed with praying and followed by a talk. This talk was really a sermon and I was prepared to just look at the guy giving it and lust after him since he was a very good-looking, dark-skinned guy. But then he began to talk about the earthquake, and how many of us could have ended up that day in the wrong place, burning forever.

Well, you know what happened. I was convinced again. I gave myself up to the Lord God Almighty, and then played the games.

This stint with God though was longer than the time the time of the eclipse. This one lasted three years.

My father was jealous of this God. 'Oh, so God now is your father, eh,' he would say.

In the third year, an evangelist came to Jamaica and there were crusades. He healed people, they said. I went. When an old lady got up out of her wheelchair and walked, I told myself that I would believe and my brother would walk.

I believed and went home expecting. But he was still in the bed, not walking.

Now at least I'm free of that fear of burning.

- Ann Margaret Lim