Autumn

Foreword:

It was autumn and she was halfway through sixteen

She was brave, she was selfless, she was the type of hero I could never be

It was autumn and she was halfway through sixteen

She wouldn't let them mold her into what they wanted her to be

It was autumn and she was halfway through sixteen

She had a coil scribbler in the pocket of her hoodie

And that meant everything

So she snuck onto the roof of a train

And then was never seen again

Autumn:

It's autumn

The sky is gray overcast

A lightening storm is brewing

Our POV character lies on the roof of a train

Rhythmically rocked by its movements

Hanging white-knuckled to the edge of the roof

In the pockets of her oversized sky-gray hoodie

Pressed between her and the metal car

There's a worn-edged notebook

The wind rips through her hair

Cold

Why is everything always so cold?

She hopes they haven't found her

Hopes they haven't followed her

She knows they probably hav

She'll have to climb down as soon as she finds a major station

Get lost in the crowd and and hopefully lost forever

The metal coil of the cheaply-bound scribbler digs into her rib cage

She doesn't have a plan

But she has a mission

And nerves of steel

Thunderstorm:

It's raining

Of course it is

The universe hates her

She put the notebook in a ziplock bag in a plastic bag

From her tattered backpack

The first chance she got, the first time the train stopped

In a small worn-down town

It would be too easy to spot a new face there she couldn't get off yet

The book is staying dry

That's all that matters

She normally loves cold

When it's natural cold

There's something about this windswept thunderstorm cold

That just isn't natural at all

Her fingers burn with cold, all heat seeping out of them, no amount of cellular respiration being able to ward off the rain

They slowly go numb, the most excruciating sort of numb

Then her palms

Then her wrists

Then her forearms

She wonders how much longer she can go on

If she died of hypothermia right now

Or if she couldn't hold on anymore and fell onto the adjacent rails

(Under rain-slick wheels)

I guess that would be the end of this story

And the story doesn't end until next year so

She makes it

To the other side of the storm

The sun peaks through the clouds

Shining on her strawberry-blonde hair which shines in return

Station:

Her hoodie is still damp

Her pocket is still full of blue-lined pages

She's a traveller she guesses

But this next station is large and it's crowded

Throngs of people with faces all tinted gray

She waits until the passengers have gotten off

Until there are no guards around

And she climbs down with as much agility as she can muster

She needs to melt seamlessly into this crowd

She has no money

She had had to run before she could pack anything

Stuffing the notebook into her pocket

And her half-empty backpack over her shoulder

Before she could pack anything

She'd laced up her ripped shoes

And she'd run into the woods

The woods she knew like the back of her hands

The woods that had raised her like a mother

Woods she'd be bidding farewell to

The people had looked for her in the town

And along the edge of the woods

But she crouched high in towering trees

Where they could never follow

She filled her stomach and her backpack full of berries

And she said goodbye to the forest that raised her

And she snuck onto the next train that pulled up into the station

She fled that town

Perhaps she'd be back one day to burn it down

Perhaps not

She was quite frankly out of both money and food now

But more importantly she was dehydrated

But that was a problem easily solved

If she was alright with drinking from the faucets in the public washrooms

It wasn't healthy

But beggars couldn't be choosers

She put her hands in her pocket, feeling the hard-soft edges of the scribbler under the thin layers of plastic

She smiled faintly

Sisterhood:

She can't remember her original name

It doesn't matter

She can remember the fire inside her

That is all that matters

Artemis Inciendio is who she is now

And it's what her new family knows her by

She's been here for who knows how long

In this dead-inside city

Months upon months

That shouldn't be enough to forget your own name but that name was forced upon her and it wasn't her's

So she tried her best to shove it out of her mind and it worked

She had made friends

With other wanderers like her

They were hungry together they were starving together sometimes they were cold together in winters and melting together in summers

She'd passed around the coil scribbler, and they'd all read the blue-inked words scrawled across it

It wasn't Artemis's handwriting

She had no idea whose it was to be honest but it was beautiful

They read to each other and told each other the stories until they were ingrained into their minds.

Fast forwards a few more months

It's the dead of winter

And it's an unnatural cold the cold of marginalization the cold of poverty the cold of nobody caring about you

Not the cold of Parent Nature

She's on the verge of womanhood but not quite there

She's huddled with two other girls in an alley somewhere

Under a raggedy black blanket

The tips of her fingers and her toes go frozen numb

Then her hands and feet

Then her arms and legs

It doesn't stop this time

The sun doesn't peak out of the clouds this time

They tell each other bits of the stories in the notebook

And it's like a fire it warms them

But not quite enough

When it finally is morning, a raven-haired girl untangles herself from two dead bodies, tears streaming down her face

She picks up the notebook in her thin, long, spider-like fingers

And she kisses it

And she kneels in front of her soul-sisters for a moment

And she gets up

And she walks into the morning

A worn-edged notebook in the pocket of her hoodie