Today's #flashfiction #ThePlaceOnNoMap

“Good things come to those who wait.”

Groundhog Day* #quote

Today I went to my card game thing and Grandma came over for dinner. Much had was fun due to both events. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

The Place On No Map

        In the American Civil War deep in the south between two towns a bundle of houses existed. There weren't enough houses for it to be called a town. However there were enough houses for it to be considered its own place. It wasn't on any map though because of its tiny size and the only thing that made it able to named was the little church on the hill. When people said they were visiting the church they often meant they were visiting the area because there really wasn't a name for the place.

       The name of the church was Greenhill Church. It had gotten that because the hill it was built on seemed to always have some green grass no matter the season. Saying you were visiting Greenhill Church wasn't the necessarily the most common thing for most of the areas existence. But when the Civil War came around and the war became so bloody people came to the area often. The fact that there were a group of houses that were almost large enough to be a town but not on any map made it a wonderfully safe place for those who knew about it. On maps it looked like a blank space where hills should be.

      Soldiers, citizens, and slaves hid in the place the mapmakers forgot. The rules were simple: Keep it a peaceful place and make your own living. These rules were established by the priest of the actual church and was enforced well. None of the soldiers who wanted to hide there wanted to be thrown out. The kind of soldiers who went back on the cause of the south would leave all the slaves hiding in Greenhill alone if it meant escaping the war. Many of the soldiers who fled their were Confederate soldiers who saw the Union soldiers outnumbering them and ran. But also Union soldiers who didn't want to fight but didn't want to live in the open as traitors ran to Greenhill. Slaves had their natural desire to escape and citizens wanted to avoid the war.

     The Greenhill population grew because of the war. The valuable nature of it staying a secret haven became threatened. Soon a union general learned of its existence and grew enraged. A hiding spot of cowardly soldiers, slaves and the like. It had grown enough it could have started to be put on a map but the general came in and burned the whole place to the ground and killed the soldiers he viewed cowardly. With all its buildings burned to the ground, Greenhill would never appear on any map.