Floggybottom Gets Justice

Father Floggybottom hit the wall, and all of his 200 pounds on his 6 foot frame went limp. His skin and priestly vestments snagged on the porous and jagged teeth of the red brick as he slid to the ground. The delicate pink tutu snagged as if it were hanging on, pulling the gossamer material from his side before it released and snapped back to his rainbow polkadot tights. 

Floggybottom rolled off his left side and fell against the wall, and returned to the concrete. Before he could take pleasure in the cool cement's caress, he pushed up with both palms planted firmly on the ground. He paused momentarily, wondering where the smeared and splotched imprint on the cement, left by face paint and blood, had come from. 

He scraped his palm and broke nail of his index finger to the quick. 

The security light at the top corner of the building highlighted his efforts. Floggybottom stood like a drunkard on respite from his sojourn home: One arm propped out, a palm supporting his swaying weight, head bowed. Blood ran down the front of his face and pooled in the bright red bulb of his nose. It sloshed as he swayed. The skin on his bald head burned and tingled from scraps and lacerations. It was almost as read as the tufts of hair on the sides of his head. 

Bored with his progress, the security light switched off. 

"Don't turn off the light, Father...One more..." he slurred. "I swear, do good papa. Me do good."

Father Floggybottom wondered how drunk the guy who said that must be. He laughs harder when he realized it had been him and he had been sober for 91 days. When he drank, he drank to a stupor. The reason he quit: The real life monsters morphed into unspeakable beings of darkness and pain. He could never drink enough to drown them.

Floggy took a deep breath and, waking up the security light, shuffled past the end of the cracked pavement onto the sparsely grassed dirt of the playground, fifty feet from the wall. He turned and faced the building. 

"Watch this, you...ahhhrgh!"

Floggy sprinted as fast as he could in his half-calf high combat boots and slammed into the wall, his head taking the brunt of the force. 

Sister Mary would find him at dawn when she came to begin the day's meal preparation, probably seeing him out of the corner of her eye. She wold think it was the drunk they've had to remove from the grounds on several occasions. 

Sister would not recognize him. Understandable given the distortion of his head from colliding with the wall, also understandable if one were to only account for the passage of time. Last time she saw him, he had not been a clown. It is only after staring into his cold, dead eyes that she would recall his frightened and pleading eyes twenty years ago before being closed behind the heavy rectory door.