a girl living on the top of a very high mountain

sat in her house all day

every day

and looked down on a village

far in the reaches of her sight

to the point

that she almost wasn’t able to see it

although she was very bored

the girl knew she should

never

go down to the village because

she knew

she knew she was different

from the other people of the world

while the girl was

going

about her daily work

she tripped

and fell

over something that had not been in the room before

a scrawny cat

it was so thin and starved

that each of its ribs were thin rafters

through the drum skin of its chest

the cat mewled once

stared at the girl

walked out the door and started padding along the side of the house

the girl

naturally

followed

eventually they came to a mill in a clearing on the mountaintop

the girl knew the whole mountain

by heart

and the mill had not been there yesterday

either

the cat slinked under scrub and into

a cat-sized hole

and disappeared

no doors into the mill

prevented

the girl from following

and

the fairy tale was over

before

it even began