fasting girl

Nobody remembers exactly when Elodia stopped eating. Some say it was on the feast day of Santa Clara, others say it was the morning her father’s body was found face-down in the marsh, his mouth stuffed with lilies. But by then, Elodia had already begun to change.

At first it was little things: the untouched bowl of goat’s milk curdled on the table; the crust of bread growing blue with mold under her bed; the way she sat so still during Mass that flies rested on her collarbone. Her mother, Sofía, took it for grief. The girl had always been delicate — all lashes and collarbones, never cried, never laughed. But then she stopped speaking too. She sat in the far corner of their one-room home, knees drawn to chest, eyes half-shut like a veiled saint in a chapel niche. When she finally did open her mouth, it was to whisper: “I don’t need food. She feeds me. The white woman. The one with no eyes."

The priest was called. He touched her forehead and recoiled as if it burned. They said it was fever, or fasting psychosis. But when the days passed and Elodia did not grow weak — only thinner, and colder — the whispers began.

A miracle. A chosen one. A girl fed by heaven.

They moved her to a cot in the church sacristy. Sofía stood watch over her like a guard dog, swatting away the curious. But it didn’t take long. First came the altar boys, then the abuelas with their rosaries, then the sick and limping, then the journalists with cameras and soft voices. They brought offerings: silver lockets, piglets, locks of hair, jars of honey. They left them by her feet.

Elodia spoke little, only to describe the woman who visited her at night. “She has no mouth,” she said. “But I hear her singing. Her hands go inside me and come out clean.”

Some wept. Others fainted. The priest declared it heresy, but his hands trembled. Donations began to arrive. The bishop sent a letter. A nurse was dispatched from the capital to record her vitals and verify the claim: the girl who did not eat, did not age, and did not die.

The nurse’s name was Corina, and she was not afraid. She had worked in cancer wards and maternity clinics. She had held the dying. She had cleaned the mouths of corpses. When she saw Elodia, something in her stomach clenched — not fear, exactly. Revulsion, maybe. Or pity.

Elodia was impossibly small, folded like a mantis on white sheets, eyes shut, arms crossed over her chest like a corpse in a painting. Corina reached out to touch her wrist. The skin was waxen. Not warm. Not cold. Not quite living.

That night, Corina dreamt of a woman in a veil crawling across the ceiling. In the dream, the woman opened her mouth to scream, but inside was only a nest of worms.

Corina began to keep a log. She wrote down everything: Elodia’s weight (always the same), her temperature (undetectable), her pulse (barely there). She documented the prayers, the weeping mothers, the smell of vinegar and blood. She wrote down what Elodia said, even when it made no sense.

“She says I am a cradle. A door. She says I am almost ready.”

Corina found an old book in the church archives. Leatherbound, brittle. The ink bled when touched. It was not in Spanish. The priest refused to translate it. He only said it had been brought by missionaries three centuries ago, and that some pages were copied from something far older.

One chapter showed a girl with hollow eyes and flowers blooming from her ribs. The margins were crowded with symbols: mouths, worms, chalices, a crowned woman with bleeding hands. A passage, scrawled in the corner, read: "She who eats the light shall bring the darkness with her."

Corina began to notice certain villagers who never approached Elodia directly but lingered near the church every evening, whispering in a dialect she could not place. They wore strings of teeth around their necks. One of them gave her a folded scrap of paper with a crude drawing: a girl with a hole in her stomach and something winged crawling out of it.

She asked the priest. His face went white. He said nothing.

Later that night, she overheard him in the bell tower, pleading with someone. "It was only a tradition," he hissed. "We never meant to awaken her."

Each night, the smell of rot grew stronger. The walls of the sacristy began to sweat. Candles refused to stay lit. On the fourth night, Corina noticed mold creeping across the ceiling in the shape of a woman’s open mouth.

She asked Sofía to let her take Elodia to the hospital.

Sofía only smiled. Her eyes were red-rimmed, ecstatic. “Why would I interrupt her communion? She is closer to the divine than any of us. Would you pull a rose out of the throat of Christ?”

Corina stopped sleeping. The dreams came anyway.

In one, Elodia stood at the edge of the swamp, her dress soaked in blood, holding something twitching in her hands. In another, Corina opened her own mouth and saw teeth that were not hers, long and clear like fish bones.

She returned to the sacristy and found Elodia floating two inches above the cot. Not levitating — floating, as if suspended in water. Her eyes were open and weeping something that looked like milk.

Corina screamed.

The townspeople called it a visitation.

They said Elodia was ascending. That she would become the first saint of the marshlands. That God was using her to remind them how holy a girl can be when she is silent, obedient, and hungry.

They sang hymns no one remembered learning. Some women tore their hair out. A boy tried to drink the water Elodia had bathed in. A blind woman said she could see, but only shapes of teeth and smoke.

At night, the group with teeth-necklaces circled the church in silence. They painted symbols in ash. They placed jars filled with leeches at the corners of the building. One morning, Corina found a dead dog nailed to the church door with the words “She is almost born” carved into its belly.

Corina packed her bag.

She tried to leave the village. But the road had collapsed into the swamp. A truck driver said it had never existed. The phone lines were dead. The priest would not look at her.

On the seventh night, Elodia opened her eyes and spoke directly to Corina for the first time.

“She says you’re next.”

Corina tried to scream but her tongue would not move.

She hasn’t eaten in three days.

She’s beginning to feel full.