The girl crossed the road. The girl crossed the ocean. She crossed the world. The girl crossed the cosmos. The girl crossed the living room.

The girl stopped being afraid and grabbed her father by the balls and squeezed til he howled in pain but he couldn’t slap her because she was fast! Fast, like lightning.

She crossed the road and disappeared into the forest. She zipped across the road and disappeared, like a ghost, into the woods that belonged to Mr. McDermitt.

Her dog was with her – the dog was not a ghost – and she knew she could never be alone if god was with her and god was. God gave her the strength to crush her father’s balls. God would have suggested eating them but she had to leave too quickly to cut them off. Instead, the dog had rats and she had take out from an old garbage can behind the mall. There was a mall on the other side of the woods.

Five miles of walking but she didn’t know how to make a fire. She could catch small animals but couldn’t bring herself to eat them raw because she knew she’d get parasites. She’d read about feral children dying young because they couldn’t handle the parasites they got from the raw meat fed them by their wolven and monkey step mothers. She had no intention of dying young.

So until she got matches, food from the garbage bins, and rats for the dog.

The dog’s name was Tim. She called him after the last person she spoke to before she disappeared. Tim. She was working on a school project with Tim. They were supposed to go to the museum and write a report on farm implements of the 1800’s.

“Here, Tim! Here, Tim!” she called. Tim came running and she fed him another rat from her bag. Tim could catch his own rats but she was so much faster that she’d stock up whenever they found a particularly rich area. She fed Tim birds as well, and squirrels and rabbits.

Tim was black and white, of uncertain ancestry. Part Labrador, probably, but beyond that nobody really knew or cared. He arrived one day and hung around. The girl wasn’t particularly nice to him, but nicer than the others.

Once they ran away, they became close. Guess she needed him more, or perhaps, once she was gone she had more time to open up; had less time to spend fending off attacks. And really, the dog was more prone to kindness than cruelty or manipulation. The dog was close to God. Tim was part of God and he knew it, at least better than the humans did.

"The girl" pic from http://www.mirror.co.uk/
"Fast Girl" pic from http://www.myspace.com/liz_shea