FLASH: The Girl In The Longaway

Sometimes you're just in the mood for a super short fantasy story about swamp dwelling priests who kidnap children for oddly innocent reasons, and get their comeuppance anyway.


1. The Longaway.  The girl that she was then.  Moiled in the glebelands of a lost parish.  Six dark skinned priests with braided moustachious tied to hoops in their ears, her masters.
+Of her acquisition they said the long fingered women painted on the walls of the church demanded a daughter.  They believed a girl in their home would impress the godhede to release the spiteful verdure they craved, that with her, through her, these celestials would put leeks in the mud for the priests to eat.  So lean these priests that spoke of cabbage as if cabbage were a barrel-chested thunder god from the books.
+This octagon house they built to expand their godhede beyond the paper fields of the bottomlands, down these brown river's tributes, where the priests could wait out the return of their master-founder from across the sea, and be heralded his first and truest sentinels.  Their names would be chaptered in the Second Book of their order.  All the time they told her she was their totem to the better days.  
Even with her, the girl she was, the Godhede spited them with seasons of spatheless bulbs washed out of the ground.  The priests were swollen with conviction as they starved.
+There was a storm.  The roof of the octagon fell in, she lived in the attic on a throne of collapsed slats, looking out over the fence of river trees and beyond to the apricot ribbon of the bottomlands.  That was where they must have stole her.  In that rib she dreamed a mother cried for her.  She dreamed a farm.  Her dreams lifted up, with each night the farm expanded.
+As the priests starved, she cleaned the tiny acari out of tree bark, and transplanted them to the attic where soon colonies were enfolded in the debris.  For her alone.  Rationed.
+When the priests entered the alley game of dying, the surviving dressed the first off in fine smocks.  Laid them out under the long nude bodies of the painted godhedes, and chanted them off, and to each other administered pacts as to how the glories of their beliefs would not be tempted by the dead.  It terrified the girl how hungry they were.
+The sixth priest, Daniel, the youngest, the last, lean to begin with by the end a molting bird his hair growing out in patchwork tufts like feathers, sat with her on his lap, and argued with himself for leaving the church to follow the water back up to the Bottoms.
-- Would you help me, Robin?
She was not Robin.  Who Robin was mattered only to Daniel.
-- Would you? He asked her.
-- You'd leave now?  She asked him, spiting him with how she spoke it.
-- But look at what we built.  The Master-Founder, he will, he will know.  He will find the others here.
As she listened her thoughts were of that farm she imagined they had stole her from, that farm she dreamed up.  Night, and night, and night, she added rooms to it.  A castle now, as she was no longer a girl.
"Daniel."
"Yes?" He whispered.
"I'm going up to the attic to eat my bugs now.  Good night."
He was too weak to hold her.
That night she left the door of the church open, and hid in the attic as swamp dogs dragged Daniel and the others back into the mud.  She crawled through the roof, and sprawled on her stomach, and listened for Daniel.  He didn't scream.  Just one soft lilting exhale when the dog tugged him free from his dreams.
This was the girl she was in the Longaway.