Once Upon a Time there was a Girl
By Janis F. Kearney

What must Angel have been thinking…that minute or hour before the final darkness came, or the second she understood it would? When the boy’s eyes told her their meeting had nothing to do with school, and the silence of the warm September night became a deafening drone? Or, when the trillions of stars sprinkled across the black sky winked their last good-byes. It was surely this moment that some merciful seraph swathed her in black velvet, sweetening the songs of the cicadas, quieting the boys’ devilish laughter until they became muffled echoes from a distant ocean floor.

How the tiny woman-child must have suffered. The three pale, thin, bodies invading, crushing, hurting; their wild taunts giving rise to wild, senseless acts as the slow-moving reel that was her addled brain, captured everything, everything...

Oh, the shameful game of musical chairs, as they took their fill of her dark innocence, by turns. The mortifying game stretching out the pain, interjecting their sins, their anger and hate into the girl’s untainted soul.

Only the night’s unusually full moon, and God’s small creatures bear witness to this horror. Some even believe that God’s creatures surely must have averted their eyes in shame; closed their ears to the silent scream of the woman-child.

There were whispers that it was `the handiwork of Satan’; that only he would preside over such a night. Some who knew the girl, imagined for months, they could hear her sweet, little-girl voice as they walked through the woods. A voice of innocence, admonishing her captives, and speaking as if to herself ’Oh, if your Mama only knew.‘

More than anything, the good people of Russwood wanted to believe that Angel had closed her eyes, cut off the lights to her consciousness before the worst of the horror took place. It was only in those few moments between night and morning – some say, the darkest moments of the day—that they wondered. How was it that a sweet girl like Angel was there at all; and how was it the boys chose her? Proof certain, they believed, that something more evil than lust, or revenge, or murder took place that night in Russwood, Arkansas.

Excerpted from Once Upon a Time there was a Girl by Janis F. Kearney. Copyright 2008 by Writing Our World! Press Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced without permission in writing from the publisher.