This is the story of a girl. She is 5’6 and has brown hair and brown eyes. Today is her 15th birthday. Unfortunately, today happens to be Sunday, the day that everyone in the town dresses up and walks down to the church to be preached to by some old, bald man about a god who doesn’t exist, as far as this girl is concerned. She decides not to go. When her parents hear her decision, they are furious; they yell and they argue, but this girl just rolls over in her bed and shuts her eyes. Reluctantly, her parents leave. She is alone. She walks downstairs and makes her favourite breakfast, cinnamon toast. She feels so free that she may never go to church again, she decides. And with every hour that she is alone, her hatred towards the church grows. She begins to question why she should be forced to go, to hear every week that she’s going to hell when she’s done nothing wrong. She wonders why god would allow good people to be out on the streets an bad people to be in big houses with servants, and this is her answer: there is no god. The rich people get that way by being greedy and manipulative, and the poor people because they weren’t greedy and manipulative enough. She also decides that the bible is bullshit; none of that stuff ever happened. It was a book of myths that was taken to seriously. There is no divine will, no fate, just us and ourselves. It is for all these reasons that she decides never to go to church again.

Weeks go by and still she stays home every Sunday morning. With every week she gains more self confidence and more self understanding and slowly begins to loose that feeling that she is a little bug caught in a big web. She is her own person, not a puppet on a string. She walks down the street with her head held high, smiling at everyone she passes. No one smiles back. To them ,she is the girl who doesn’t go to church. She pities them. She longs for all of them to feel the way she does, think the way she thinks; she decided on a course of action. Running home to get her supplies, the plan becomes more and more clear, and all consciousness of her surroundings drops away. Do it is all she can hear or see or touch, do it. She does. The old wooden church burns very easily, the great orange flames reaching for the heavens. She laugh, she laughs and laughs and with the last ounce of breath she has left in her lungs, she runs home. No one ever accused her of doing it.

They all knew, though, they all knew she did it.

She knew she did it.

She was glad.