Chapter XIV: Satiety

Instantly Floreca was quiet, and Aĉaĵego's anger faded. It felt foolish, and worried. When Floreca woke up she would be angry. What if she stomped her foot on the ground again? It would not like that.

But Floreca had been cruel. Floreca loved her family, and it loved only her. That made it angry. It did not want her to love her family. It was cruel of her.

It would be kind to her, when she woke up. It would catch deer, her favorite food; maybe even cook it for her. It would take one of the colorful sheets that Karesema had brought her from the village and cover her with it, and place her pretty new doll in her arms. Then Floreca would love it more. She would love it so much she would stop asking to go home to her family.

So it crawled over to the corner where she kept her sack of things from home. It grabbed a blanket and a pillow and the doll. It slinked over to where it had slammed her against the rocks, and gently lifted her head to lay the pillow underneath, and her scalp was bleeding.

It stared at her. It smelled the spilled blood. She was broken, crushed, she smelled like humans always smell when it takes the first bite of them and it was surprised because she wasn't supposed to smell like that, she should not be dead.

She was dead.

It tried to nudge her awake. It screamed and stomped and kicked boulders around the cave. It tried to piece her back together, it scooped up the blood and poured it back over her. When that didn't work, it picked her up in its teeth and shook her violently. But she was dead. And finally it put its head down next to her and wailed. It hated her for being so weak, and it hated itself for being so strong, and it hated her sisters for making them argue.

It tried, once again, to die. It didn't move. It didn't eat or drink. Karesema and a little child came by looking for Floreca, and they screamed. The little girl rushed in, shouting, "Franjo! Franjo!" until Karesema pulled her back and ran away like she expected it to chase them. It didn't.

It curled up next to Floreca's body and pretended she was alive, and delicate, and it could protect her. It stayed like that for days, but finally its body woke up and it grew hungry, and it tried to ignore its hunger because it did not want to eat. It wanted to die. But the hunger grew and grew until it became too difficult to ignore, and then finally it picked Floreca up and swallowed her whole. She tasted like any long-dead human, not as good as a warm fresh human, but still savory. But when it finished eating and its stomach was full, it didn't feel any better.

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(Is that enough line breaks before I kill the mood with my author's note? Eh, probably not.)

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Anyway. AHAH. AHAHAH. This is the end. Thank you very much for anyone who has read this far. Special thanks go to noveltealover, who has my eternal gratitude for sticking with this story for over a year. Please go check out her YA novel; it's amazing! I'd also like to shout out to crazy lion for leaving me such thoughtful comments even though English is not her first language. If anyone can by any chance read Italian, check out her amazing poems, short stories, and essays as well.

I'm going to let this story sit for a month or two, and then I'm going to go back and revise it again. Some noted issues - a minor character's name changing halfway through, I intended to use "eggflowers" as a symbol for things but forgot to mention they existed until like three chapters ago, that kind of thing I'm going to be fixing for sure. Some things I'm dubious about and don't know if I should keep or change: the mother's backstory, the storyteller named Rakontisto who would have been sacrificed if Karesema hadn't been caught, Karesema having a flashback to what the guards said to her while she's traveling back down the mountain. Because I don't know if I want to keep them or not, I would really appreciate any thoughts on those aspects of the story.

Thanks again for reading!